Technical SEO and AI Search Essentials with Semrush

Meet Rita and learn why you don't need to be tech-savvy to succeed at technical SEO. Get tips for making the most of strategy lessons and hands-on walkthrough videos with real Semrush tools.

The search landscape is evolving! This intro explains why AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode are reshaping search marketing—and why we've updated this course to include AI SEO essentials.

Think of technical SEO as back-end maintenance - you can have the most beautiful storefront, but if the pipes leak, shoppers won't buy anything. Learn how search engines actually discover and rank websites.

Set up your essential toolkit including Semrush Site Audit with mobile-first settings, Google Search Console, and Google PageSpeed Insights. Complete the setup tasks to follow along throughout the course.

Good site structure creates a roadmap telling search engines what's important and how everything connects. See how Semrush's own website flows from broad to specific, keeping important pages within 3 clicks of the homepage.

SEO expert Crystal Carter shares strategies for organizing site architecture, discussing tools and approaches for brand new websites versus existing ones that need restructuring.

Stop making search engines wander around blindly - XML sitemaps are like handing them a detailed map with every page labeled. Learn what lastmod, changefreq, and priority tags actually tell Google about your content.

Ready to give Google direct access to your website's roadmap? Follow along step-by-step as we demonstrate how to submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console and help search engines discover your content faster.

Get hands-on with Semrush's Site Audit tool to spot broken internal links, orphan pages, and other crawlability problems that waste your precious crawl budget.

Getting crawled doesn't guarantee you'll appear in search results - Google's mobile-first indexing means they judge your entire site based on the mobile version. Learn about HTTP status codes and what they mean for indexing.

Leave polite instructions for search engine bots with robots meta tags. Master the combinations of index/noindex and follow/nofollow to control exactly how search engines treat each page.

Help search engines understand that "2 eggs" means ingredient and "Bake for 15 minutes" means cook time. See how Dell uses JSON-LD markup and why structured data is crucial for AI search tools.

Hunt down indexing problems using Semrush's Site Audit reports. Learn to identify pages that can't be properly categorized or understood by search engines.

Google's research shows 54% of mobile users abandon slow sites, which is why Core Web Vitals became official ranking factors. Master Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift metrics.

That "Not Secure" warning makes users leave immediately - learn why HTTPS has been a Google ranking factor since 2014. See real examples of mixed content issues that quietly damage search rankings.

Use Semrush's Core Web Vitals and HTTPS reports to find speed problems and security certificate issues that are hurting both user experience and search rankings.

AI bots don't just crawl your pages like Google—they analyze content meaning, assess trustworthiness, and extract detailed information using completely different rules. This lesson covers how three types of AI crawlers work and the specific technical adjustments needed to make your site accessible to both search engines and AI systems.

Use Semrush's Site Audit to uncover LLM optimization opportunities, fix crawling issues, and ensure your site is technically primed for maximum AI visibility. (Fast-follow feature demonstration).

Leigh McKenzie talks through technical SEO tactics that you should (and should not) focus on when it comes to optimizing your site for LLM visibility, including his opinion of the number one issue that could be holding your site back.

You've just mastered the technical foundations that separate high-ranking websites from the rest. Celebrate your new skills in site architecture, crawling, indexing, and Core Web Vitals - then get ready to put your knowledge to the test with your final assessment and earn your official certification.

One last thing! If you enjoyed this course (or even if you didn't, we won't take it personally), please give us some feedback so we can keep making even better free content in the future!