While this is a professional career, you can learn SEO in about a month, enough to have a big impact on your website and, therefore, on your business in general. It takes 1 to 3 months to learn SEO at a basic level and 6 to 18 months to learn SEO at an advanced level. The time it takes to learn SEO depends on the number of hours a day you can study search engine optimization. In my experience, if you follow a solid learning plan and make the necessary effort, you can learn the basics in less than 6 months.
As with any discipline, a good base of basic SEO knowledge is required so that you can understand the reasoning why a particular strategy works for an SEO campaign. The reason why I've set 6 months as a minimum period is that SEO takes time to work and you may have to wait a couple of months (or more) to see the impact of SEO-related changes on a website. If you dedicate yourself to understanding SEO as quickly as possible, then you'll want to spend several hours a day studying the concepts of the discipline. It allows you to identify when you've reached a point where you understand SEO well enough to grow an organic audience.
With the ClearPath online course, it will take 2 to 4 weeks to start learning and understanding the basic concepts. As mentioned in this other guide on how to learn SEO at home, you can easily discover SEO on your own. SEO is a very practical discipline with a set of rules that are easy to follow in a strictly controlled way. It will be very difficult at first because, in addition to SEO, you will have to familiarize yourself with concepts related to search engines and digital marketing.
As you discovered, the answer to how long it takes to learn SEO depends on how many hours you can spend learning the basics of search engine optimization. SEO can be defined as a set of rules that you can apply to a website so that it appears in the top positions of search engine results pages (SERPS) for related keywords. This is essential because if you don't know what to measure and what KPI to analyze, you won't know if your SEO campaigns are successful or not. Therefore, you should spend at least one month acquiring knowledge about SEO so that you can start implementing the methods you learned in the second month and beyond.
Unless something major happens or a huge flood of new competitors with specialized SEO knowledge enter your niche, those keyword rankings can be maintained to attract organic search traffic to your website, which can lead to more leads, customers, and sales. As you've seen in the learning plan above, there are a lot of SEO concepts to master and a lot of things to learn, and having everything you need to know in one place can save you a lot of time and effort.
