Google has recently released a new Digital Marketing & E-commerce certification course, which is endorsed by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the American Advertising Federation. This must mean that the course offers some solid SEO-related learnings, right? Well, not so much.
Google Certificate in Digital Marketing and Ecommerce
Google’s new certification course seeks to train jobseekers in the art/science of finding customers online, sell products or services, and do marketing analytics. The certificate from Google provides experience on the following digital marketing tools and platforms:
- Canva
- Shopify
- Hubspot
- Hootsuite
- MailChimp
- Google Ads
- Google Analytics
- Constant Contact
This all seems great; so what’s the problem?
An Uproar from the SEO Community
Upon closer investigation of the course, it appeared that the SEO advice divulged is… not exactly great. It all came to light with a Tweet by an international SEO Consultant by the name of Gianluca Fiorelli. See his Tweet below:
Google’s official SEO advice from the course is:
- Write more than 300 words on your webpage.
- Your webpage is more likely to be ranked higher in search engine result pages if you write a higher volume of quality content.
- Keep your keyword density below an industry standard of 2%.
- This means that 2% of the words on the webpage or fewer should be target keywords.
- Be thoughtful about keyword placement.
- Your keywords should be used only once in the following places on each page within your website: page title, subheading, first paragraph, and body conclusion.
In a nutshell, the advice offered by Google’s own course offers advice that SEOs have been told to ignore for a very long time. Still skeptical? Google’s own Danny Sullivan responded by saying that said advice “can be ignored”, and that the team that produced the course are not even part of the Search team.
He went on to say, “As someone from the Search team, we don’t recommend any limits or “density” or anything like that. This can be ignored; I’ll pass it on. Our advice from Search is here.”
Perhaps the course does have some merit to it in some other aspects, but the fact of the matter is that Google will never give anything away that’s going to turn you into an SEO wizard overnight; unfortunately, and fortunately, that’s not how SEO works.
At the end of the day, there is no linear model in SEO – everything is based on testing and learning.
