The material is interesting and new, on that part the instructor is doing a good job.

What is really VERY annoying about this course is the fact that in case you have questions/problems relating anything of the course material and you (as said by the instructor) post them to the discussion forums, there is COMPLETELY NO REPLY neither from the instructor, nor from the Coursera.

There were obvious mistakes in one of the quizzes and lots of students were posting and discussing this in the forums (as this was actually preventing students from passing the course), but there was no answer whatsoever.

I find this very unprofessional, especially because of the fact that this was a paid course. I do not know (and I also do not care) who is responsible for this - Coursera or the instructors, but this is something that should not be present in any of the courses on Coursera.

I liked the first course very much, but the mentioned part of the second course was so annoying that I really would not recommend taking this course to new students.

Sorry.

The lecturer provides very general information that is extremely low level, dated (for SEO this is unacceptable) not detailed and without actionable insights. Moreover, she asks the students to read online articles and Moz articles (which are great) which are easily discoverable by a simple google search. This course adds no value, no new knowledge, no insights and does not give you a competitive edge. The lecturer speaks about an hour in total and asks the course takers to do the heavy lifting by doing 10's of HOURS OF READING articles (also asks you to buy a book for 20+ USD as one of the assignments). This course is a joke! Alexa demographics is discontinued for almost a year now but she talks about Alexa and other defunct tools and metrics.

The first courses of this specialization are a waste of time. The full specialization could be just 1-2 courses. This is a perfect illustration of how schools now insanely make a course a "specialization".

Very interesting course. It took me through the basics of SEO for a website. I used the concepts thought in this course in my current job and it has helped me gain credibility from my supervisor.

Sometimes it's not important to be able to DO the subject, but just understand the language to ask the right questions. This was an informative and helpful insight into optimization fundamentals.

In general, I'm satisfied from the presented content, although I would really appreciate more concrete examples (visual) and more involvement of mentors

Very poor. Full of errors in videos and quizzes (which affect final grade), no response from course organizers in the forum to multiple complaints from learners, and extremely thin on content. Could have been merged into the first course of the specialization (Introduction to SEO).

I've taken $49 one-off certificate classes that provided 4-10 hours of content for 6-8 weeks; for this course I was charged $119 for 1-3 hours of content for what was supposed to be 4 weeks. I completed the course in a couple of days and felt like I learned more from free resources like Moz. Complete rip-off and easily the worse course of the half dozen I've taken on Coursera on various topics. It seems like you're paying for the UC Davis name on the certificates rather than the content.

In addition to all that they dropped the price from $119 to $79 per course for the specialization after I paid for it, and refuse to refund the price difference. Fine - but if I'm paying a premium price I expect much better content and service than was received.

I've been a professional SEO for a decade and am taking these courses to ensure I have the "Google SEO Certificates" that new clients may look for. However, these courses are not very good. I do appreciate their production quality and overall design. But plenty of the information presented is untrue or at best misleading. This makes taking the tests hard, when I know the actual right answers, but have to adjust to the weird logic of many of these questions. For instance, one test question asks "which action can you take to aid web crawlers in finding your site" and the answer apparently is NOT "submit your site to a search engine" - the correct answer supposedly is "Add your site to Google Webmasters Tools". Nevermind that a) it's "Webmaster" Tools, b) it hasn't been "Webmaster Tools" for 7 years, it's Search Console, and c) submitting it to Search Console IS THE SAME THING AS SUBMITTING IT TO A SEARCH ENGINE. This is just one example of many, on EVERY test, that make no sense. I do not consider this a very good course.

