Set up your free stack & how this course works
Why this lesson
Section titled “Why this lesson”You learn SEO by doing it on a real site and watching real numbers move — not by reading about it. That means you need two things before Level 1: a site to practice on, and the free tools that let you see the crawl → index → rank → cite pipeline happening. Every one of these tools is free, official where it matters, and used by professionals every day. This lesson gets them installed and explains how the course is built so you always know what “done” looks like.
The explainer
Section titled “The explainer”You need a practice site
Section titled “You need a practice site”Pick the site you’ll use for the whole course. In order of usefulness: a site you own (a business site, a portfolio, a blog — best, because you can change it), a site you can get permission to touch (a client, an employer, a friend’s business), or, if you truly have none, a brand-new site you spin up this week on any host. Local SEO for a small business is the ideal training ground and it’s exactly what Level 4 monetizes, so a real local business you can work on is gold. Whatever you choose, you need to be able to add a small verification snippet or DNS record to it — that’s the price of entry for the tools below.
The free stack — install all four
Section titled “The free stack — install all four”1. Google Search Console (GSC) — the most important free tool in SEO. This is Google talking directly to you about your site: which queries you appear for, your impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position, which pages are indexed, and any crawl or indexing errors. You verify ownership once (via a DNS record, an HTML file, or your analytics tag) and it becomes the instrument panel for the entire course. Set this up first, today.
2. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) — what people do after they arrive. GSC tells you how you did in Google; GA4 tells you what visitors do on your site — sessions, engagement, and the conversions that actually matter to a business. In Level 2 you’ll wire these together to prove SEO moved a real outcome, not just a ranking. GA4 also has a free official certification (Google Skillshop) we use as a checkpoint.
3. Bing Webmaster Tools — free, and quietly strategic in the AI era. It’s Search Console’s Bing equivalent, and it takes ten minutes (you can import straight from GSC). Why bother when Bing’s search share is small? Because ChatGPT’s web search has historically leaned on Bing’s index — so being healthy in Bing has an outsized effect on AI answer visibility. This will matter a lot in Level 3.
4. A crawler — see your site the way a bot does. Install Screaming Frog SEO Spider (the free tier crawls up to 500 URLs, plenty to start). A crawler fetches your pages like Googlebot would and lists their titles, metas, status codes, redirects and broken links in a spreadsheet. It’s how you audit — the core Level 2 skill. (Ahrefs’ Webmaster Tools is also free for your own verified site and gives you backlink and site-audit data; add it if you like, but Screaming Frog is the one to learn.)
You do not need a paid Ahrefs or Semrush subscription for this course. We’ll show what those paid tools do, and where their free tiers help, but every capstone is passable on the free stack. Concepts are taught so they port to any tool.
How this course works
Section titled “How this course works”Five stages, in order. Level 0 (you’re here) → Level 1 rank a page → Level 2 audit and grow a site → Level 3 AEO/GEO, get cited by AI → Level 4 package, price and sell SEO. Go top to bottom. Each level assumes the vocabulary and skills of the one before, so skipping ahead breaks things.
Jargon by usage. SEO is drowning in acronyms, and most courses front-load a glossary you promptly forget. We don’t. Every term is introduced inside the lesson where you first need it, in context, doing real work — and the glossary is generated backwards from the lessons, so each entry tells you the lesson it came from. Never memorize forward; let terms arrive.
Every lesson has the same seven-part shape: Why this lesson → Watch (with specific watch-fors) → The explainer → Do it (a concrete exercise + downloads) → Terms introduced → Check (a self-quiz + a “you can move on when…” line) → Go deeper. Watch the video, read our explainer, then actually do the exercise on your site.
One honest gate per level. No fake mastery. Each level ends with a one-line test you can genuinely pass or fail, and a capstone on the practice page that makes you prove it on a real site — with a Not-yet / Passing / Strong rubric. Passing the one-line gate is the bar; “Strong” is what you come back for. Free external certifications (HubSpot after L1; Semrush + GA4 after L2) are wired in as checkpoints.
Progress is yours and local. The completion toggles and quiz results live in your browser’s storage — no account, no server. They roll up on the progress page, where finishing a whole level lights its badge.
- Choose your practice site and confirm you can add a verification record or file to it.
- Set up Google Search Console and verify the site. This is non-negotiable — it’s the spine of Level 1.
- Set up GA4 and confirm it’s collecting data (visit your own site and watch the realtime report tick).
- Add Bing Webmaster Tools (import from GSC to save time).
- Download and install Screaming Frog, then crawl your site once just to see the spreadsheet it produces. Don’t interpret it yet — Level 2 teaches that. Just meet the tool.
- Bookmark your progress page.
Terms introduced
Section titled “Terms introduced”Check yourself
Which free tool tells you how a site is actually performing in Google — the queries it shows for, its clicks, impressions and average position?
What is the single thing you need before you can verify a site in Search Console and do this course for real?
How is jargon handled in this course?
You can move on when you can… open Search Console for a site you control, and explain in one breath how the course is structured — five levels in order, jargon by usage, one gate per level, progress saved locally.
Go deeper
Section titled “Go deeper”- Google Search Central — “Add a website to Search Console”: the official verification walkthrough if you get stuck on any step.
- On to Level 1: 1.1 · Get found, get measured — the setup recipe that stops the single most common beginner failure before it happens.