A month has passed since I finished the course, and I can now share my opinion.
In short, Mikhail Shakin has his own distinct workflow built over years of working in English-language/international SEO.
Continuous On-Site Content Improvement
I recommend the course to anyone who wants to continuously refine and improve their content. In my opinion, this is Mikhail’s main focus—he constantly updates his pages rather than abandoning them. I think Shakin provides the most comprehensive material on content re-optimization I’ve ever seen:
- copying competitors’ keywords and pages
- filling semantic gaps on the site using Ahrefs Keyword Gap and Serpstat
- adding Q&A sections and finding relevant questions to capture traffic from them
- working with comments
- improving page CTR through A/B testing, which leads to ranking growth according to a Moz.com study
- snippet tuning—what tweaks deliver a CTR boost.
Many don’t realize the value of updating pages, and over time these pages fade away if you don’t work on them.
This is from a presentation at the AllinTop 2019 conference. I can’t share slides from the course itself)
I ended up saving 77 useful slides for myself:
SEO Bookmarklets
A fantastic feature that has saved me a ton of time is Bookmarklets: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fpZ7c1LOslIlGUEnjwoRa3XMB6JkcnUDF6-Zvb47K_Q/edit
Here is how mine turned out:
I even introduced my own metric for evaluating referring domains sorted by Ahrefs DR, and Mikhail added it to his bookmarklets. Very handy!
Working with Social Networks
Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube—an interesting case study from the course: Mikhail drove a couple of thousand visitors a day from Reddit, and the page firmly locked into the top 3 for its queries after that.
It covers working with each social network. In the private chat, people shared interesting sites that get thousands of daily visits from these networks without search engines.
What I felt was missing in this module was more inspiring examples and case studies.
Like, «did this—got that result.»
Case studies and real-life examples are precisely what would add a lot of credibility to this module.
In the chat, members shared examples of sites that generate solid traffic from social platforms.
What Else Was Covered in the Course
Links and expired domains, types of Silo architecture, content specs, working with copywriters, outreach, keyword difficulty evaluation, multi-tier linking, how to get cheap links in high volume (I’d add a case study here too, as hardly anyone uses these types of links nowadays).
The homework assignments progress from simple to complex. The first ones were really easy, but toward the end, I was spending hours digging deep and analyzing just to submit the assignment.
All in all, the course is spot on, but I would add a few more case studies. Because theory and practice work best together.