Melanie GormanFounder, Crownsville Media · SEO and website expert for mental health businesses

🔎 SEO or no SEO for course creators?

18 Dec 2023 · 1 min

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0:54

In this brief monologue, the speaker argues that investing in SEO is ineffective for course creators who host their courses on platforms that use subdomains (e.g., HighLevel, Thinkific). Because the course lives under the platform’s domain (e.g., course-name.thinkific.com), any search‑engine authority and ranking signals flow to the host site rather than the individual creator. The speaker explains Thinkific’s current architecture, notes that this situation could change if the platform alters its setup, but as of the video’s recording, SEO efforts only bolster the platform, not the creator’s own brand or visibility.

Chapters

Does it make sense to do SEO if you're a course creator on something like HighLevel or Thinkific? I'm going to tell you it doesn't. So here's the deal. When you put your course on a subdomain of another website, you're really only feeding their SEO. So Thinkific, the way that it works, and this could change, right? So awesome if it changes. But at the time of filming this video, the way Thinkific did it is that your course is the name of your course, thinkific.com. When you're doing that, what you're actually doing is putting all your content in the domain thinkific.com. So you might have the most amazing course, it's the coolest thing, it's unique, it's SEOable, all that good stuff. But all you're doing when you fill in all those fields in the backend is supporting Thinkific. You're not supporting yourself. That's true for any course creation platform that has a subdomain instead of an actual domain on your own.