This month’s Customer Showcase is Yoast, the popular SEO WordPress plugin. With the slogan “SEO for Everyone,” Yoast has a reputation for being at the forefront of the SEO industry.

When Yoast decided to launch their academy to empower users on SEO best practices, they needed an LMS they could depend on. Yoast turned to LearnDash to build impressive courses to show WordPress users how to understand SEO best practices. 

Let’s explore how Yoast uses LearnDash to ensure a reliable and impressive online course experience. 

SEO for Everyone 

When you land on Yoast’s course page, Yoast Academy, you’ll see two ways to enroll in courses. Many of Yoast’s SEO courses are free and only require email registration.

The option to require an email can be set in LearnDash’s Course Access Settings. When you set a course to Free (as opposed to Open), it requires users to register and allows you to customize a login & registration page to collect emails.

Yoast’s Premium courses use LearnDash’s Recurring Course Access feature, billed yearly. You can set this up in LearnDash with PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout, or Razorpay as your payment gateway and choose how often you’d like the recurring course access to renew. You can also use this option to offer a free trial, which’ll turn into a recurring subscription after a fixed period of time.

Courses at a glance

When you click “Go to Yoast SEO Academy,” you can see all course offerings thanks to LearnDash’s Course Grid add-on. This provides an easy way to browse the course library in a streamlined grid format. You can add a course grid to any page via the block editor or through a shortcode. 

Adding a Course Grid also allows you to: 

• Customize the number and sort order of courses
• Filter courses by category or tag, or show only enrolled courses
• Show/hide Images, descriptions, and a video preview 
• Customize buttons and CTA text
• And more! 

Thoughtfully Designed

Each course in Yoast’s academy was thoughtfully designed by expert instructional designers. They make the most of LearnDash’s extensive features to ensure learners are engaged throughout the entire course. 

The Yoast Academy uses Focus Mode, which eliminates distractions and adds a progress bar to the course. This small gamification feature can encourage users to continue until they see that progress bar filled to 100%. 

The course content widget on the right-hand side is another essential Focus Mode feature. It provides a learner with a complete overview of the course content, including the number of topics and quizzes. You can expand each lesson to preview the topics before you get started. 

When you click on a course, the first lesson appears right away. There are clear course outcomes that begin each lesson, with introductory videos, embedded, documents, and a custom quiz. Each step of the lesson is clear and actionable, thanks in part to LearnDash’s educational-focused features.

Do More With LearnDash

Yoast turned to LearnDash to offer a full library of courses on SEO optimization, copywriting, configuration, and even multilingual SEO. More than 20,000 students have gone through Yoast’s academy, powered by LearnDash.

“Learndash has allowed Yoast Academy to create much more meaningful exercises,” says Joost de Valk from Yoast. “In the past, we could only dream of having users complete lines of code to test and perfect their SEO skills. This is what learning is about!”

For an in-depth look at how the Yoast Academy was created, check out our webinar with Jesse van de Hulsbeek, the creator of the Yoast SEO Academy: 

If you’re feeling inspired, take LearnDash for a test drive in our demo. You can experience LearnDash from a learner’s or a course creator’s perspective in our free demo. When you’re ready to experience course creation, you can transfer any work from your demo right to your first LearnDash licensed course.