The Hawk Academy SEO Roadmap
This is the 10-step roadmap StudioHawk uses to train a 120-person SEO agency. Every step links to a free Hawk Academy resource you can use right now, plus the specific course module that teaches it inside Hawk Academy. Built for Australia. Free, forever.
Why a roadmap, not another list of links? Most "best SEO resources" pages dump 50 articles in alphabetical order. That is not how StudioHawk trains a junior SEO into a senior. Inside the agency, every new hire follows a deliberate path: fundamentals first, then process, then specialisation, then automation, then AI search.
This page is that path. Each step opens with a short brief on what to learn and why it matters, links to the Hawk Academy resources we built for it, points to the specific course module that teaches it inside Hawk Academy, and includes a few hand-picked external links where we have not published the equivalent yet.
Watch the walkthrough
A free SEO learning course, available to everyone
Hawk Academy's hybrid learning dashboard gives you videos, quizzes, and downloadable resources, all designed to help you learn SEO at your own pace and in your own way.
Start here if you are new. Understand how Google decides what ranks, why E-E-A-T matters, and how to read your own search performance data. Everything else in the roadmap depends on these basics.
Course module · Hawk Academy
Practice right now · Free Hawk Academy resources3 resources
The single guide every Hawk Academy student starts with. SEO in plain English, the four jobs your website needs to do, and the moves that actually move rankings.
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. Google's quality framework, broken down with the signals that actually count toward it.
Free Claude skill that pulls your own GSC data and tells you which pages to fix first.
Other reading we trust · External1 link
Google's own canonical doc on how Search works and what they actually want from you.
Knowing SEO is not the same as running it. Step 2 is the agency process: audit, prioritise, fix, measure. The exact workflow StudioHawk follows on every new client account.
Course module · Hawk Academy
Practice right now · Free Hawk Academy resources4 resources
Free Claude skill that runs a full crawl audit and gives you a prioritised fix list. The same skill StudioHawk runs on new accounts.
Finds the pages you rank positions 8 to 20 for, where small CTR or content gains push you onto page one.
Interactive tool. Upload your Search Console export and get a ranked list of pages with the highest opportunity score.
Get a free SEO score for any URL via Claude. The opening move on every audit StudioHawk runs.
Every CMS handles SEO differently. WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow each have quirks that catch SEOs out. Use the docs straight from the platform teams while we build our Hawk Academy CMS guides.
Course module coming soon
Other reading we trust · External3 links
The most thorough free WordPress SEO documentation on the internet. Covers permalinks, schema, sitemaps, and the Yoast plugin in depth.
Shopify's own guide to product, collection, and blog SEO inside their platform.
Webflow's official primer on configuring SEO on Webflow sites. The redirect, schema, and CMS field settings most Webflow builds miss.
You know the basics and you can run a process. Now go deeper on the four pillars that move rankings at scale: site architecture, content architecture, link earning, and page experience.
Course module · Hawk Academy
Practice right now · Free Hawk Academy resources4 resources
How Google crawls your site, why architecture matters more than most people think, and the moves that fix crawl waste on large sites.
The topical authority play StudioHawk uses to compound rankings across an entire domain, not just one page.
How StudioHawk earns links at scale. The pitch process, the angles that actually land, and the campaigns we run for clients.
Plain-English fixes for LCP, INP, and CLS, with the dev playbook StudioHawk hands to engineering teams.
Generalist SEO gets you 80 percent of the way. Specialist SEO unlocks the rest. Pick the vertical you actually work in and learn the specific levers that move it.
Course module · Hawk Academy
Practice right now · Free Hawk Academy resources5 resources
Free Claude skill that audits product, collection, and category pages for the issues StudioHawk fixes on every ecommerce client.
The B2B-specific audit framework. Long sales cycles, decision committees, and the content that actually converts the buyer.
SaaS-specific audit. Feature pages, comparison pages, free tools, and the product-led growth content that compounds.
Google Business Profile, NAP citations, local landing pages, and review strategy in one Claude skill.
Hospitality-specific audit. Menu schema, opening hours, reservations, and the local intent that drives bookings.
Other reading we trust · External1 link
Joy Hawkins's blog. The most rigorous local SEO research on the internet. Read it for the experiments and the case data.
The fastest SEOs are not the ones doing more. They are the ones automating the repeatable work so they can focus on judgement. Claude skills, AI prompts, and the StudioHawk automation library.
Course module coming soon
Practice right now · Free Hawk Academy resources4 resources
Every Claude SEO skill StudioHawk has built and open-sourced. Install into Claude Desktop in 30 seconds and start running audits, briefs, and reports automatically.
The flagship skill. Plug Claude Code into your SEO workflow for code-level fixes, schema injection, and automated site audits.
Hand-tuned SEO prompts. Use directly in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Title tag optimiser, information gain finder, and website score card.
If you have not heard of Claude skills yet, start here. The full primer on what they are, how they work, and why StudioHawk built 24 of them.
Google is not the only search engine. Bing powers ChatGPT search. YouTube is the world's second-largest search engine. Bing and YouTube traffic compounds while everyone else is fighting over Google.
Course module coming soon
Other reading we trust · External3 links
Verify your site, submit a sitemap, and pull Bing search data. Bing is also the index ChatGPT search uses, so this is your ChatGPT visibility data too.
Bing's own ranking guidelines. Shorter and more explicit than Google's. Worth a once-over if you are serious about Bing.
YouTube's own documentation on how the algorithm decides what to surface.
SEO changes weekly. Google ships updates, AI search shifts the SERP, and competitors test new angles. Keeping up is part of the job. These are the sources StudioHawk reads every day.
Course module coming soon
Other reading we trust · External3 links
The newsroom of record for SEO. Daily coverage of Google updates, AI search developments, and the industry beat.
Free weekly roundup of the most important SEO news, tools, and reads. The cleanest single-source filter for the SEO web.
Barry Schwartz's daily SEO blog. Picks up every Google update, ranking volatility signal, and SERP feature change as it happens.
AI search is not the future. It is now. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews are answering queries that used to drive blue-link clicks. This is the StudioHawk playbook for getting cited in AI search.
Course module coming soon
Practice right now · Free Hawk Academy resources5 resources
What AI Overviews actually are, how Google generates them, and what to do about the click-loss they cause.
The actual on-page moves that get you cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Schema, entity work, and the content formats AI search prefers.
Free Claude skill that tracks whether ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity are citing your site for the queries that matter.
Free Claude skill that scores any page on the on-page factors most likely to win an AI citation. Run it before you publish.
Why Claude skills are the practical entry point to AI search optimisation, and how StudioHawk uses them inside live client work.
The senior SEOs at StudioHawk are not only good at SEO. They can read Analytics, debug a CSS bug, and brief a developer in technical language. These are the complementary skills that round out an SEO career.
Course module · Hawk Academy
Practice right now · Free Hawk Academy resources1 resource
The Google Analytics 4 reports an SEO actually needs. Plain English on what to look at, what to ignore, and the custom reports StudioHawk builds for every client.
Other reading we trust · External2 links
Google's own free Analytics training. Run through the certification path so you can read GA4 without asking the data team.
The definitive free HTML, CSS, and JavaScript primer for SEOs who want to brief developers in their own language.
Hawk Academy is the free SEO course that teaches every step on this roadmap across 12 modules: Fundamentals, Technical SEO, Content, Analytics, Industry-Specific, and Link Acquisition. Video walkthroughs, quizzes, templates, and direct feedback from StudioHawk's senior team. No paywall. Forever free.
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