SEO Interview Questions
What qualities are required in order to be effective in an SEO role, in your opinion?
- Analytical - Research minded
How do you determine if a backlink is good?
- Check how many outbound links are on that page - Anchor text should be relevant - Make sure there aren't too many similar links - Check if it's No Follow or Follow
Traffic took a 75% hit overnight - what do we do?"
- Check to see if there was any news of an algorithm update - Accidentally blocked your website
How would your experience at X Company helps you excel here?
- I learned a lot of about digital marketing as a whole but I definitely focused more on the SEO and trying to get as much experience as I could so that I could get familiar with the different tools, concepts and strategies in SEO.
How did you learn SEO?
- I took a digital marketing course that covered SEO and PPC and I took that was created by an owner of an SEO Agency and went a little more in depth about
What does it mean if nothing appears while searching for the domain?
- Maybe the site is banned by search engines - Maybe no index by search engines - Some canonical issues
What are some SEO KPIs to track with Google Analytics
- Sessions - Pages per session - Bounce Rate - Page Views - Goal Conversion Rate - New vs Returning Users
Walk me through a campaign
- Website Audit - Keyword research -Keyword Analysis - On page optimization - Link Building
What SEO tools do you use and why?
1. Google Analytics - 2. Google Search Console 3. SEMrush & Ahrefs
What is the meta description character limit?
160
What is a canonical issue?
A canonical issue happens when you seem to have duplicate content.
What is a link audit and why should you do one?
A link audit is basically an audit of the links that point to your website, the backlinks.
What is a session
A session is a group of interactions on a website in a given time.
How do you measure SEO success?
By looking at different KPIs metrics you set to track for that campaign. Such as
What are some black hat SEO practices to avoid?
Cloaking, keyword stuffing, copying content from another site, exchanging or trading links,
Why do you need to know about backlinks to competitors' websites?
Doing an analysis of competitors' websites is a useful way to execute a competitive analysis to basically see if you should be emulating anything that they are doing.
Which SEO analytics don't get enough attention, in your opinion?
Funnel conversion
Which Webmaster tool do you use and why?
Google Search Console
What is the Google Spider?
Google Spider is basically Google's crawler. A crawler is an program/algorithm designed by search engines to crawl and track websites and web pages as a way of indexing.
What is Google's preferred method of configuring a mobile site?
Google prefers that mobile websites are configured using responsive web design.
Explain Googlebot
Googlebot is Google's web crawler that crawls and indexed different webpages. You have a mobile and desktop crawler
Where do you start when looking at on-site SEO?
I usually like to start doing an audit of the site using a tool like screaming frog & search console to check if there are any errors, duplicate content, H1 tags etc.
What do you mean by Cloaking?
In this technique, different content will be shown to the search engine crawler than what is presented to the end users. For ex: showing HTML text to search engines and images to users
What is the most important thing to do for effective SEO?
Keyword Research
What is Cross-linking? What is the function of Crosslinking?
Linking one website to another website
What is the appropriate amount of keyword density on a page?
Obviously do not oversaturate but use a natural amount of keywords that flows with the context of the page.
What are rich snippets?
Rich snippets are the featured text that appears at the top of the organic search results, in a box, and sometimes with an image.
What is the relationship between SEO and SEM?
SEO is the foundation for good SEM and when you have each set up properly, you have a better chance of getting high-quality traffic and improving conversion rates.
What is the main purpose of using keyword in SEO?
Search engine stores keywords in the database, and when a search is done, it will come up with the best possible match.
1. What makes a website search engine friendly?
Several factors make a website search engine friendly, including keywords, quality content, titles, metadata, etc. A website needs these factors to be ranked by a search engine and therefore found by a user.
Which SEO factors are not in your control?
The biggest SEO factor not in your control is Google! How exactly Google ranks websites is unknown.
Which meta tags matter?
The title and meta description
Walk me through your authority-building process.
You can build authority through content and backlinks.
https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/seo-tutorial/seo-interview-questions (Q 12)
https://career.guru99.com/top-35-seo-interview-questions/ (Q 21)