Poor grading system. Based on 2 peers' "subjective" points of your week4 analysis assignment, even if you digested all the materials and received 100% on quizzes all weeks, you will have to repeat taking this course endlessly. At first I thought I did not analyze thoroughly so on my second session, I basically rewrote the whole assessment, followed by samples passed students gave me, also making sure I covered all the points the instruction asked me to cover, peer gives me 1 or 1.5 point for writing persona with little detail. I wrote 350 words persona, with stories and demographic of my target audience. Because I am 2.5 points short or so, I have to take this same course for the next round session for the third time, wait it it reaches week 4, resubmit my analysis that is now edited for 4 times. There is no clear guideline, format, or even sample provided, but the grades are left to the peers. Some pass with less than 300 word analysis with a lot of charts and pictures. I did as well but wasn't lucky at my first round so I developed 3 pg. analysis all in words to make it look like a true analytical report, didn't pass again. I do not know what this instructor is looking for as a form of assessment/analysis paper, and only those who are lucky enough to meet sensible peer graders pass. Waste of time, waste of money no one wants to spend lifetime to get a certificate especially when one knows what he or she is talking about.

The course covered a lot of useful information but the reason why I'm giving this 2 stars is because the grading of peer assignment is unfair. Some students clearly didn't read my work carefully and graded me low. Also the lesson needs to be updated because the tool that they suggested ''Alexa'', its audience gender is outdated. No information of how to use the other tools such as Google Analytics as well.

I signed up to audit the first 5 courses in this specialization. This review is for the first 3 of these courses taught by Rebekah May.

I don't know that SEO is truly simple and logical or if it just appears this way because of how clear and easy to listen to Ms. May is. I do feel she has supplied a lot of very useful information, pointed to a lot of great tools and websites., and am already making improvements as a result of her classes.

this is amazing SEO course . i am first time learning about SEO . its really informative and help me to improve my skill. i really thanks to coursera to give this opportunity to learn this course.

I'm very pleased with the course, It has a very clear and organized structure and content. I love i! It is very easy to understand SEO this way. Nonetheless I would suggest that some resources need to be updated, as SEO and his tools are changing rapidly. The explanations about Alexa is not updated, for example. It already changed.

Also, and this has nothing to do with this particular course, but Coursera, I think that at least the final job should be reviewed by a professional SEO expert.

It's great to check others students work to learn and understand things, but we should also receive some feedback from an expert.

All the other things related to this course are truly great. It's been a joy to study with this material. Congratz to Rebekha and her team.

Wow. For a basic course - this thing is packed. You can literally start freelancing as an SEO after doing this course. And I am lol. Great job guys.

Suggestions:

Google has recently lengthened the meta description to 320 characters - please change this info in the course. (You still have the old meta description limit of 160 characters in the course.)

It would be incredibly helpful if I would get notifications from Coursera when (1) ppl comment on my comments, and, (2) comment on my assignments. Kind of like the little red flag in facebook or linkedin.

now we're talking! After the very general "Introduction course" this second part of the specialization has a lot of valueable information you can actually apply! I have to say - I didn't really feel like doing the mandatory assignment part at first but in hindsight it was a really great exercise and amplified the learning process so much! Excited to take the next course!

I thoroughly enjoyed this course !

It provided me with an in depth knowledge of SEO and its strategies that can help you to rank your website on SERP.

The best part of this course is quizzes and assignments after every module. It helps you to gauge your understanding about this course.

I would highly recommend this course to all.

While I was going through this course, I had a client who paid me 40$ to do on-site optimization for her website. So, I took her website as a case study and applied all my learning from this course on her website, I improved her rankings for more than 5 keywords. She's happy. I am super excited. Thank YOU.

I highly recommend this platform for all young Digital Marketing students who are in their Senior years and Colleges. Best industry standards and concepts discussed. Very Practical and assignments are worth it. It is a capstone method. Very well co-related with all digital elements. Truly Informative.

This is not a trivial subject. Nevertheless, I feel completely confident in my newfound knowledge of it. Not only that, but I am very motivated to keep going with the rest of the specialization now.

This course gives an excellent introduction to different aspects of SEO. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in learn \ing about SEO, but not sure which part to specialize in.