Announcing the New Technical SEO Certification Series: What It Is & How to Get Certified

SEO education has been central to Moz’s mission since the start. In addition to our many guides, blog posts, and videos, we’ve shifted in recent years to offer on-demand video training courses through Moz Academy. Our team has been blown away by the reception of our online training programs. To date, over 142,000 students have enrolled in a course through Moz Academy. Wowie!

On top of that, 94% of Moz Academy students said they would recommend the course(s) they took to a friend or colleague. We’re so glad that our content is resonating with you and helping to level up your knowledge in various SEO subject areas.

We launched our SEO Essentials Certification Series back in May 2019, and we’ve seen almost 500 students get certified in that timeframe. Since then, we’ve heard requests from across the Moz community for more technical-focused coursework and more advanced course options. As a result, we’re stoked to be adding another outstanding certification to our collection of coursework.

The Learning Team has put in many, many hours of work to develop a technically focused, in-depth training series that hones in on the nuts and bolts of technical SEO. We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the Technical SEO Certification Series through Moz Academy.

What’s included in the Technical SEO Certification Series?

The Technical SEO Certification is a five-part series dedicated to technical SEO, combining video lessons with tasks and activities to allow for practical application of important concepts. The series culminates in a final exam, and with a passing score, you’ll be awarded an official Moz Certificate and badge for your LinkedIn profile.

The Certification Series was built to help you efficiently grow your technical skills and think critically about websites and SEO strategy from an informed technical perspective. By the time you wrap up the series, you’ll be ready to build a technical strategy for your website that ensures crawlability, indexability, accessibility, and site performance.

The certification series focuses on four core competency areas:

1. Explore the Fundamentals of Technical SEO
2. Design for Crawlability
3. Build for Indexation
4. Prioritize Accessibility & Site Performance

Dig into what’s included in the coursework below:

1. Explore the Fundamentals of Technical SEO

In building a certification series solely focused on technical SEO, we knew laying the groundwork would be critical. Although many folks in the SEO space are aware of various components of technical SEO, we felt it was important to identify where these tactics fit within a larger strategy.

The Explore the Fundamentals course analyzes the reasoning behind technical SEO and its foundational impact on other SEO work. In addition to defining core terminology and principles, you’ll gain a clear understanding of how technical SEO fits into the larger SEO methodology. You’ll learn how search engines find and analyze websites, readying you to apply that knowledge to the concepts of crawling, indexing, accessibility, and site performance that we’ll dive into in later sections.

2. Design for Crawlability

Once we’ve gotten the fundamentals down pat, the Certification Series jumps into crawlability – search engines’ ability to discover and navigate a website. In developing this section of the coursework, we wanted to be sure to provide a thorough background on how search engines operate, what they value, and a step-by-step process to ensure that your website is crawler-friendly.

You’ll learn the importance of optimizing your crawl budget to help crawlers get to the parts of your site that matter most. These considerations can also improve overall SEO health and even site conversions. In addition, we’ll cover robots.txt, site architecture, response codes, log file analysis, and more, using a variety of tools to give you hands-on practice with designing for crawlability.

By the end of this section, you’ll be well-versed in how to optimize for efficient crawling and how to implement and scale fixes across your website.

3. Build for Indexation

Up next in our Certification Series is indexation – how search engines understand, store, and organize information while crawling the web. We want to be sure that you’re confident in your ability to build and present a website that will be indexed properly by the search engines. You’ll next learn how to utilize sitemaps, canonicalization, and structured data to support indexation.

We’ll dig into what search engines typically value as they organize the information they’ve ingested, and how you can use that knowledge to implement tactics that will get your most important content indexed. This will ensure that your valuable content makes its way into the SERPs and, ultimately, to your target audience.

4. Prioritize Accessibility & Site Performance

There are heaps of articles across the web addressing accessibility, and we wanted to build a comprehensive section of the Certification Series dedicated to this vital concern as well as site performance. Here, we dig into top priorities to ensure a site is accessible to all users and performing at its best, as well as tasks to help you do so.

You’ll learn how to conduct an accessibility audit to identify and prioritize optimization efforts. You’ll also discover how components such as URL structure, site speed, mobile-friendliness, and site security impact performance. We’ll look at various tools to help us test these, so that you can create a repeatable process for auditing in the future.

By the end of this class, you’ll be familiar with strategies you can implement to ensure a great (and accessible!) user experience.

Following the courses on these four core competency areas, you will take a final exam to test your knowledge. The exam will consist of 50 multiple-choice questions.

Technical SEO Certification Series FAQs

How do I get certified?

The Technical SEO Certification Series is available through Moz Academy. Just select the series from the catalog, move through the registration process, and get started! After completing the series and taking the final exam, you’ll be awarded an official Moz Certificate and a LinkedIn badge.

Who is this Certification Series best for?

This series is ideal for intermediate SEOs and digital marketers with existing SEO knowledge who are looking to level up their technical skills. The series content covers technical topics that pair nicely with a solid understanding of keyword research, on-page SEO, link building, and content marketing. If you already have familiarity with the SEO fundamentals and are looking to grow your technical expertise, this series is great for you.

If you’re new to SEO and looking to learn the ropes, we’d recommend the SEO Essentials Certification.

How long will the series take to complete?

The certification series includes three hours of instructor-led curriculum, in addition to activities to test your understanding and the final exam. With all of that in mind, you can expect your time commitment to be about five hours in total.

How long is the Technical SEO Certification valid? Do my certification credentials expire?

No, your Technical SEO Certification credentials will not expire.

I don't have a Moz Pro subscription – is the Technical SEO Certification Series still relevant for me?

Yes! While we do use Moz Pro to apply certain concepts throughout the series, having a Moz Pro subscription is not a requirement to benefit from this certification. We’ll also explore a number of technical tasks in other tools outside of Moz. In general, the concepts, activities, and theories covered in the series are agnostic of tools.

Any other questions or thoughts about the Technical SEO Certification Series? Drop them in the comments below – we’d love to chat with you!