How We Started
Siciha Suyuwa began as a set of internal training notes before it became a public curriculum. The path from one to the other took longer than expected.
Where the Idea Came From
The earliest version of this material was written for a single communications team that kept receiving the same request from leadership: make our press releases and executive articles show up in search. The team had strong writers. None of them had a background in technical SEO, and most of the available training assumed they wanted one.
Existing courses spent hours on server configuration, crawl budgets, and schema markup before ever mentioning a headline. That approach made sense for a technical SEO specialist building a career around search infrastructure. It made far less sense for a communications director whose job was to protect a brand's voice while getting a story in front of the right audience.
Why Existing SEO Training Didn't Fit
Most SEO courses are built around one of two audiences: people who intend to work in SEO as a specialty, or business owners managing their own website from the ground up. Communications and PR professionals fall into neither group. They write daily. They rarely touch a content management system's back end, and they are not responsible for site architecture.
What they needed was narrower and more specific: an explanation of how search engines interpret written content, applied directly to press releases, bylines, and executive articles. Nothing about server response codes. Nothing about crawl directives that a comms team would never be asked to configure.
Building a Curriculum for Writers
The internal notes were rewritten several times before they resembled a course. Each revision removed technical vocabulary that wasn't necessary and replaced it with terms already familiar to a PR writer.
Draft One: Too Technical
The first draft mirrored a standard SEO training outline. Reviewers from communications backgrounds found it accurate but exhausting, and several admitted they stopped reading after the second module.
Draft Two: Too Simplified
The second draft overcorrected, cutting so much technical grounding that reviewers felt unprepared to answer even basic questions from a technical SEO colleague.
Draft Three: A Working Balance
The third draft kept the concepts that affect writing decisions and dropped the ones that don't. That draft became the basis for the current five-module structure.
Ongoing Revision
The curriculum is still updated as search engines change how they evaluate written content, though the core teaching approach, framed around structure and audience intent rather than technical manipulation, has stayed consistent.
Where the Program Stands Today
Siciha Suyuwa is now offered as a self-paced, written training program rather than an internal document. The audience has broadened past the original team to include agency account leads, executive ghostwriters, and internal communications staff across a range of industries. The teaching approach has not changed. It remains focused on giving comms professionals a working understanding of search, not a technical certification.
Details on the format and pacing are covered on the Our Process page. Written perspectives on specific topics, including recent changes in how search engines handle executive content, are collected on Our Thinking.