Five years teaching SEO at Dijital Pazarlama Okulu

From June 2017 to April 2022 I taught search engine optimisation (SEO) at Dijital Pazarlama Okulu (Digital Marketing School) in Istanbul.

Over five years I worked with many different cohorts: business owners trying to grow their own websites, people starting out at agencies, and professionals moving their careers into digital. I built the course around one idea: SEO is not a checklist, it is the discipline of making sure a site genuinely answers the question a user is asking. Technical foundations, content and measurement are different parts of that same question.

Most of the principles I taught then still hold. What has changed is search itself. AI-assisted results and chat assistants can now answer a user’s question without them ever visiting your site, which makes visibility and trust matter even more than raw traffic. I plan to write about that separately.

Thank you to everyone who attended these courses, and to the school’s team.