Top 30+ SEO Interview Questions. Google has a large contribution to the Worldwide Internet as it provides anything you need to know about something. It is a very popular source of information and ideas, and you cannot even imagine a single step in your everyday life without it.
Whenever you need an answer fast, you grab your phone and bank on search engines to deliver that information. Plus, a new study suggests that searching online could be beneficial for your brain, and it can control decision-making and complex reasoning.
But if you are seeking new career advancement in SEO, you will pursue the necessary training. You can also consider training yourself for that important interview to be ready to shine as an SEO job candidate when your dream job knocks on your door.
SEO interview questions for freshers.
If you are a beginner and are involved in an SEO job, you need to prepare SEO interview questions for recent graduates and beginners ahead of time. Many of these questions (for 1-year experience) are geared toward someone with some actual on-the-job experience or a solid education in SEO.
1.What is SEO?
SEO or search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing a site’s architectural layout. SEO helps in link attractiveness and content relevancy. Its pages will be more relevant, more readily found, more prominent in response to web searchers, and rank higher in search engines. Search engine optimization aids in increasing the overall company’s exposure.
The fact is that organic results from search engines are more trusted than sponsored results, and having a website featured for the relevant keywords might bring you a lot of new visitors.
SEO techniques help companies rank for their desired keywords without spending a dollar on search engine marketing, resulting in the most valuable visitors. Or they are also known as organic, accessible, and natural incomes.
Read: What is Techincal SEO?
There are plenty of optimization techniques and actions that Users can take to ensure their website ranks for possible keywords and is SEO friendly.
2. Why is SEO important to businesses?
Given that only a small percentage of people go beyond the 1-st page of Google results, you must make sure your industry is on the first page. Otherwise, your rivals and competitors will steal all of your clients. With each position, CTR lowers progressively. A significant benefit of SEO over PPC is that your results won’t end if you quit doing SEO.
Another aspect of why SEO is crucial is that it helps a certain company grow sales without promotions or splurges.
The most important Google ranking factors are:
- Quality Content
- Technical SEO
- Quality & Relevant Backlinks
- Mobile First
- Page Speed
- Brand Strength
- Domain Strength
- User experience
- Schema Code
- Social Signals
- Domain Authority
- Content-Type
- Content Depth
- Content Freshness
- HTTP
3.What is the organic result?
Organic results are results provided by a specific search based on quality, relevance, on other ranking variables. And they are one of 2 kinds of search results on the search engine results page. These organic results are often called ‘free results,’ or ‘natural outcomes,’ and unpaid results.
Read: What is organic traffic?
Organic results appear underneath the sponsored results, and they cannot be influenced by charging Google. So who may improve them by ensuring superior data and allowing users to engage with it?
4. What is a paid result?
A paid result refers to the advertiser who pays to show its ads alongside better organic results on SERPs. Such results are immediate, and advertisers are not obligated to enhance their website and content ranks. However, you must be aware of your Max CPC and quality score because they can determine your position. So here’s a little secret: the more money you save, the better your quality score.
5. What is Google Sandbox?
The Google Sandbox Effect affirms that new websites are mostly an inside box and can not rank successfully for their (most important) target keywords. And according to this notion, Google needs to look thoughtfully for a long time before leaving the fictitious location. This can happen because of constructing too many connections in a short time.
Even though who widely discussed it, it was never officially announced – Google itself discussed various things and ideas.
6. What stands Google Autocomplete?
Google Autocomplete is a search engine component that works with Google and different search engines. As you start writing in the search field, Google Autocomplete helps you finish your query by offering you a long list of related suggestions. Google Autocomplete enables users to complete their searches less quickly and with much less initiative, and it is especially useful for mobile users.
7. What is a TLD?
TLD stands for a top-level- domain, and it is the last portion of an internet address. There are many sorts of TLDs accessible:
- .com
- .net
- .org
- .co
- .in
- Etc.
8. What is a ccTLD?
ccTLD refers to the country code top-level domain, and you need to know that the domain extension is distinct for each notion. Plus, all ccTLDs have only two characters. So, for example, .in stands for India, .us stands for the United States, etc.
9. What is keyword Frequency, Keyword Density, Keyword Difficulty, and Keyword Proximity?
Keyword Frequency: guides to how usually a keyword phrase occurs on a specific web page. One thing to keep in mind when optimizing a page is avoiding keyword stuffing at all costs (not overusing the term).
Keyword Difficulty: this metric measures how difficult it is to rank for a specific term based on its competitors and prominence. The more complicated, the more backlinks and time are required.
