BlueArray Tech SEO Certification Review
- Imo Gee
- Apr 17, 2022
- 4 min read
Whilst on my sabbatical I thought it’s not only best to focus on my health but also my career. Something I felt like had been on hold for a while.
After following some great SEO’s on Twitter like:
I found a thread suggesting SEO courses. Though I have a more general SEO background featuring tech, on page and off page. I really wanted to solidify my knowledge on the tech side of things.
What is it?
The course is made up of 14 modules, featuring short quizzes at the end of each module. It features 70+ videos, totaling 7+ hours of learning time. With some really great downloadable templates and checklists.
Check the course out here: https://bit.ly/3McEXWo
So my opinion...
Spoiler: This course was GREAT.
It featured videos on each topic that weren’t too long or dull and gave useful real life examples. It covers a wide range of things like:
Security
Status Codes
Helpful SEO Tools
HTTP status codes
Schema
Crawlability
and much more..
I would highly recommend this course for beginners or intermediate SEO’s wanting to sharpen their knowledge.
My Personal Key Takeaways
Like most people in the digital marketing space, I’m still learning everyday. With 2 years digital marketing experience and 3 years more specific to SEO, there are still gaps in my knowledge. Tools I may not have used before or algorithm theories I may not have seen. Doing courses, attending events and connecting online has really helped me shape where I am today. I can honestly say I wish I had done this course when I first started. Of course, there will always be topics that you’ve covered time and time again within online courses. However, I've listed a couple below which I thought that I will definitely use and remember going forward.
Sitebulb
I’ve utilised a few site crawlers and auditors in my experience, the likes of Ahrefs, SEMrush & ScreamingFrog. But I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of trying out Sitebulb. This course featured a whole section from Patrick Hathaway the Director of Customer Success at Sitebulb. It walked through how to use the tool effectively featuring tips and tricks. It has a user friendly UI and easy to understand hints to improve your site. I can really see the value in using multiple crawlers now. I would recommend giving this tool a try if you haven’t already!
Edge SEO
Now I can’t lie, I had to go over this a couple of times to fully understand this. But after completing the course and looking into the topic a bit more I can now confirm I understand at least 95% (I'm the type of person who needs real experience working on something to fully understand it).
Edge SEO gives SEO’s the ability to utilise CDN’s (content delivery networks) to be able to implement SEO recommendations which would usually be passed onto a developer to implement. For example, platforms have their limitations like Shopify. SEO’s are unable to edit the robots.txt within the platform itself and this would usually be passed on to a developer, which can sometimes take time to implement.
The popular CDN ‘Cloudflare’ offers the Edge SEO technology called ‘Cloudflare Workers’ which allows you to execute JavaScript.
As you can see above, the service worker sits between the site and the origin server, allowing webpages to be modified without affecting the original content on the main server.
As I wanted a deeper understanding of the topic I followed up by watching a great YouTube video by Aleyda.
In this video Edge SEO was described simply as a ‘Google Tag Manager for SEO’ By Hamlet Batista. Both help with injecting code onto a site without the need of a developer. So what’s the difference between Tag Manager and Edge SEO?
You are able to make changes before the page loads (normally you have to wait for tag manager to load to execute the Javascript)
You can modify redirects, headers & URLs with edge SEO
More flexibility to modify configurations through the CDN
It is a fraction of the time and cost because don’t need developers
E-A-T content
I’d heard a lot about the importance of long form content and the direct correlation between this technique and rankings, as backlinko states here. I knew thin content was something to avoid and i‘d seen a few tweets around E-A-T Content.
Thin content was also relatively easy to find through crawlers, like Ahrefs site audit report, as it appears as a warning. But I still felt as though I didn’t know too much about it other than Google’s Panda & Phantom algorithm updates prevented low quality, thin content from succeeding in the SERPs. Thankfully, this course opened my eyes to the importance of Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. It seems obvious right? Write engaging, content relevant to your brand/company. But after watching the particular lesson on this topic, I realised it’s much more useful than that.
The E-A-T method is great to refer to when planning content and pitching to clients. It’s even stated in the Google quality rater guidelines.
"The amount of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) is very important."
To find out more about E-A-T Marie Haynes has wrote all you need to know here.
Thanks!
Congrats on making it this far, I hope you enjoyed! Feel free to drop me a message through the contact page, leave a comment or connect on any of my socials that you can find in the footer. I'll also happily accept any recommendations for more useful online courses! 😊
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