SEO knowledge is essential for anyone working in digital marketing, web development, or for those who want to run any kind of business and have a successful online presence. The following strategies make it easy to effectively teach SEO to high-school, college, and university students who are new to the concept of SEO.
Keep it Relevant
Talk about SEO as it relates to your students—how it impacts what they click on and how it can be used to promote their own businesses. It’s a lot easier to grasp a new concept if it actually applies to you and could be used to your advantage in the future. Explain that SEO isn’t just for marketing and tech geeks, it’s for everyone who wants to be found online—from influencers to artists to plumbers.
Show the Real-World Applications
It’s all well and good to talk about how good SEO practices makes for a successful website, but showing real websites that perform well due to their SEO is a better way of hammering your point home. Use concrete examples from companies and brands that your students are familiar with. Think about companies that your students know and care about (not sure what those are? Ask your students!), and show those as your examples.
Showing concepts in action instead of just talking about a bunch of technical stuff illustrates your point and helps students see exactly how SEO works in the real world.
Encourage Students to Test What You’re Talking About
SEO is a lot more interesting when you actually start getting involved. As you lecture, encourage students to pull up Google and any relevant SEO tools to try typing in search terms and putting what you are teaching to the test. This gets students engaged and helps them really understand what you’re saying. This is also a great way to generate questions and discussion.
Use Reliable Teaching Material
Using reliable course material is essential for teaching a subject as technical and ever-changing as SEO. Mujo’s SEO teaching material is updated regularly so it doesn’t go out of date as SEO best practices evolve. We provide textbooks written for students as well as teacher manuals with minute-by-minute lesson plans and our teacher resource cloud and courseware platform which gives you access to chapter-by-chapter video tutorials, supplemental content to extend the hours of your course, and much more.