The Complete SEO & AI SEO Course for 2026 (Full Beginner’s Guide)

In the next 60 minutes or so, I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about getting your website ranking on Google and showing up in AI, search results, even if you're a complete beginner. And at the end, I'll give you a 30 day action plan so exactly what to do when this video ends.

This video will be very comprehensive, so feel free to watch in multiple settings or go straight to the sections most relevant to you via the timestamps in the description. Okay, so first we have to address the elephant in the room. AI chatbots are answering questions.

AI overviews are taking over Google, and everywhere you look, someone is claiming SEO is dead. For real this time. So if you're wondering whether SEO is still worth your time, that's a fair question. But here are the facts. Google still processes billions

of searches every single day. That number grew 20% last year. And Google sends 190 times more traffic to websites than ChatGPT. Google is not shrinking, but the way people find information is changing.

There are now two places your business needs to show up. Traditional search and AI powered search. This video covers both. And here's something the folks selling expensive geo services

don't want you to know. Those AI assistants, they're built on top of traditional search infrastructure. ChatGPT uses Bing's index when it searches the web. Perplexity runs its own crawler, but still leans heavily on Bing's index underneath.

Even the ones building their own indexes like Perplexity are crawling the same pages that already rank in traditional search. So if your site doesn't show up in Google or Bing, there's a good chance it's invisible to AI assistants too.

SEO is not competing with AI search, and it's the foundation AI search is built on. Learning. SEO means learning to show up everywhere. And by the end of this video, you'll have everything you need to do just that. What SEO is.

SEO has historically stood for search engine optimization, but as of late, I'm much more inclined to Ashley Liddell's definition search everywhere optimization. In a sentence. SEO is getting your website to show up wherever people search

for things related to your business or the solutions you provide. That's it. Everything else is details. Admittedly, there are a lot of details. Google search works in three steps. Crawl, index and rank.

Crawling is when Google sends automated bots to read every page on the Internet, or at least the vast majority of them. They follow links from page to page, reading everything they find in code. Indexing is the process of Google Storing what those bots find

in a massive library, its index. If your page isn't in the index, it can't show up in search results. Simple as that. And lastly, ranking. When someone searches, Google looks through its index and picks the results it thinks are the most relevant,

most trustworthy and most useful. The order that it puts them in, that's the ranking and that is what we're trying to influence. Now let me show you what a search results page looks like right now. At the top you might see an AI overview.

This is relatively new in Google's history. Google's AI summarizing an answer directly in the results below that. Sponsored ads. Then the organic results, the ones you can earn through SEO.

Over here, people also ask boxes. Sometimes you'll see video carousels, a local map pack if the search has a location angle or knowledge panels., we've come a long way from 10 Blue Links and our SEO

strategy needs to reflect that. So how does SEO directly impact your business? Well, I think it's important to clarify. You shouldn't ultimately have an SEO goal. You should have a business goal. More customers, more revenue, more leads.

SEO is one of the most reliable ways to get there because you're reaching people at the exact moment that they're looking for what you sell., think about it. When you're on your phone scrolling Instagram and you see an ad, you're interrupted. You were in the middle

of doing something and someone showed you their ad. Someone who Google's best proposal software for agencies is actively looking for a solution. They have a problem, they want answers. SEO puts your business in front of them at that moment.

Hopefully the difference is intent. And that's what makes SEO so valuable. Now to make this real, I'm going to look at three different businesses throughout the course of this video. A SaaS company that sells proposal software. An E commerce brand that sells specialty coffee.

And a managed cybersecurity platform that protects small and mid sized businesses. Because despite what you may have heard, SEO is not a one size fits all strategy. The mindset, workflows and principles are the same, but the decisions you

make change completely depending on your business. I'll show you what throughout the video. So I've run dozens and dozens of SEO campaigns for clients. And before I make a single change on the website, I always ask one key question. What are people searching for?

And what do they want when they search it? That second part is so important that it gets its own chapter. Chapter 2 Mastering Search Intent before we get into keyword research tools or any tactics.

You need to understand the single most important concept in SEO and it's called search intent. See, every time someone types something into Google, they're looking for something specific and your job is to figure out what that is and give it to them.

Broadly speaking, there are four types of intent. Let's look at a few example keywords. How to train your puppy. This is informational. They want to learn something. Best dog training classes. This is commercial.

They're willing to spend money to solve their problem, but they're not quite sure what they want to buy. They're comparing options. Next dog training class, near me, sign up. This is transactional. They're willing to spend their money. They know the broad category of

the thing they want to spend their money on and they're ready to buy. Lastly, petsmart dog training. This is navigational or branded intent. Either one works. The sale is as good as one. They're just using Google

as a digital Uber driver to take them to the brand's website. So how do you figure out search intent? Well, it's super simple. You just google your keyword and you look at what's ranking. That's what Google thinks the intent is. Now Google has already done

the research for you. The top 10 results are Google telling you exactly what this searcher wants. And your job is to match that intent to and do it better than anyone else. By the way, SERP is just an acronym for search engine results page.

Every keyword has their own and due to a variety of factors, they change quite a bit. Now, quick rule of thumb, the shorter the keyword, usually the more competitive, higher volume and less useful it is.

