Anyone can call themselves an SEO expert. These are the courses our founder, Christos Karampetsos, actually finished, with the certificate numbers to prove it.
All seven come from Semrush Academy and were completed in May 2026. Every one is valid until May 31, 2027.
A badge on a footer tells you very little. You can't see what the course covered, when it was taken or whether it has lapsed.
So for each certificate below, we list the course length, the instructors and the ID printed on the certificate itself. If something has expired, you'll be able to tell.
Sixteen video lessons, about 107 minutes, taught by Wes McDowell and Rita Cidre. It covers Business Profile setup, categories, reviews, citations and tracking rankings in Google Maps.
Certificate ID b86024e6b9. This is the course behind our local SEO services.
Twenty-one lessons, roughly 80 minutes, led by Rita Cidre and Rosa Amato with guest lessons from Crystal Carter and Leigh McKenzie. Topics run from site structure and sitemaps to schema markup, Core Web Vitals and how AI crawlers read a site.
Certificate ID 6c339b829e. It shapes how our technical SEO reviews are run.
Nine short lessons, about 40 minutes, from Leigh McKenzie and Rita Cidre. The course frames brand visibility in four layers: discoverability, clarity, authority and trust.
Certificate ID 0df2e0b4c5. We use its four layers when we check how AI answers describe a client.
The longest of the seven: 24 lessons and about 112 minutes, taught by Alex Lindley and Rita Cidre. It covers search intent, matching keywords to pages and grouping topics into pillar pages with supporting articles.
Eighteen lessons, about 84 minutes, from Brian Dean and Rita Cidre. It deals with link gaps against competitors, outreach, cleaning up toxic links and how brand mentions feed AI search.
Certificate ID ab5d2b17df. It underpins our off-page SEO work.
Twenty lessons, about 102 minutes, with Kyle Byers and Rita Cidre. It's the foundation course, tying together on-page, off-page and technical SEO, competitor research and local search.
Certificate ID d5bbca84e9.
Fifteen sections, about 70 minutes, taught by Aleyda Solis. It covers picking markets, hreflang tags and how to structure a site that serves more than one country or language.
Certificate ID d64029eef5. Most of our clients are local, but the course helps when a business sells beyond one market.
Each certificate shows the holder's name, the course title, the expiry date and a completion ID. Open any of them on Christos's team page and compare the details with this list.
The course pages are public on Semrush Academy, so you can see exactly what each one teaches.
Training shows someone keeps up with how search works. It doesn't prove they can get your phone ringing.
For that, look at the work itself. Our SEO case studies show what happened on real client sites, measured in Search Console and call tracking.
Christos Karampetsos, the founder of Rise Marketing HQ. He sets the strategy on every account and writes or reviews each free audit.
Yes. All seven were completed in May 2026 and expire on May 31, 2027.
Semrush prints a completion ID on every certificate it issues. It ties that certificate to the course and the person who passed it.
We don't have the Keyword Research certificate image on our site yet. Rather than guess the number, we've left it off.
The free 24-hour audit is the quickest way to see how this training applies to your business. Christos will tell you what he'd fix first.
Tell us about your business and what you need help with. Prefer to talk first? Call or email us directly.
Fields marked * are required.