On LinkedIn, I regularly get a lot of messages from candidates who are seeking a job or an internship in SEO. But what amazes me is now, people tend to rely on easy shortcuts. I have seen SEO Interview Questions and Answers in the search engine dropdown.
I have spent 10+ years in this field now and have given as well as taken a lot of interviews. The reason why you can use these SEO interview questions and answers, these are from my experience.
While interacting with candidates, I have realized the fact that most of them are not prepared. They just have half-knowledge or very little knowledge.
Another observation is the fact that the candidates are not even able to answer the basic questions related to SEO. Many of them just mug up the definitions of certain terminologies and speak it up in the interview. I hope this article full of SEO interview questions and answers helps them, if not, ”buddy you need to work even more”
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Being an experienced person in this field, I can understand which candidates have actually worked in SEO or whether the candidate is knowing the basics properly or not.
Practical knowledge is a must in SEO but in order to learn things practically, you must be well-versed with the very basic concepts too.
I thought of writing this article providing SEO interview questions and answers to help candidates prepare for their SEO interviews. SEO is a very vast topic and I cannot cover it entirely.
Also, at different levels, the complexity of the questions will differ. The list of SEO interview questions and answers is never-ending and keeps on updating with time.
But do not worry. I will cover as much as I can. Also, do not just rely on these questions for your interview preparation. But ensure that you know SEO Interview Questions and answers before you appear for your interview. These are the most commonly asked questions.
Before we go ahead with SEO interview questions and answers, do not completely rely on readymade content. Unless you’re very well prepared and thorough with the knowledge.
Digital marketing is a mode of marketing that uses digital mediums to reach out to the target audience in a more sophisticated manner.
Read the full article about what is digital marketing
It is comprised of SEO, SMM, Email Marketing, ASO, etc.
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is a process of getting the website rank higher in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
SEO is the process that lets people discover you on search engines easily. People have the tendency to click on the top results in the SERP and hence SEO is very important for a website.
SEO activities can be of 2 main types – On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO, as the name suggests consists of activities on the web page. It involves page structure, navigation, headings, etc.
Off-Page SEO is the SEO that does not require changes on the web page but involves driving traffic to the web page from other sources. It is also known as link building activity.
Answer this question as per your skill set.
If you are aware of any coding language, mention it in a proper way like “Yes, I know Java Programming. I studied it during my graduation and also have made an XYZ project in it.”
This question is asked as SEO requires a basic understanding of how websites are made and the terminologies.
Over here, the interviewer wants to understand how comfortable you are while working with scripts. In the above scenario, I mentioned Java, Now, Java has nothing to do with SEO. But yes, if you know any programming language, it will be an added advantage.
If you don’t know any programming language, do not hesitate. Simply say “I do not know any programming language. But if needed, I can learn. I am open to learning new things”.
I would highly recommend you to learn the basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript. PHP would be an added advantage. You don’t have to master these scripts. You just need to get acquainted with them so that in your SEO interview, you can say “I know the basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Though I am not an amazing coder, I can understand tags and scripts and even manipulate them if needed”.
Answer such questions precisely
There are three hats in SEO –
Take a pause and let the interview ask you further on this. Do not start explaining things on your own.
The hats indicate the kind of activities performed. There are people who do not follow Google’s guidelines and get involved in unethical ways to drive traffic. Such unethical activities are Black hat SEO tactics. When Google recognizes such activities, the websites involved in such activities are penalized.
White Hat SEO is the SEO that is as per the guidelines of Google. Here, there is no scope of penalty. Google reward such websites by making them rank higher.
Grey Hat SEO is the combination of both white and black hat SEO. Here, there is a chance of a penalty. But, the risk is lesser than that of black hat SEO.
Backlinks are the links pointing to your website/blog from an external website. The more the number of quality backlinks, the better is the SEO.
Link building is a key activity in SEO and backlinks are the result of the link building activities.
You might have 1000s of backlinks. But they are of no use if they are not coming from relevant and trusted sources.
Having 100 high-quality backlinks has more impact than having 1000s of low-quality irrelevant backlinks. Building backlinks is an art.
The several ways to build quality backlinks are:
There are a lot of tools that help in SEO. But, the most commonly used tools are:
Whenever you type something on Google search, it is a “Search Query” for you. Google identifies the keywords in the search query and fetches the most relevant results from its database on the basis of the intent of the search. For you, it is the search queries and for search engines, webmasters and SEO – it is keywords.
They are the most commonly used search terms. Usually, the content is developed by keeping them in mind.
In order to select the keywords for a website, extensive research is a must. What is your business about and what keywords are used by your competitors? – Many such questions should be answered. First, you need to answer the question – What can be the search queries used by my customer to buy my product/service?
Then, you need to use a tool like Google Keyword Planner or Keywords IO to identify the best keywords.
The success mantra over here is – select the keywords with high search volume and less competition.
