Ryan Stewart – The Blueprint Training Full REVIEW 2021

Last Updated on July 25, 2023 by John Cirelly

*This review has been updated to reflect recent updates to TBT as of 6/21*

If you’re like me, you almost always do 3rd party research before making a big purchase. Buying The Blueprint SEO Training was no different.

In this review we’re going to look inside each module to breakdown exactly what you’ll be getting as well as answer some basic questions about the coursework.

In a hurry? Here’s what you need to know about The Blueprint Training:

The Blueprint Training is an incredibly detailed training designed for SEO freelancers who want to earn more, and SEO agencies looking to improve their results, workflows, and sales.

The Blueprint Training is great for:

• Freelance SEOs that are already earning income for their services
• SEOs who are looking to transition into an agency model
• SEOs who want to find higher paying enterprise clients
• People looking for a proven way to strategically get rankings for clients

The Blueprint Training is NOT for:

• People who are new to SEO, or who only have a surface level understanding of the subject
• Those who want to get rich quick
• Small business owners who just want to learn SEO for themselves

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Who Is Ryan Stewart?

Ryan Stewart founded the SEO agency WEBRIS in 2015 after working as an analytics consultant for Deloitte. The company started off as an SEO agency and then quickly overtime began building their own tools and information products. One of those premier information products is The Blueprint Training.

What Is The Blueprint Training?

The Blueprint Training is an SEO course geared towards SEO agencies and SEO professionals to ultimately help them get results for their clients. Each module contains video trainings as well as course material, links, and files to support the lessons.

At this time the course is broken down into 14 different sections where you can choose which courses you’d like to buy based on their category. You don’t have to purchase the full course, however if you really want the whole Blueprint experience and to save some money along the way, the full course option is cheaper.

At this time there is no monthly fee to stay in the Slack channel or to keep access to the course materials. The course is currently getting two more modules added to it, and evolves over time. Nearly all the courses I review end up having stale, outdated content so seeing this level of dedication is honestly awesome.

You can check out The Blueprint Training’s roadmap over on Trello.

Who Is The Blueprint Training For?

The Blueprint Training is a very high level SEO training specifically designed for professionals. If you’re brand new to SEO or are planning to just create a few ‘ranks and rent’ sites, this might not be for you. With this training being taught at such a high level Ryan still provides resources within the course that can help supplement the learning curve for less experiences members.

Is The Blueprint Training A Scam?

No, The Blueprint Training by Ryan Stewart is not a scam. The amount of value and course materials provided in this training far exceeds the price tag in my opinion.

The Blueprint Module Breakdown

I’m going to go over all of the modules as I take them and give you my honest feedback. Keep in mind, since this is a ‘living course’ some new material may be added overtime that is not covered here.

Module 1: Link Building Overview [25 Minutes]

A very detailed high level overview explaining what link building is, why it’s important and how to leverage it. This module is great for someone who is new in SEO, but nothing new if you’re already familiar with how link building works.

I still enjoyed how this module was taught. This module also contains an overview of the entire link building process. This is particularly useful to both people who are new to SEO, as well as agency owners looking to improve their policies and procedures for their own link builders.

Module 1.1: Onboarding [16 Minutes]

This section contains everything you’d ever need to  smoothly onboard your SEO clients. This is something a lot of courses don’t touch on too much, so this was refreshing to see.

Onboarding can be one of the most crucial moments to set the tone for the relationship moving forward. Ryan really nails this by teaching how to gather client information, set expectations, and get small wins quickly to build trust.

Module 1.2: Kickoff Data Analysis [25 Minutes]

These videos show you how to produce in depth reports for your clients. This guides you through the value these reports have for the client and how to get all of their relevant information in the report. Again this is something you can do yourself, or outsource.

Ryan goes into great detail on how to interpret that data, and use that information to begin building outreach and link building strategies. He also touches on the important data point that you can bring to your clients attention and how to properly report your findings.

Nothing is left to chance or gut feeling here.

This is all data driven.

Module 1.3: Competitive Analysis [46 Minutes]

I was not expecting the level of detail that I received in the analysis section. I was thinking we were going to just use a competition analysis tool and use the data from there, but The Blueprint Training  takes it a step further breaking down every single on and off page element in an excel spreadsheet.

I know that doesn’t sound sexy, but I was genuinely impressed with the level of detail we were going through to understand our competition. The Blueprint Training breaks down these steps into what has to be done manually, and what can be done via tools.

After all of this data is gathered the course shows how to take this data and create detailed reports that not only help you make data driven decisions, but show to your client that you have a solid understanding of the competitive landscape.

