SEO Mastery for Google and AI Answer Engines

What's inside

1. Level 1: What SEO Is and How a Results Page Is BuiltFree
   Learners see what search engine optimisation can and cannot do and identify each part of a modern Google results page, including organic results, ads, search features and AI Overviews.
2. Level 2: Crawling: How Googlebot Discovers PagesFree
   Learners find out how Googlebot discovers and downloads URLs through links and sitemaps, and how server availability and robots.txt rules affect crawling.
3. Level 3: Rendering and Indexing: From Fetched Page to Index
   Learners follow what happens after a crawl: Google renders the page with Chrome, works out what it is about, groups duplicates under one chosen canonical, and may or may not store it in the index.
4. Level 4: Serving and Ranking: How Results Are Chosen
   Learners see how Google picks and orders results from its index using many factors, such as relevance, quality, location, language and device, and how the features shown change with the type of query.
5. Level 5: Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
   Learners find out how Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode use query fan-out to pull in a wide range of supporting links, and why Google says they need no special optimisation beyond standard SEO.
6. Level 6: How ChatGPT and Perplexity Find and Cite Sources
   Learners compare how AI answer engines such as ChatGPT search and Perplexity fetch web content through their own crawlers and cite sources, and how site owners control that access.
7. Level 7: Setting Up Google Search Console
   Learners add and verify their own site in Google Search Console, choosing between a domain property and a URL-prefix property, and submit their sitemap.
8. Level 8: First Diagnosis: URL Inspection and Page Indexing
   Learners use the URL Inspection tool and the Page indexing report to see whether Google has crawled and indexed key pages and why some are excluded, which turns the earlier crawl, render and index lessons into a baseline audit.
9. Level 9: Keyword Fundamentals: Seeds, Head Terms and Long Tail
   Learners learn the basic vocabulary of keyword research, including seed keywords, head terms, long-tail queries and search volume, and build a seed list for their own site.
10. Level 10: Free Keyword Research Sources
    Learners expand their seed list using free sources: Google Keyword Planner, Search Console queries, autocomplete, People Also Ask and related searches.
11. Level 11: Search Intent: Informational to Transactional
    Learners sort keywords by search intent (informational, navigational, commercial investigation and transactional) and confirm the intent by reading the live results page.
12. Level 12: Keyword Metrics: Volume, Difficulty and Value
    Learners judge keywords by estimated volume, third-party difficulty scores, cost per click and business value, and learn that difficulty scores are tool-specific estimates, not Google data.
13. Level 13: Prioritising Keywords and Finding Quick Wins
    Learners combine value, difficulty and current position into a priority score and use Search Console to find quick wins, such as pages ranking just off page one.
14. Level 14: Identifying Your Real Search Competitors
    Learners tell apart business competitors and the sites that actually compete for their priority keywords, in both organic results and AI answers.
15. Level 15: Competitor Keyword Gap Analysis
    Learners find relevant keywords that competitors rank for and their own site does not, and judge which gaps are worth closing.
16. Level 16: Planning Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages
    Learners group related keywords into topic clusters around pillar pages, a practitioner planning model rather than a documented Google ranking factor, to plan coverage and internal links.
17. Level 17: Avoiding Keyword Cannibalisation
    Learners spot when several pages on their site compete for the same query and intent, and decide whether to merge, differentiate or redirect them.
18. Level 18: Building the Keyword-to-Page Map
    Learners bring their research together into a keyword-to-page map that gives each priority keyword cluster one existing or planned URL, with its intent and page type.
19. Level 19: People-First Content: Google's Helpful Content Guidance
    Learners apply Google's documented guidance on creating helpful, people-first content, including its self-assessment questions, and learn that helpfulness is now judged within Google's core ranking systems, not by a separate classifier.
20. Level 20: E-E-A-T: What Google Says It Is and Is Not
    Learners learn what Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness mean in Google's documentation and Search Quality Rater Guidelines, that trust is the most important part, and that E-E-A-T is not a single ranking factor or score.
21. Level 21: Showing Experience and Expertise on the Page