Meta tags are used to describe the metadata of the page. Metadata is “data about data”. Your webpage consists of data. What kind of data it is, is described by the metadata. It is used by search engine crawlers to understand what the web page is all about. Meta tags play a key role in SEO.
There are various meta tags that are supposed to be optimized:
Earlier, Meta Keywords was widely used. But it is no longer used by search engines.
The alt attribute provides alternate text for an image. This alternate text is displayed when the image fails to render. Providing alt attributes to the images is one of the most important SEO activities.
The alt attribute should describe the image. Also, Google uses the alt attribute to know about the image. Hence, it is very important to specify the alt attribute.
There are 6 heading tags in HTML – h1 to h6. h1 is of the highest priority and h6 of the least. Heading tags describe the content in the block following them. They are also one of the key On-Page SEO factors and should be used properly. Every page must have at least one h1 tag and then if you are using subheadings, then use h2, h3 and so on in proper hierarchy.
Do not use heading tags to give bold effect to the text. Many people use heading tags and bold tags interchangeably which is a very wrong practice. Also, do not use heading tags merely to increase the font size. Use heading tags wisely to give proper headings on your web page.
OG (Open Graph) tags are used when your web page is shared on Facebook. Whenever you share a webpage on Facebook, you can notice that as soon as you paste the link, the title, description, and image are loaded. This is the work done by open graph tags.
You can write a custom title, description, image, etc for the post when it is shared on Facebook using OG tags.
A featured snippet is a special section (box) that is displayed at the top of SERP, even before the first search result. This section provides a summarized answer to the user query.
Featured snippets are also known as position zero. The summarized answer in this box is fetched from the site answering the user’s question in the best possible way.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. SEM uses paid approaches while SEO uses organic strategies to rank higher in search results.
In SEM, the results are immediate while in SEO, the results take time to appear. Also, in SEM you can target the audience while the results appearing organically with the help of SEO are visible to all.
It is a text file that tells search engines (crawlers/robots) which pages on the website should be crawled and which are not supposed for crawling.
If a robots.txt file is absent, Google me crawl and index all the pages on the website. Even if a page will be duplicated, or of no importance, it will be crawled and indexed. This is harmful to the SEO of the website. Hence, every website must have a robots.txt file.
Whenever you start typing something on Google’s search box, you get a lot of suggestions in the dropdown below. This is Google Autocomplete.
This helps users search faster and in a better way.
Long-tail keywords or to be more precise key phrases are more specific keywords or key phrases that are longer than the most commonly used keywords.
They are more effective. For instance, in order to buy a T-shirt, one might search “Buy T-Shirt”. Here, the search is not specific. Whether the T-Shirt is for a boy or a girl? What kind of t-shirt? What color?
On the other hand, if you consider the search query “buy a black color printed t-shirt for a girl”. Here, any e-commerce player that would have used and optimized for this phrase will rank and there is a high chance of a person buying it.
As it is a more specific search, the user is knowing what he/she wants and does not want to waste time browsing other color t-shirts. Though the search volume for such keyphrases will be less, the conversion rate is going to be much higher for such long-tail keywords.
Do-follow links are the ones that allow the bots to follow the links and no-follow links restrict the bots from following the links.
Search engine bots crawl through the links by default. But, if you want to restrict them from following some links you can add the attribute no-follow to the links.
Google Search Console is a tool by Google that helps webmasters to check the web site’s traffic, issues, indexing status, performance and much more.
It is a free tool widely used by digital marketers for optimizing the website.
A sitemap is a complete list of all the pages of a website. It is a detailed list of all the resources on the website.
2 main types of sitemaps are XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps.
An XML sitemap is a must for a website. An XML sitemap helps the search engines understand the structure of the website, the pages it has and the connection between various pages and resources.
SSL is a networking protocol that secures your web connection. By default, the website has HTTP. When the SSL certificate is activated on it, it gets converted to HTTPS. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP.
It not only secures the connection but also plays a key role in SEO. Google uses HTTPS as one of the ranking factors.
Also, if the website is not secured, Chrome gives a ‘not secure’ message to the visitors.
Google My Business (GMB) is a free listing tool by Google using which you can list your business on Google. You can mention your business name, website, address, contact details and much more using GMB.
You can also upload images of your business/products and have a catalogue on the GMB listing.
It not only enhances the visibility of the business but also helps in SEO.
AMP is an acronym for “Accelerated Mobile Pages”. It is an open-source framework that speeds up the load time of the website on mobile phones.
You can either have a mobile-responsive website or have an AMP version of your website. It is highly recommended to use a mobile-responsive website.
Enter the URL of the website along with “site:” before it. For example, site:shantanarang.com
The results show all the indexed pages of your website.
There are many free tools using which we can check the number of backlinks. A few of the tools are:
A broken link is a link that is no longer working. It can be because of several reasons like the website moved, the webpage got deleted, the URL got changed, etc.