For example, take the keyword coffee. Over 650,000 searches in a month in the US alone. Sounds awesome, but Google doesn't know what the heck you want. The SERP is a mess. Shops definitions news brands.

Every major site on the Internet is competing for it. What do you want? What do you want? It's not that simple. What do you want? Now try best dark roast coffee beans for espresso.

It's a lower volume, maybe a few hundred searches a month, but man, look at that syrup. All comparison posts and buying guides, the intent is crystal clear. The competition, it's a fraction of what coffee attracts. Now SEOs call these

long tail keywords, longer, more specific phrases. They've got lower volume individually, but the intent is focused. The competition is very manageable and taken together, they can send your site a respectable amount of traffic. Now, if your site is Newer.

This is where you start. You build authority on the long tail keywords, and then you work your way up to the big ones as the business requires. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We're going to talk a lot about keyword research and prioritization

later in the video. For now, I want you to do something. I want you to pause this video or just open another tab while you're watching and Google your main keyword, the thing that you want your customers to know you the most for, and look at the top

results. What type of content is ranking? Blog posts, product pages, tools, YouTube videos? That's the intent. Now, remember that it'll come in handy later in the video. Now let's talk about intent in the AI era.

So AI overviews aren't just showing up for informational queries anymore. Google's AI now summarizes results across all types of searches, including commercial and transactional. That means even when someone is comparing products or ready to buy

Google, Google might answer them before they click a single link. This is called zero click marketing, and it's got consumers making entire buying decisions completely outside of your brand's ecosystem. So your content needs to go deeper

than whatever that summary covers to earn the click surface level. Content will not cut it anymore. And we'll talk way more about how to create content like that in the chapter on content creation and on page optimization.

So now that you understand intent, let's move on to the lifeblood of any SEO strategy. Keywords Chapter 3 Finding the right Keywords so as we've covered, a keyword is the phrase

someone types into Google doesn't matter how many words it is. By the way, keyword can be one word, five words, 10 words, 20 words. In fact, I don't even really think there's a limit. I think you could probably paste a whole essay into Google, but that's beside the point. Your job is to figure out which

phrases matter for your business and then build pages that rank for them. But not all keywords are created equal. I, use a framework I call the keyword sweet spot. Four attributes that make a keyword worth targeting.

The first is demand. Are people searching for this? If nobody's googling it, ranking number one has little benefit. See, I've worked with many clients who have ideas that, that they feel are important to their audience,

which is certainly valuable from a thought leadership perspective. Just don't expect to get a ton of organic traffic to those topics. The second is fit. Where does the keyword sit in your funnel?

Is it someone just learning about the topic, or someone ready to buy? Is it relevant enough to the products or services you're offering, or the audience you're reaching? Each of these can be valuable, but you need to know which one you're dealing with. The next attribute is intent.

You already understand this from the last chapter. What does the searcher want, and can you satisfy that want? If that's a YouTube video, which are very common appearances in the modern SERP, well, you better get your Tarantino on

because you're going to need to film a YouTube video if you want to rank. Lastly, we have keyword difficulty. Can you realistically rank for this, given your site's current authority? A brand new website is not going to outrank Amazon for

running shoes, but it might have a fighting chance for a less competitive keyword like best running shoes for flat feet in winter. You won't always find keywords that score highly on all four metrics. In fact, sometimes they can be unicorns.

But if you do find those keywords, you should absolutely prioritize ranking for them. So let me show you how this works in practice with two real companies. PandaDoc sells proposal software. The keyword contract

template gets approximately 300,000 searches a month. Nobody, searching that is buying proposal software today, at least. Not likely. Conventional wisdom would say Skip it, but PandaDoc consistently ranks highly for contract template.

Their template directory drives hundreds of thousands of visits every month. And here's the play. Watch this free template Download, Email Capture Nurture Sequence Product signup that top of funnel keyword feeds

their entire pipeline. Now, contract template is not a bad keyword. It's just a top of funnel keyword. And it's brilliant if you have a plan for what happens after someone lands on the page. And by the way, if you ever

need a dog breeding contract template apparently PandaDoc's got you covered. Now look at Counterculture Coffee. The keyword pour over coffee has a around 34,000 searches a month. Now, does Counterculture

get a lot of immediate purchases from that keyword? Maybe. Probably not, though those people could be looking for pour over coffee near them, or trying to understand what it is or how to do it. Counterculture gets this and they

don't try to target that keyword with a conversion focused page. Instead, they rank high for that keyword with a brew guide on their blog. They also rank highly for pour over coffee ratio at 10,000

searches as well as cold brew ratio at 6,800 and coffee brewing methods at 5,200. All educational content. They became an authority in specialty coffee through tutorials, thus building trust

and the product sales followed. The important thing to know is where each keyword sits in your funnel and to have a strategy for that particular stage. A keyword without a conversion path is just wasted traffic.

It's vanity metrics. A keyword with a conversion path could be an automated pipeline for your business. Okay, so how do we, number one, identify the terms our target customers are searching for, and number two, evaluate them against the keyword

sweet spot framework. So I like to break up the keyword research process into three separate disciplines to keep things nice and organized. Number one, keyword ideation. Number two, keyword validation.

And number three, keyword clustering. Now, there are so many ways to find keyword ideas. If I explained all of them, this video would be three hours long. So I'm going to rapid fire through some techniques. And you should feel free to pause or rewind the video