12 weeks · intensive
For whoever has a deadline
About 8 hours a week, in 1 cycle focused on the gaps that weigh most.
Career in 2026 and 2027
SEO Specialist
An SEO specialist earns organic visibility by making a site easy for search engines to crawl and understand and worth ranking for the people searching. The work spans research, technical health, content structure, links, measurement and, at the top, team and strategy.
Content reviewed on October 20, 2026
- Levels
- 4
- Skills mapped at Mid-level
- 7
What each level must prove
Mid-level
Accountable for making pages technically sound and discoverable, and for earning the first links that support them.
You now own the page itself: tags, crawl rules, speed and the outreach that brings links. Compared with junior work, you act on the site and answer for results instead of only preparing research.
Average score required: 62%
On-Page SEO Basics
Why: Lets you fix titles, headers and URLs on a page that ranks on page two and know which change is worth the developer's time.
Keyword Research
Why: Lets you run a competitive gap analysis and defend a prioritized keyword plan to a content lead who wants to chase high-volume terms.
Topic Clustering & Pillar Strategy
Why: Lets you design the internal linking between pillar and cluster pages and show why a topic gains authority only when the cluster is complete.
Crawling & Indexing Management
Why: Lets you diagnose index bloat or a blocked section using robots.txt, sitemaps and canonicals, and decide what should be removed from the index.
Core Web Vitals & Page Speed
Why: Lets you read a failing LCP or CLS report and tell engineering which template to fix first, rather than forwarding a generic speed complaint.
Digital PR Fundamentals
Why: Lets you pitch a data study to a journalist and judge whether the coverage it earned brings links worth having.
Link-Building Campaigns
Why: Lets you run a broken-link or resource-page outreach campaign and reclaim lost mentions, with a repeatable process instead of one-off emails.
Study for SEO Specialist: trails and practice exams
Each level of this career maps to a study trail. Read the full topic map for free, then measure your level.
Two ways to move up one level
40 weeks · regular
Alongside work
About 4 hours a week, in 3 cycles. Each cycle carries what was left from the previous one.
Frequently asked questions
What is SEO Specialist?
An SEO specialist earns organic visibility by making a site easy for search engines to crawl and understand and worth ranking for the people searching. The work spans research, technical health, content structure, links, measurement and, at the top, team and strategy.
What must each level of SEO Specialist prove?
SEO Specialist is mapped in 4 levels: Junior, Mid-level, Senior, and Expert. Open each level above to see the skills it must prove.
How long does the SEO Specialist plan take?
The plan has 2 paces: 12 weeks per level at about 8 hours a week (intensive) and 40 weeks per level at about 4 hours a week (regular).
How the plan works
AI tutor
A study session on each new topic, at your level.
AI school
Hands-on lessons on using AI in your career's daily work.
Assessments
Each requirement is proven by measurement, not by a checkbox.
Stage review
At the end of each cycle you see what moved and what carries over.
Find out which level you are at
A short diagnostic measures the skills you already have. The journey starts from there.