Broken links are not good for SEO and hence we must find and fix all the broken links on our website.
Rel canonical is used to tell the search engines that certain URLs on the website have similar content.
Search engines penalize the websites with duplicate content and therefore, it becomes essential to mark the pages with similar content using the canonical tags.
Google Analytics is a web analytics tool by Google that helps in tracking and analyzing a website’s traffic. It is a part of the Google Marketing Platform.
The basic features of this service are available for free while there are certain advanced features too which are paid.
In the Google Analytics dashboard, go to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages
Domain Authority (DA) is a metric developed by Moz. It is a score that predicts the website’s performance. Better the DA, the better are the chances of the website to rank higher in the SERP.
PBN stands for private blog networks. It is a network of websites used to build links.
All the websites in the network link only to the main website for which link building is done. Basically, the same person owns several websites and link the sites to his primary website which is making money for him.
Google penalizes sites with backlinks from such PBNs.
Google now primarily uses the mobile version of the website for the purpose of indexing and ranking. This is mobile-first indexing.
Google does not index 2 separate versions of the web pages. It predominantly focuses on the mobile version. Hence, it becomes essential for a website to be mobile-responsive.
GTM is an acronym for Google Tag Manager. GTM is a free tag management tool by Google that helps in managing multiple tags together from the same dashboard in a quick and easy manner.
You can track a lot of things using Google Tag Manager. A few of them are events like PDF downloads, link clicks, exit link clicks, etc.
Schema markup is a semantic vocabulary/microdata that can be added to your website to help search engines understand your content in a better way.
It is the schema markup that creates the rich snippets that are visible in search results.
Social media marketing does not directly help in SEO. But that doesn’t mean that it does not help at all. It does help in SEO.
Social media can be used to create powerful social signals for your website and good social signalling can impact SEO. Search engines consider the links shared on social media and thus social media helps in SEO.
Disavow tool is used to disavow spammy or low-quality backlinks. Quality backlinks are good for your SEO.
But Google also penalizes you if it finds low-quality links pointing to your website. Someone or a bot can link to your website without you knowing about it and this can harm your SEO to a great extent.
Disavow tools help you in mentioning to search engines that you reject those links as they are low quality or spam.
E-A-T and YMYL are concepts that can drastically impact your SEO.
E-A-T is an acronym for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. This is a framework used by the quality evaluators of Google.
These individuals check whether the content is created by someone who is an expert in that niche, whether they are recognized by others and whether the content is trustworthy.
YMYL is another important metric that is used to evaluate the quality of the page. It is an acronym for your money or your life. The quality raters go through various web pages on the internet and if the page is having content that can impact someone’s life or money, they evaluate such pages very closely. Such pages are YMYL pages.
Domain Authority (DA) is a ranking metric developed by Moz. DA predicts how well a website will rank in the search engine result pages.
Page Authority (PA) is also a ranking metric by Moz that predicts how well a particular page from the website will rank in the search engine result pages.
Hreflang is an attribute to link tag in HTML. It tells search engines about the relation between the web pages and the languages used.
Suppose a website has 2 versions of the same page. One page in English and another page version in Hindi, then the Hreflang tag tells about this to search engines. It helps in the localization of the content.
Google RankBrain is a Google Algorithm update that uses ML (machine learning) to determine the most relevant results for the search made.
With this update, the search engines can understand the intent of the search in a better manner.
Google Pigeon update came in 2013. It was one of the biggest updates in the algorithm of Google.
It was an update that improved the search results on the basis of location and distance. It penalized the bad practices used by local businesses. It drastically changed the way local SEO worked.
A/B testing is the process of evaluating 2 versions of a website or landing page and checking which one is performing better.
It is also known as split testing. It is used to enhance the overall customer experience and thereby improve the landing page’s performance.
A mobile website means a separate version of the actual website which will be rendered on mobile devices. It is a traditional practice.
Today we live in the era of responsive websites. In the case of a responsive website, there is a single website that is rendered on devices of various sizes/resolutions. The website components adjust on the basis of the resolution.
Alexa Ranking is a ranking system that analyzes websites and ranks them on the basis of their popularity. It checks websites across the globe.
The rankings are given on the basis of website traffic and the engagement of visitors over the period of the last 3 months.
I hope these most common SEO interview questions and answers were helpful. I will keep updating this article from time to time. So, do not forget to bookmark this article.
If you have any questions, please do ask in the comments section and let me know if these SEO Interview Questions and Answers we helpful or not?
Shanta Narang is a Passionate, amiable, dynamic, and result-oriented digital marketing professional with over 12 years of experience in SEO, content management, brand marketing, business management, and educational counseling. She facilitates digital transformation initiatives for organizations to help them grow in the online platform. Being a DM Specialist, She helps companies to succeed in their business with the help of the latest trends and technology.
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