    Learners turn E-E-A-T from an idea into things a reader can see on the page: first-hand evidence, clear author bylines and bios, sources and an honest About page. They also learn that Google says E-E-A-T is not a single ranking factor that it measures directly.
22. Level 22: Helpful Content Signals Today: Auditing and Pruning
    Learners find out how helpful-content signals work now. Since March 2024 they have been part of Google's core ranking systems rather than a separate classifier. Learners then use Google's self-assessment questions to decide whether to keep, improve, merge or remove pages.
23. Level 23: AI-Generated Content and Google's Spam Policies
    Learners find out what Google allows when AI helps write content. They learn the 'scaled content abuse' and 'site reputation abuse' spam policies, and how to use AI without making pages that exist only to rank.
24. Level 24: Finding the Gaps in AI Answers
    Learners run a set of test prompts through Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT and Perplexity. They record which sources each engine cites and where the answers are thin, out of date, generic or wrong.
25. Level 25: Non-Commodity Content: Filling Gaps with Originality
    Learners fill the gaps they found with what Google's generative AI guide asks for: unique, non-commodity content such as original data, first-hand testing, expert quotes and local or product detail that other pages lack.
26. Level 26: Structuring Pages to Be Quoted: Inverted Pyramid
    Learners write in the inverted pyramid: a direct answer first, then supporting detail, then background. This is labelled as practitioner theory. Learners also see that Google's own guide says content chunking and AI-specific rewriting are not needed for its AI features.
27. Level 27: Semantic HTML: Headings, Lists and Tables
    Learners use semantic HTML, which Google's AI guidance recommends where possible: a logical heading hierarchy, real lists and data tables, and descriptive links. This makes pages easier for people and machines to read.
28. Level 28: Controlling Snippets and AI Crawler Access
    Learners control how their content can be shown. They use nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet for Google, and robots.txt rules for user agents such as Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot and PerplexityBot, and learn what each one does and does not affect.
29. Level 29: Market Research and Personas with ChatGPT and Gemini
    Learners use specific prompts in ChatGPT and Gemini for market research and audience personas, then check the output against real data instead of trusting it.
30. Level 30: AI-Assisted Competitor Keywords and Topic Clusters
    Learners use ChatGPT and Gemini to brainstorm competitor angles and group keywords into topic clusters. They then check the AI's suggestions against real keyword tool and Search Console data.
31. Level 31: AI Outlines and Briefs That Keep a Human Voice
    Learners use prompts that turn a target query, the AI-answer gaps and their own first-hand material into a detailed outline and writer's brief, without handing the substance of the page to the model.
32. Level 32: AI Editing, Fact-Checking and Publishing a Page
    Learners use AI for editing passes on clarity, structure and tone. They then fact-check every claim themselves and publish or refresh one people-first page that brings this phase together.
33. Level 33: Setting Up a Technical Audit: Crawling Your Site
    Learners set up a technical audit. They crawl a real site with an SEO crawler and pair the results with Search Console reports to get a baseline of status codes, redirects, titles and orphan pages.
34. Level 34: Crawl Control: robots.txt, Meta Robots and Budget
    Learners control what Googlebot crawls and indexes. They learn the difference between blocking crawling with robots.txt and blocking indexing with noindex, and when crawl budget matters.
35. Level 35: Diagnosing Indexing with Search Console
    Learners read the Page indexing report and use URL Inspection to work out why pages are 'Crawled – currently not indexed', 'Discovered – currently not indexed', duplicates or soft 404s, and what to fix.
36. Level 36: JavaScript Rendering: Client-Side vs Server-Side
    Learners see how Google crawls, renders and indexes JavaScript pages. They compare client-side rendering with server-side rendering, static generation and hydration, and how each affects what search engines see.
37. Level 37: Finding and Fixing JavaScript SEO Faults
    Learners hunt down common JavaScript faults: links without real hrefs, content that loads only after a click, blocked resources, client-side soft 404s and meta tags injected by JavaScript. They also learn that many non-Google AI crawlers are reported not to run JavaScript, which is practitioner observation.
38. Level 38: Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP and CLS
    Learners learn the three Core Web Vitals and their 'good' thresholds: LCP of 2.5 s or less, INP of 200 ms or less (INP replaced FID in 2024), and CLS of 0.1 or less. They also learn the difference between field and lab data and how Google uses page experience.
