How Long Does it Take to Learn SEO? Time & Learning for Beginners in 2023

How long can it take to learn SEO is what most beginners would want to know. Knowing the time to learn helps plan and pace yourself. And only after knowing this can we understand and plan on how to learn faster.

Time and Learning for SEO

Learning SEO takes time as does everything else. And the time to learn SEO goes into properly understanding the different aspects and parts, and more importantly learning the basics and the techniques of search engine optimization.

Here one popular and important question beginners ask and want to know is how can they learn it fast.

Learning SEO fast is directly correlated to how fast do you understand, how good is your learning resource or guide and how quickly can you find it.

And to solve these three problems of most beginners we created this ultimate guide on how to learn SEO fast.

The important thing to remember is that you need to learn and understand every important aspect and part without having to waste too much time on searching for resources.

This is also why an advanced & complete SEO course becomes important. And many beginners right away go for such a training.

Learning Time for SEO

How much it takes to learn SEO means in how much time can you learn & master all the things there are to make you a complete professional in search engine optimizing a website.

This is the basis that we take when we go on to discuss and explain the time taken learning search engine optimization.

Therefore, to properly analyse the time it can take to learn search engine optimization we will go through the right process or steps a beginner goes through or should take to learn SEO from scratch.

When beginners want to learn search engine optimization from the very start then they go through this typical process.

These are the stages of how to learn SEO from the scratch.

You need to go through these stages of learning to become an SEO professional or expert.

So, the time take to learn SEO depends upon what level you want to reach or achieve.

Here are few things which could help you understand SEO better.

Understanding what is SEO and explaining simply how it works.

Understand how SEO works for a business.

Why SEO is important for their business success.

Yes. All this can take some time which also depends upon the learner and type of resources. Yet it is not difficult it is to learn.

And yes, all this is worth to learn as this is what makes a beginner a professional and even an expert.

How much time it will take to learn SEO like this?

Time to learn SEO depends upon the stage you want to reach. Going from scratch to learning to do it can take 3 to 6 months. And to go from a beginner to becoming good at doing SEO it will take up to a year or little more.

Let us analyse the learning and time taken for each level or stage.

To analyse it we are going to take a time frame for a beginner to learn the way we suggest.

The time frame we are taking is 12 months. And we will divide and suggest time to learn for each stage from this total time only.

Let us start.

Stage 1: Understanding SEO

This is where you start learning when you are beginning from scratch.

First you need to learn about what is SEO and what all it involves.

This is getting the basic idea.

You need this to know what all you need to learn.

You need to start with this stage to get comfortable and little more confident in learning SEO.

What Percentage of total time you need?

Percentage of total time you need for this stage is about 1%.

How much time this stage can take ideally?

The time this stage can take is between 2 to 5 days.

Level of learning

All you need to focus here is to know about SEO. However you need to avoid going too far or reading too much as that might confuse you.

Here are the important things to learn in SEO fast in one day.

What factors can affect the time here?

Time taking factors:

The time this stage can take could vary due finding the online guides or blogs, the resources you select, how much time you give and how quickly you grasp.

Stage 2: Learn to do SEO

After understanding what this professional field of optimizing websites for search engines is about and what it involves you come to this stage of actual learning.

This is where you start learning SEO.

This is where you learn the techniques of search engine optimization.

This is the core learning.

This is what builds your skills to be professional.

This is the learning stage that you need to prepare for your career.

What Percentage of total time you need?

Percentage of total time you need for this stage is about 15%.

How much time this stage can take ideally?

The time this stage can take is between 1 to 3 months. But the ideal time according to us should be up to 2 months as per the percentage.

Level of learning

The first thing for you to learn here is how each technique is used in complete SEO process. Which technique comes first and which later. This is understanding SEO as the step by step process.

Then you need to focus on understanding and learning each technique properly.

You are a beginner and so what is more important to learn here is how to use each technique.

What are the further steps of each of the techniques?

This is more theoretical in learning.

Try to remember the how to do steps.

Or better make notes.

What factors can affect the time here?

Time taking factors:

If you have to again find resources to learn each technique in detail then it could take much more time.

The ideal way is to find a detailed SEO tutorial step-by-step. Or you can search for and find one or two good websites with enough resources. Just like Purpalyn has a good list of SEO guides for beginners.

Stage 3: Getting Good at Doing SEO

This is the most important stage of learning SEO.

This stage provides you with true and complete learning.

This is because SEO is best learned by practice.

The more you practice it, the more and better you learn it.

