Technical / Tactics
Every SEO prefers certain tactics over others, but familiarity with many could indicate a deeper understanding of the industry. And while every SEO doesn't need to have a web developer background, having such skills can help set someone apart from the crowd.
1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
2. Can you write HTML code by hand?
3. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
4. How you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?
5. What do you think of PageRank?
6. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
7. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
8. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
9. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
10. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
11. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
12. Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?
13. Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.
14. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
15. If the company whose site you've been working for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?
16. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements
17. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
18. What do you think about link buying?
19. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?
20. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
21. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
22. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for back links?
23. What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?
24. What things wouldn't you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
25. What's the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank?
26. Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?
27. The difference between seo, sem, smo and spo relation with internet marketing.
28. Brief latent semantic indexing (LSI).
29. Brief diversify search results.
30. Explain in details the market research procedure in your words.
31. What is keywords cannibalization?
32. What is long tail keywords and advantages of it.
33. Factor to follow for copy writing and any terms defines related to it.
34. Steps follow to write meta title, meta keywords, meta descriptions.
35. What is pagination and how does it affect seo.
36. Write note on the link building and list of methodologies for it.
37. Any difference links in navigation and links in paragraph.
38. List various book marking and sites and its significance.
39. How blog is different from the sites and why blog is given more priority now a days.
40. Brief relevance comment on the forum, blog and smo.
41. Brief details about the sitemap and xml.
42. Brief about the image optimization
43. Need of analytics make a list of various analytics software.
44. Strategies to follow for multilingual seo .
45. What is link bait?
46. Does site size matter if yes then how.
47. Are the keywords you are targeting are relevant to the site’s content.
48. Are targeted keywords phrases you are using are used in the search engine queries.
49. Does your page title stats with the targeted keywords.
50. Does your site employ H1 header tags for prominent content titles?
51. Is your permanent body copy contextually sufficient and keyword-rich?
52. Do text links include targeted keywords that point users to pages within your site?
53. Do you use CSS (define) image replacement in graphical navigation on the site?
54. Do graphics used in the site have descriptive, keyword-rich alternative attributes that are useful for visitors?
55. Does your Web site have a site map with text links?
56. Do the URLs of your dynamic, database-driven pages look simple and static?
57. Does your site have a flat directory structure?
58. Do your site's home page and other key category pages have PageRanks?
59. Is your site listed in Open Directory?
60. Do you routinely list your site in other trusted, human-reviewed online directories?
61. Do all the pages in your Web site have keyword-rich meta descriptions?
62. Does your site have a custom error page?
63. Do the site's filenames and directory names include targeted keywords?
64. Does your site avoid using pop-ups?
65. Is the exact same content visible to both users and search engine spiders?
66. Do you avoid free-for-all linking offers?
67. What kinds of back links are considered the most powerful?
68. What’s Google supplemental index.
69. What’s the difference between the indexed and non-indexed pages?
70. What is keywords analysis and how do you analyze your targeted keywords.
71. What’s the difference between page rank and Google toolbar PR.?
72. What’s do you know about the links buying and how Google treat links buying.
73. What is Google sandbox?
74. What are ranking factors in Google, Yahoo and MSN?
75. Have you any experience in the copywriting and technical writing.
76. What do you know about page segmentation?
77. What do you know about the SEM.?
78. What’s spam indexing?
79. What do you know about the podcasting, blogs and RSS?
80. What do you know about the XML sitemap and how do you generate it.
81. What is your biggest mistake and biggest success in SEO?
82. How would you monitor rankings?
83. What if your client is not open to ideas to make changes on their website, what would you come up with?
84. Which blogs and websites do you follow daily to keep up-to-date and why?
85. How is your copywriting skills? Can you give some examples?
86. What is your opinion about paid link
87. Do you have Knowledge of Static as well as Dynamic Website Optimization ?
88. As a seo consultant what do you prefer google / yahoo/ bing ?
89. What do you mean by social networking Traffic? How do they help for website seo?
90. Have you done any Videp Submissions and Video Promotions.?
91. How many target keywords should a website have? Or how many target keywords do you suggest for a website?
92. How do you help your client to decide budget allocation for seo and pay-per-click?
93. Do you have your own blogs? Do you do any seo freelance works ?
94.
Analysis
A big part of SEO involves assessing the effectiveness of a campaign both relative to past performance as well as to competing sites.
1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
3. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
4. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
5. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
6. If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
7. How many target keywords should a site have?
8. How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?
9. You hear a rumor that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results - how does this affect your work?
10. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?
11. Tell me through the google analytics how you set the conversion goal.
12. Explain the process of advanced segmentation and an example of why you might use this?
13. If you could develop a new feature for an analytics package that is not currently/easily available what would it be
14.
Industry Involvement
1. Is SEO just a job to pay the bills? Nothing wrong with that, but some senior positions can benefit from more enthusiasm and interest that can be measured by work done outside of the office.
2. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
3. In Google Lore - what are 'Hilltop', 'Florida' and 'Big Daddy'?
4. Have you attended any search related conferences?
5. Google search on this candidates name, (if you cannot find them, that's a red flag).
6. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
7. Of the well-known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?
8. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
9. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
10. Who are the two key people - who started Google?
11. Who is Matt Cutts?
12. If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?
Open-Ended
These questions are more about how an answer is given rather than the actual answer. They often scare interviewees, but with no wrong answer they're actually a good opportunity to shine.
1. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project
2. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?
3. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?
4. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
5. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?
6. Can you get "xyz"? company listed for the keyword "Google"? in the first page?
7. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
8. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?
Algorithms:
1. Please explain the PageRank algorithm…
2. What is the most important aspect to you of the PageRank algorithm for link-building?
3. What is page segmentation?
4. What is LSI / LSA and its relevance to SEO?
5. Explain to me how phrase-base algorithms work? Clustering?
6. Describe any perceived differences in the main search engines?
7. Have you noticed any algorithm changes lately that you believe to have affected your rankings? How do you work to protect your online visibility?
Keywords:
1. What process do you typically go through when researching keywords?
2. How could this process be improved?
3. How do you carry out competitive analysis of keywords/SERPs as part of the keyword research process?
4. When targeting keywords on-page, discuss some considerations you might make?
Accessibility:
1. What factors hinder search engines access to a website’s content?
2. What is the most responsible way of using Flash?
3. Tell me how you might use the Robots.txt file?
4. What is the difference between an xml sitemap and an html sitemap?
On-page Ranking Factors:
1. If you were reviewing a landing page, what on-page ranking factors would you consider?
2. How would you analyse the strength of that page as part of the site?
3. Are you competent with HTML and CSS?
Onsite Ranking Factors:
1. Talk me through factors you would consider in building an optimised website. (Possible answers might include the discussion around information architecture, site structure, title tags, link structures, keyword relevance, etc).
2. What are onsite ranking factors for building a successful landing page strategy?
3. Please provide examples of blackhat SEO techniques?
4. What are your thoughts on blackhat SEO techniques? What, if any, have you used, or tested?
Offsite Ranking Factors:
1. What would the perfect inbound link look like?
2. What do you like and not like about link-building?
3. Explain to me your involvement in link-building in the past?
4. What approach to link-building have you had most success?
Linkbait Development and Marketing:
1. Would you consider yourself as creative?
2. Have you ever successfully carried out a linkbait campaign for a client / in-house? What was the success?
3. Talk me through the process you might go through in developing a linkbait strategy?
Copywriting:
1. Are you confident writing and publishing content online?
2. Please provide examples of the content that you have written. What was the purpose of this content and what keywords were you targeting?
SEO Tools
1. What keyword research tools do you use and why?
2. What is your favourite ‘SEO tool’? Why?
3. Do you think SEO tools are effective in competitive markets? Why?
Testing
1. Have you carried-out split-testing / multivariate testing of content?
2. What did you learn from this process?
Image Optimisation
1. What factors can you do to encourage the chance of ranking for images?
2. What is hotlinking? How can this be successfully optimised?
Video optimisation
1. Have you ever carried out video optimisation?
2. What are a few considerations of optimising video content?
Social Media Interview Questions
1. Open-ended Social Media Questions
2. Which social media sites do you most like? Why?
3. Which social media sites do you most dislike? Why?
4. What has been your biggest achievement in SMM?
5. Do you feel that you are well connected in Social media spheres? Does your social media account carry influence?
6. Do you prefer to use the same pseudonym across your social media profiles? What are the pros and cons of doing this?
7. When did you get into social media (and marketing)?
8. What is your oldest social media profile?
9. Would you ever sell or buy social media profiles?
10. What has been the most effective social media marketing campaign you have been involved in? How was it effective? Metrics / exposure / links?
11. How do you effectively use social media to support SEO campaigns, or vice versa?
PPC Interview questions
1. Although not strictly SEO, the understanding of the cross-over of visibility in paid-listings can be very important for effective SEO campaigns.
2. Have you worked on/with PPC accounts? How did it go?
3. How do you integrate PPC and SEO?
4. What considerations might you make when carrying out paid search competitive analysis?
Business Acumen and ROI
1. What are the key performance metrics you have previously reported to clients?
2. What are effective metrics for highlighting return on investment from SEO?
3. What would you like to change about the SEO reporting process?
4. What other areas of business present opportunities for organic search visibility?
5. If your SEO efforts aren’t getting the visibility you would hope, what would you do?
Pitching for Business
1. Have you prepared proposals for SEO clients?
2. Have you presented proposals to SEO clients? How did it go?
3. What was the biggest mistake you have made in a meeting with a client?
4. What is your greatest strength when presenting to prospective SEO clients?
Retaining Business
1. What do you think is the most important factor in retaining a client?
2. From the previous company that you worked for, what was one process that they could have improved in retaining and gaining clients?
Closing questions
1. Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?
2. What are you salary expectations? Availability? Etc, etc…
3. How did you feel the interview went?!
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