Google turns its Search Central videos into two SEO courses: beginners and technical

Google has sorted years of its Search Central videos into two playlists meant to be watched in order. The Search Central blog announced them on October 6. The channel has published hundreds of videos across series such as Search for Beginners, Ask Googlebot, Search Console Training and Search Off the Record, and Google says a clear path from scratch was hard to find among them.

Search fundamentals for beginners

This one is for site owners, marketers, content creators and anyone new to SEO. It runs from how Google crawls, indexes and serves pages, through the anatomy of a results page, to measurement. That means setting up Search Console, reading the performance reports and Search Console Insights, and using Google Trends to find topics people are searching for.

Technical SEO fundamentals

The second playlist is for developers and technical SEOs, and Google says it skips the basics. It covers robots.txt, the crawl stats report and crawl budget, troubleshooting indexing problems with the URL Inspection tool, duplicate content, how browsers parse HTML, page weight, and automating work with Search Console's bulk data export and APIs.

Worth bookmarking

Both playlists are live on the Search Central channel's playlists page. They are free and come from the people who document how Google Search works, which makes them a sound first course for a new hire or a client who wants to understand the reports. For the hands-on part, the technical playlist pairs well with a crawler from our site audit tools, such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.