Learning the theory is of not much good if you do not practice it.

SEO requires practical learning.

In fact, I learned it this way only. As I already had a website so all I did was read about it and side by side do SEO for my website as practice.

And many people start learning SEO like this.

This stage requires more time.

However, the better you learned & understand it in the second stage the easier it becomes for you to do learn it in this stage.

What Percentage of total time you need?

Since according to us this is the most important learning stage and the stage which also requires more time, we assigned 84% as the percentage of total time you need for this stage.

How much time this stage can take ideally?

The broad is anywhere between 6 to 12 months. Yes, do not get confused. If one has not gone through the previous two stages then they might need a year in learning at this stage.

So the ideal time this stage should take is 7 to 10 months.

Level of learning

This is your professional and practical learning.

This is where you learn SEO by practicing it.

Here you will learn many more things in SEO which you did not learn at the previous stages.

This is where you go deep into this field and the practical steps to do SEO.

This is also the opportunity to master this technique of search engine optimization.

What factors can affect the time here?

Time taking factors:

At this stage the time not only goes into doing or practicing and learning more from it.

Much of the time goes in observing and waiting to see the results of each of the step you took.

You learn the most important factors about SEO and the time it actually takes.

How long does it take to be an SEO expert

What does it mean to be an SEO expert?

The first thing it means is that you can do so much and also provide best services.

You know how to get results.

You know how to improve keyword rankings.

You also know how to rank keywords fast.

How to become an expert in SEO?

If you want to know how to become an SEO expert and how long does it take to become one then you need to go through the steps and process we mentioned above.

On the premises of what all you need to learn now we give you a broad timeline of how much time learning SEO takes usually.

How much time does it take to learn SEO as a beginner

6-9 months is the short & straight answer.

6-9 months is how long it can take to learn SEO from scratch.

You can learn the fundamentals of SEO in about a month’s time, it takes 6-9 months to learn it properly. That involves learning the techniques, using these techniques on a website, using basic tools and first hand witness the rank/traffic movements.

You can understand the time factor properly with this time schedule I have created from experience.

6-9 months is the learning time frame for a beginner to learn SEO from scratch and be ready as a professional.

The Breakdown of the time take to learn SEO from the beginning.

When beginners start to learn SEO then this is the three phase process they typically go through. We breakdown SEO learning time by these three phases of learning.

How long does it take to be an SEO professional or expert?

1 Year — You will need at least or about one year from here on, depending upon how much you practice and learn from it. So, if you are a complete beginner and want to know how long it takes to be a professioanl or expert in SEO then you need to give about 2 years. This time you need to reach a decent professional level in doing SEO and develop your skills.

This is the total time period by phases which you need to learn SEO properly with practice to become skilled professional in SEO.

Learning how to do SEO as a professional and how it works takes time. The time this stage takes is not because SEO learning becomes hard. But it takes time because now you have to actually do SEO and learn more from how it works in the real world.

You do it step by step. This itself takes time. Once you do step one then you go to step two and three and so on. After this you wait to see results which are rankings and traffic.

Both of these take time and work as per Google guidelines. The one most important part of doing SEO is building links.

This part itself takes time to do, and then more time in seeing some results from it.

So, if you want to know how soon or fast can you become an SEO professional, from scratch who knows how to do SEO for a website then the proper answer is 12 to 15 months or about 1 year.

And then if you want to know how long will it take a beginner to become a skilled SEO professional who know how to do SEO for a website, what all to do in SEO, how SEO works and how to rank a website. The right answer to this is that there is no actual time frame for this. It all depends upon how much you are willing to learn. Still, to reach this stage you may take about 18 months or 2 years.

These are the three steps according to us which YOU NEED to learn SEO completely and properly. The second and the third parts are more important.

This is the actual learning of SEO. This is because SEO is more about application and less about theoretical SEO knowledge. The basics, fundamentals are much needed but you actually learn SEO when you start applying it.

Why does it take much longer to learn how it works? It is because of the process of doing SEO and seeing the results. Two reasons for that. SEO is a step by step process. It is also a continuous process wherein you need to update, adjust, optimize & re-optimize.

This is the actual way of doing SEO and the real learning. Second, Google and search engines take their own time to give you the benefits of what you did in SEO.

Then begins the second stage of improve SEO efforts. Once on the page, and even on the second page you start getting clicks.

Then on the first page you need to improve further and reach top few. Then comes (or might come) the need to optimize search results and conversion optimization, to get more clicks or traffic and to convert more of the traffic into leads.