39. Level 39: Speed Diagnostics with PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest
    Learners diagnose slow pages with PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest, using the waterfall, filmstrip and LCP element breakdown to find what is actually slowing a page down.
40. Level 40: Fixing Speed: Images, Minification, Caching, CDNs
    Learners apply the main speed fixes: modern image formats (WebP and AVIF), correct image sizing and lazy loading, fetchpriority for the LCP image, minifying and deferring code, cache-control headers and a CDN.
41. Level 41: Canonicals and Duplicate Content
    Learn how Google chooses one canonical URL from a set of duplicate pages, and how rel=canonical, redirects, internal links and sitemaps act as signals that Google may follow or override.
42. Level 42: Hreflang for International and Multilingual Sites
    Learn how to tell Google about the language and regional versions of a page with hreflang annotations, and how to avoid the errors that make Google ignore them.
43. Level 43: Site Architecture, Crawl Depth and Faceted URLs
    Learn to design a flat, logical site structure that lets Google and users reach important pages in a few clicks, and to stop faceted navigation creating endless crawlable URLs.
44. Level 44: Internal Linking Audit
    Learn how internal links help Google discover pages and understand what they are about, and how to audit and improve them on a real site.
45. Level 45: Structured Data and Which Rich Results Still Exist
    Learn how JSON-LD structured data works and check Google's current search gallery to see which types still earn rich results now that FAQ rich results have ended (May 2026) and How-To and several other features have been phased out.
46. Level 46: Product Markup and Validating Structured Data
    Learn to add Product, Offer, review and merchant listing markup to product pages and check it with Google's testing and Search Console reporting tools.
47. Level 47: Links and Google's Spam Policies
    Learn how Google uses links, what its spam policies define as link spam, and how to qualify paid, sponsored and user-generated links correctly.
48. Level 48: The Skyscraper Technique
    Learn the Skyscraper Technique, a practitioner method (not a Google guideline): find content that has earned many links, build a clearly better resource, and contact the people who link to the original.
49. Level 49: Broken-Link Building
    Learn to find dead pages that other sites still link to, create a useful replacement, and suggest it to those sites' owners as a fix.
50. Level 50: Guestographics and Linkable Assets
    Learn the guestographic method, a practitioner technique for offering a custom introduction with an infographic or data asset to relevant sites, and how to run it within Google's spam policies.
51. Level 51: Tracking, Reclaiming and Protecting Links
    Learn to monitor the links you have earned, recover lost links and unlinked mentions, and respond sensibly to spammy links using Google's guidance on the disavow tool.
52. Level 52: Search Console Performance Analysis
    Learn to analyse clicks, impressions, CTR and position in Search Console, including the generative AI performance reports that show impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
53. Level 53: GA4 for SEO: Organic Traffic and Key Events
    Learn to measure organic and AI-referred visits in Google Analytics 4 and connect them to key events that matter to the business.
54. Level 54: SEO Reporting and AI Visibility Tracking
    Learn to combine Search Console, GA4 and AI answer checks into an honest dashboard that tracks visibility, traffic and business results over time.
55. Level 55: Building an SEO Portfolio
    Learn to turn work on your own or volunteer sites into honest case studies that show your process and measured results.
56. Level 56: Finding SEO Clients and Roles
    Learn the main routes into SEO work (in-house, agency and freelance) and how to find and qualify the clients or employers who suit your skills.
57. Level 57: Pricing SEO Services
    Learn the common SEO pricing models and how to price your work by scope, value and the time it really takes.
58. Level 58: Honest Proposals and Contracts
    Learn to write SEO proposals and contracts that set realistic expectations, promise no rankings, and agree deliverables, access and responsibilities.
59. Level 59: Prioritising an SEO Roadmap
    Learn to turn audit findings, keyword maps and content gaps into a prioritised roadmap that weighs impact against effort and dependencies.
60. Level 60: Final Challenge: Full Strategy and Audit of a Real Site Exam
    Bring the whole course together by producing a complete SEO strategy and audit for a real site, covering crawl to index, keywords and intent, content and E-E-A-T, AEO/GEO, structured data, ethical links and measurement.

Access

The first 2 levels are free with a free account. Every level, the podcast edition and the AI tutor come with All Access at £4.99/month or any Creator plan — see pricing.

Start free →