Module 1.4: Project Management [1.6 Hours]

This is where Ryan shows his true love for frameworks and processes. He goes into detail on how to breakdown and build these workflows and frameworks which is really critical to running a technical SEO operation.

It’s so easy to get lost and frustrated with so many moving parts, but The Blueprint Training modules help keep everything organized. Not only will you know what steps need to take place to execute a part of the SEO strategy, but you’ll know who is in charge of that and how to delegate that work.

This section to me was particularly valuable and I think anyone who is interested in the organizational structure of an SEO agency would find this section enlightening.

There are tons of time saving and organizational tactics that The Blueprint Training covers. This truly helps put you in a position to scale to incredible numbers. I feel this is the line in the sand that separates 10k a month businesses from 100k a month agencies. This is truly worth the cost of the course itself.

Module 2: Building Your Team [30 Minutes]

This is a smaller module, that as the title alludes, helps you build a team. Now keep in mind this is all optional and Ryan explains that when he first started he did everything himself.

Again, I really love that The Blueprint Training covers both sides of how an SEO agency can be run. If you want to outsource, finding reliable content writers, outreach managers, and link prospectors its all covered in this module.

Module: 2.1: Website Quality Report [2 Hours]

This is actually really cool. The website quality report is a proprietary report created by Ryan and his team that measures quality not just based on technical SEO, but a number of other factors as well.

This idea of website quality wasn’t necessarily invented by Ryan and his team, but the report he creates and the information that he weighs definitely is.

This report provides actions to take based on a number of metrics. Whether you should leave the page alone, improve on page content, add more backlinks, or simple no index it. Everything you need to do is broken down on a per page basis.

I don’t want to go into too much detail of how it works, but it’s impressive. It leverages APIs from a number of different tools and pulls this data all into an insanely detailed Google Sheet. I’m honestly just so impressed how this was built and set up.

If it sounds like it’s complicated, well that’s because it is. But don’t fret. The great thing is that this report takes all this information and makes a determination on what needs to be done per page. I don’t think there is any other tool that does this. I know Ubersuggest provides a nice easy to read suggestion area, but it’s not even close to the depth that the Website Quality Report goes into.

Module 2.1 goes on to teach how to get this report cleaned up by an analyst and get it ready to present. It is very detailed and breaks things down step by step. If you’re currently selling SEO to small businesses, it’s this level of detail, reporting, and results that will help you land higher paying enterprise clients.

Module: 2.2: Technical SEO Audit [2 hours]

This is a complete breakdown of very high level SEO technical audits. I’m talking an audit you would run and present to 100M a year company. This section could be considered a mini course in and of itself as it contains just about 2 hours of video content.

This might sound like a lot of work, and I guess it is if you compare it just running a simple SEO tool, auto generating a report and calling it a day. But reporting and selling your services at this caliber allows you to charge 5x more than you’re already making with one off projects and local small budget SEO clients.

One of the videos is about an hour long and is an entire SEO technical site audit report. It shows how the data is visualized and what recommendations he has for the clients. It’s honestly quite impressive and can be a bit intimidating at first.

Because I got the entire course this Technical SEO module was included but it is available as a standalone product for those who are just interested in the enterprise reporting aspect of technical SEO.

Module 2.3: Keyword Research Existing Pages [2.5 Hours]

This is a complete breakdown of how to perform proper keyword research. Keyword research in The Blueprint is broken down into two parts. One for existing pages, and keyword research for pages that don’t exist yet. This level of breakdown really helps you understand keyword strategy and lays the foundation for a solid ranking methodology.

These next few videos go into great detail finding main and secondary keywords as well as mapping keyword intent and then organizing this data into a report where the data can be broken down and visualized.

That was an extremely brief overview of about 2.5 hours worth of content covering proper keyword research, and that’s just for keywords that you already have pages on. I don’t want to give too much away here but The Blueprint Training really takes the guesswork out of SEO completely.

Module 2.4: Target Pages [22 Minutes]

The target page section focuses on improving key parts of the website. This allows you to get quick results by taking care of the ‘low hanging fruit’ first. This means finding pages that are doing average, and figuring out what needs to be done from an SEO perspective to get them ranking fast.

Picking your target pages also lets you set benchmarks for your client, giving them a snapshot of their current ranking and then showing them quick results in a shorter amount of time.

Module 2.5: On Page Analysis [1.9 Hours]

Everything you would possibly to properly analyze on page SEO and how to improve your page rankings. The Blueprint Training breaks down every piece of on page optimization, from the meta description to body text best practices, it is all covered here.

