I joined Search Engine College to see what it teaches about SEO, ranking and topics that I personally know a lot about.
And I do review this program favorably, but in all honesty, I found much of the material kind of boring to absorb and I believe there are many more alternative programs on this same exact subject that are not only more fun and easier to learn, but the practically of using it to get result is also better in my opinion.
Quick Report on Search Engine College.
Price: $99 or one time $249 fee which offers basically everything the regular membership provides, but also includes access to private tutors.
Overall Rating: 5 out of 10 stars.
Not a bad program at all. If you enjoy the “textbook” approach to learning and you’re interested in online business, this is a good course for that.
Update: In 2020, I can’t find the official Search Engine College site anymore.
I have been updating many articles on my site recently and wanted to review this particular one. In doing so, I went to check out if Search Engine College still had an active website to link to but couldn’t find it anywhere. It’s possible it’s no longer in business but if I’m wrong, please comment below and let me know the new URL, if it still exists.
Either way, you are welcome to read my review of this program but know that even when I first did this review, I didn’t find the program exciting enough to recommend, even though it was legitimate.
Search Engine College in a nutshell:
An entire study course on not just SEO, but PPC marketing to help you build an online business. The website is set up to actually feel like an online college and that can be a good and bad thing depending on how you look at college.
What you learn from Search Engine College:
There are many courses you can access as a fully paid member as you can see to the right, but if you’re interested in seeing a little bit before you want to pay, they offer a free trial for 3 lessons.
I went through them and they basically explained the history and effect of how important online marketing is in today’s world.
I agree with this, since I know how much of the money spent online is done through people who own blogs, eCommerce sites and more.
I do affiliate marketing and besides my own sites, there’s many others from which millions of people flow into places like Amazon and make their purchases, but this act gives the original sites credit and commissions.
While technically, you only get 3 lessons, you can access some more great info from their blog page where the information is accessible without having to register for the paid plan.
The rest of the courses in the college are build around establishing an online presence through:
- Link building.
- Quality content creation (articles).
- Social sharing.
- Keyword tutorials
- And paid advertising.
Each course has it’s own lessons, most of which are all provided under the $99/month plan.
Some great things about this site include the chat available to community members as well as access to tutors. The lessons are also very correct in much of what they teach.
If you like quizzes, you’re probably going to also find this program more interesting. They provide this after every course you take. I personally don’t like quizzes.
It’s not just that they bring up bad memories from my old study days, but also because I think the best test of knowledge is putting what you learn to use, seeing how it works and if it doesn’t, making the changes and adapting. Quizzes tend to narrow down knowledge in my opinion even though they are meant to expand knowledge.
But there are 2 things that really concern me about Search Engine College:
1) Like I said before, it felt boring to me.
Going over some of the lessons was very boring for me, not from the point of view from an experienced marketer, but a first time observer who had never been involved with it. There are a lot of terminologies right of the bat thrown at you which I feel takes away from the main points.
This goes back to me saying that if you like the textbook way of learning things, this can work for you. For me, I need to see, experience and experiment to learn and since I didn’t see that so much in Search Engine College, it may be annoying to learn about. While reading the lessons, I felt as though I was back in a lecture class trying to stay awake.
2) Are the teachers/tutors themselves legit?
I was very concerned about was the legitimacy of the tutors themselves. I would like to know how successful these people are before I sign up to something so expensive. After all, back when I was in college and school, I often had a lot of professors teach me a lot of things they could never do themselves.
That’s one of the reasons I’m apart of a program now where you get access to people who actually do what they teach. The program is called Wealthy Affiliate University and in my review of Search Engine College, I will be forced to make a lot of comparisons because as of this point, WA is just levels above in my opinion.
There’s also Income School, which is another similar program that is recommended (but WA in my opinion is better still). And in fact, since I mentioned in the beginning of this review about other programs that I felt as better, in addition to Wealthy Affiliate and Income School, here are other awesome affiliate training programs that I feel are better options to Search Engine College.
But since Wealthy Affiliate is my top choice out of all of them, let me state:
5 reasons why Wealthy Affiliate is better than Search Engine College in my opinion:
And also…
- It’s cheaper (Free membership called starter and even the paid one is WAY cheaper. $47/month vs $99/month).
- WA chat is open to free and paid members. Search Engine College only offers the chat to it’s paid members.
- More benefits offered in WA (free sites, less hassle in setting up and much more lines of communication).
- WA has 20 lessons to check out as a free member, plus the chat and free sites vs Search Engine College which only offers 3 lessons and nothing else.
- In WA, actual access to coaching is available without having to pay extra, even for starter members.
While I feel Search Engine College is second to WA, it’s still a program worth checking out if have the money and really feel don’t want to try anything else.
Final Rating: Search Engine College
Green Light
5 out of 10 stars. I think Search Engine College is already a good program capable of going MUCH further if they just stop being so traditional in terms of how they teach and just bring more excitement into the training. Checking out their tutorials brought me back to the anti nostalgia days of college when I would try to stay awake through the lectures I had.
In my opinion, there are way better ways of teaching such material and Wealthy Affiliate is one of those programs that does it right.
My final thoughts:
It’s a good program, but for me personally, it felt as though I was reading a textbook from a college course.
Yes I realize it’s called Search Engine COLLEGE, but learning in the traditional way college courses teach is just too boring and this is an exciting industry. The way we learn today is much better in a lot of aspects than it was before and what this program is doing is still sticking to the old ways.
It’s a debate on book smarts vs street smarts. I’m more on the side of street smarts, but I also feel there is a great necessity for book smarts as well. In Search Engine College, I feel like there is too much focus on the book end than actually getting into it and working on the business.
Of course, the other end of that is too much street smarts which is what I went through that wasted years for me. There needs to be a blend.
Sites like Wealthy Affiliate in my opinion have that perfect blend where you not only learn the book aspect of things, but also the street smarts from actually doing what you’re learning. This brings about the best results.
If you’re going to learn SEO, you need to know how to market and I feel that the marketing aspect in Search Engine College is greatly lacking. Otherwise, the rest is OK, not great though.