SEO Certifications Are Worthless

Open any SEO professional's LinkedIn profile. Scroll down to the certifications section. Count the badges.

Google Analytics Certified. Google Ads Certified. HubSpot Content Marketing Certified. Semrush SEO Certified. Moz Academy Graduate. The list goes on.

Now here's a question: does any of this mean they're actually good at SEO?

The answer is no. And everyone in the industry knows it.

The Certification Industrial Complex

SEO certifications exist for one reason: lead generation.

When Semrush offers free certification courses, they're not doing it out of educational altruism. They're building brand awareness and collecting email addresses. When HubSpot gives you a shiny badge for your LinkedIn profile, they're turning you into a walking billboard for their software.

The actual educational value is secondary. Often it's negligible.

These certifications are designed to be passable by anyone who can sit through some videos and click the right multiple choice answers. They test memorization, not skill. They measure completion, not competence.

I've seen people pass SEO certifications who couldn't explain what a canonical tag does. I've seen certified professionals who've never actually ranked a page for anything competitive. The certification said they knew SEO. Their results said otherwise.

What Certifications Actually Test

Let's look at what these exams typically cover:

Definitions. What is a meta description? What does robots.txt do? Basic vocabulary that you'd pick up in your first week of actually doing SEO.

Tool-specific features. How do you create a custom report in Google Analytics? Where do you find the keyword research tool in Semrush? This isn't SEO knowledge. This is software training.

Best practices from 2015. Many certifications still teach outdated concepts as gospel. Keyword density. Exact match anchor text ratios. Things that either never mattered or stopped mattering years ago.

The certifying company's worldview. HubSpot certifications push inbound marketing. Semrush certifications emphasize whatever features Semrush wants you to use. You're learning their framework, not universal truth.

What certifications don't test: the ability to actually rank websites. The judgment to prioritize opportunities. The creativity to find angles competitors missed. The patience to execute over months and years. The resilience to adapt when Google changes everything.

You know, the things that actually make someone good at SEO.

The Google Certification Paradox

Google offers SEO certifications through their Skillshop platform. Think about that for a moment.

Google, the company that deliberately keeps its ranking algorithm secret, that actively tries to prevent manipulation of its search results, offers a certification in how to optimize for their search engine.

What could they possibly teach you?

They teach you what they want you to do. Follow the guidelines. Create good content. Build a fast website. Don't do anything spammy. It's the party line. It's what they'd tell anyone who asked.

They can't teach you how ranking actually works because they don't want you to know. The certification is essentially a document confirming you've read and agreed to their public guidance. It has nothing to do with expertise.

Some of the best SEOs in the world have spent years testing the boundaries of that guidance, finding what actually moves the needle versus what Google just claims matters. None of that is in the certification.

Why Hiring Managers Fall For It

Despite all this, certifications still influence hiring. Why?

Because most hiring managers don't know how to evaluate SEO skill.

If you're a marketing director hiring an SEO specialist, you probably can't assess whether someone truly understands technical SEO, content strategy, and link building. You don't have the expertise to evaluate their expertise.

So you look for proxies. Certifications feel like validation. If Google says this person understands SEO, they must understand SEO, right?

Wrong. But the certification gives you cover. If the hire doesn't work out, at least you hired someone certified. You followed the process. You're not to blame.

This is how mediocre people with great credentials keep getting hired over talented people with thin resumes. The credentials are easier to evaluate than the talent.

What Actually Indicates SEO Competence

If certifications don't work, what does?

Results. Can they show you rankings they've achieved? Traffic they've grown? Revenue they've influenced? Not case studies from their agency's marketing materials. Actual work they personally did, with enough detail to verify it's real.

Process explanation. Ask them to walk you through how they'd approach a specific problem. Good SEOs can explain their thinking clearly. They can tell you what they'd prioritize and why. They can acknowledge uncertainty and trade-offs.

Technical depth. Can they explain how Google discovers, crawls, renders, and indexes pages? Can they debug a crawling issue? Do they understand how JavaScript affects SEO? This stuff matters and it's not in certifications.

Adaptability. Ask about times they had to change their approach. How do they stay current? What have they learned recently that changed how they work? SEO changes constantly. People who learned it once and stopped learning are already obsolete.

Honest assessment of limitations. Good SEOs know what they don't know. They can tell you where their expertise ends. Someone who claims to be an expert in everything is almost certainly an expert in nothing.

The Experience Premium

Here's what actually makes someone good at SEO: years of doing it across different sites, different industries, different challenges.

There is no substitute for having watched your rankings tank because of an algorithm update and having to figure out why. There is no certification for the pattern recognition that comes from analyzing hundreds of competitor sites. There is no exam that tests the intuition developed from thousands of hours of trial and error.

A junior person with every certification available knows less than a senior person with none. This is true in most fields, but especially in SEO where so much of the knowledge is tacit, experiential, and constantly evolving.

The certification tells you someone spent a few hours watching videos. Experience tells you someone spent years in the trenches.

The Harm of Credential Culture

Beyond being useless, SEO certifications actively cause harm.

They create false confidence. Someone with a Google certification thinks they understand SEO. They don't know what they don't know. They make decisions based on incomplete understanding and wonder why things don't work.

They waste time. Hours spent completing certification courses could be spent actually practicing SEO on real websites. The opportunity cost is significant, especially for newcomers who should be building experience.

They homogenize thinking. Everyone learns the same frameworks from the same courses. This produces practitioners who all think the same way, use the same approaches, and miss the same opportunities. The best SEO comes from creative thinking that certifications explicitly discourage.

They provide cover for mediocrity. Agencies hire certified people because it looks good, not because it works. The certification becomes the goal rather than actual skill development.

What To Do Instead

If you want to get good at SEO, skip the certifications. Here's what to do instead:

Build something. Start a website. Rank it for something. Doesn't matter what. The experience of taking something from zero to ranking teaches more than any course.

Read primary sources. Google's actual documentation. Patent filings. Search quality rater guidelines. The source material, not someone's interpretation of it.

Study sites that rank. Pick competitive keywords. Analyze what's ranking. Reverse engineer why. Form hypotheses and test them.

Join communities of practitioners. Not the certification-focused communities. The ones where people share real experiments, real results, real learnings. Twitter, Discord servers, private forums where actual SEOs talk shop. Though be warned, many of these communities, especially SEO conferences, are just extended commercials.

Work under someone good. If you can find an experienced SEO willing to mentor you, that's worth more than every certification combined.

Nobody ever ranked a page because they had a certification. They ranked it because they understood the problem, had a strategy, and executed. Credentials are paperwork. Results are proof.

Burn the badges. Build the skills. The difference shows up in outcomes.