I really like that The Blueprint training not only goes through the motions of what needs to get changed but also the why behind it. This allows you to not only just follow the motions, but learn the thought process behind why it’s happening.

Module 3: Website Link Evaluation [46 Minutes]

At this phase in the training, you’re about at the halfway mark, at least from a module perspective. Module 3 is all about preparing to start your campaign. (I thought we’d never get there!)

The Blueprint Training gives a high-level view of campaign management and the tracking process Ryan uses in his own agency to track live links and keep organized. There is so much proprietary business information in the course it’s almost baffling why Ryan would share this much information with so many people.

Many of the courses and ‘gurus’ out there teach tactics and maybe some strategy. But when it comes to the behind the scenes of how things are organized and prepared they give you nothing. That is absolutely not the case here. You could literally take this information a start a legitimate company with complete organization and structure.

Module 3.1: Content Audit [1.5 Hours]

This section is all about how to take crappy content and make it great. A lot of what is covered in these later modules relies on previous reporting and research that should have been done earlier in the training. So if you think you can skip ahead or half-ass a part of the research you’re going to be doing yourself a huge disservice down the road.

Just an observation.

Anyway, Ryan goes over how to assess what content is good, great, crap, and how to deal with it. Some pages will need removed completely, other pages will get 301 redirected into more pillar content depending on a number of variables that you’ll pull from your previous audits.

This section isn’t just for bad content, it’s also for good old outdated content.

The Blueprint Training goes over properly updating your content and why it’s important. In some industries, for example SEO, content needs to be fresher because things are always changing. By making these changes people share your content more and Google sees this as a good thing.

Module 3.2: Keyword Research Gap Analysis [18 Minutes]

This is keyword research on a whole new level for me. I knew a lot about using tools like Ahrefs and checking in on your competitors, but this strategy actually compares data sets between you and your competitor and essentials finds chinks in their armor where you have the opportunity to swipe a keyword. I personally took a lot away from this section and plan to implement it in my own strategies down the road.

Module 4: Creating Outreach Email [10 Minutes]

This sub-module teaches you how to position yourself as an authority and build an outreach email on behalf of your client. This is in preparation for executing your backlink getting campaign.

Module 4.1: Link Building Basics & Methods [3 Hours]

A complete crash course on everything white hat linking building. You won’t find any sketchy PBN tactics, or spammy email blasts here. This is truly how link building should be. The Blueprint Training goes over not just how to reach out to acquire high quality backlinks, but where to reach out.

A lot of the methods that are taught reminds me of my days finding C level executives to cold email. A lot of thought and planning goes into these strategies but this is how you truly build a backlink profile that is solid and highly relevant. 

If what I just said sounds tedious, well it is. But the great thing is it can all be outsourced or assigned to someone in house. All of that delegation is covered as well. This section is 3 hours by itself. There’s a lot to unpack here and even more to do. But just know, you won’t find any better white hat link building strategy anywhere. Period.

Module 5: Link Building Methods & Outreach [5 Hours]

Up until this point, mostly everything has been in preparation for these next few hours. This is where the money is made. This section covers over 9 different systems you can implement to build high quality, relevant backlinks.

These aren’t just simple tricks like, “send the blog owner an email and use my free template.” These are entire systems that you can setup and run yourself, other hire others to run for you.

Each of the 9 or so methods gets broken down into how to identify opportunities, and then steps to take to act on them. All of these methods come with real examples used in Ryan’s agency and there’s plenty of download files and course material outside the video to use as well.

In total, there’s easily 10 hours of material just on building real quality backlinks. This will give your clients website the foundation to not only rank it to the top of the SERP but also keep it stable during Google algorithm updates.

These lessons could also be used to teach staff or new hires. The backlinking section is thorough enough to take someone who has no idea about backlinks and quickly transform them into a backlink outreach specialist for your agency.

You don’t get that with black hat methods.

Module 5.1: Monthly SEO Reporting [38 Minutes]

s the course begins to come to an end, 5.1 in The Blueprint shows you how to run custom monthly reports for your clients.

Ryan’s method of reporting involves importing data via API pulls into a custom Google Sheet and run running a script to populate the report. There’s nothing fancy or amazing happening here, but this is really a critical component to keeping your clients updated, informed, and happy.

The Blueprint Training Conclusion

In my honest opinion this is one of the most in depth SEO trainings available. Ryan and his team have put together an excellent product with no fluff or weird up sells. This is just straight honest facts on what works for technical SEO agencies taught by someone who owns a 7 figure agency.

If you have a small agency or are an SEO who is looking to scale I can’t suggest a better place to put your money when investing in your skills.

You check out the course on the official site here.

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