Keyword Density: indicates the proportion of times a phrase or term occurs on a certain web page. Search engines often mistake the keyword frequency for term stuffing, especially over the optimal level. It would help to make sure that the keyword density for important search keywords is not superfluous.
Keyword proximity: shows the distance between 2 terms on a certain web page.
10. What is a long-tail keyword?
Long-tail keywords or phrases include +4 words and are very specialized. As opposed to broad keywords, long-tail keywords indicate the search’s quality and purpose, coaching to a high number of sales if appropriately targeted. The best place to use long-tail keywords is on a blog post. Long-tail keywords have a more inferior search volume than broad ones, but combining many long-tail keywords will bring you a lot of traffic and a high conversion rate.
11. What is the bounce rate in SEO?
Bounce speed is one of the most significant questions in all SEO Interview Questions and Answers guides. It refers to the proportion of site visitors who leave before taking action or viewing other web pages. According to Google, bounce rate is determined as single-page visits divided by sessions or a specific proportion of all sessions on your website. For example, people saw only one page or set just one request to the Analytic server.
To reduce bounce rates, you need to:
- Boost page engagement – through CTAs, internal links, etc.
- Improve web page performance.
- Provide consistent user interaction.
- Etc.
12. What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file and represents everything done via this file. Robots.txt addresses web crawlers on how to index and cache a web page, directory, webpage’s file, and a domain.
13. What are anchor texts in SEO?
Anchor text is an available text in a hyperlink that assists users in understanding the purpose of a specific web page. If an anchor text includes keywords, it has SEO value. Anyway, Google may penalize you if you are too optimized.
Natural anchor text is vital and includes long-tail, branded, picture links, and precise and partial matches. Search engines consider anchor texts to determine the web page’s context to which it is connected. And this is an important indicator for SEO to determine what a website is about for Google or other search engines.
14. What is ‘Robots Meta Tag’?
Robots Meta Tag stands for an HTML tag that directs search engines through directives like NOFOLLOW, FOLLOW, INDEX, and NOINDEX, to handle the page.
15. What is an HTML Sitemap?
A new website allows people to view a list of web pages structured to traverse and understand the website quickly. However, an HTML sitemap is useless if your website doesn’t have many user-accessible sites. Therefore, you need to understand an HTML sitemap is only beneficial to large websites.
16. What is an XML Sitemap?
XML stands for an acronym for Extensible Markup Language. An XML Sitemap’s purpose is to provide search engines with information about the most recent changes. Plus, an XML Sitemap contains a list of sites and the frequency with which these sites are updated. When using an XML sitemap, you have the right to request search engines to scan and index your most important pages regularly. Therefore, when discovering a website, the first thing a search engine looks at is if there is a sitemap in it.
Explain LSI Keywords.
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords are semantically linked to search engines’ main term visitors use. Using LSI keywords to improve a web page will increase the keyword relevance. One good thing about LSI is that it allows you to optimize keywords on a page without worrying about keyword stuffing. Plus, LSI is an important factor for Google’s algorithm to determine the relevance of a certain search term or phrase. It helps search engines to decode the semantic structure of keywords and extract the meaning of the text to provide the best results on SERPs.
17. What makes a website search engine friendly?
Some of the most common factors that make a website search-friendly include:
- Quality content
- Metadata
- Page titles
- Links
- Headings
- Etc.
18. How do you measure SEO success?
Therefore, there are several ways to measure KPIs (key performance indicators) and success. So, during an SEO interview, here are the possible answers you can get:
- Increasing traffic to a website (or a particular landing page).
- Increasing conversions (such as sales, newsletter signups, etc.).
- Growing the total number of inbound links.
- Driving traffic for a target keyword phrase.
- Increasing organic traffic.
- For an SEO professional, it is essential to continuously measure the result and know whether he needs to change his tactics and strategies to succeed.
19. How did you learn SEO?
As you can understand, this answer depends on your situation. Still, your answer is important for a potential employer to ensure that you are highly experienced in SEO best practices. For example, if you learned SEO at your last job just because someone had to do it, an employer might be skeptical about the quality of your skill sets. If that’s the case, you need to ensure you are well trained before applying.
20. Which SEO tools do you regularly use?
There are plenty of tools that can make SEO jobs more accessible, and among them, you can choose those who better match your needs. Here are some of the most useful tools that are generally used:
21. How do you approach keyword research?
This question needs a wide explanation about which keyword tools you use for research and how you go about it. You must demonstrate you go deeper than just simply choosing a random keyword and typing it into the tool. Instead, you need to explain that you consider different elements when approaching keyword research, such as search volume, longer keyword phrases, and the competitiveness of a keyword. You should also demonstrate you know how to find the sweet spot in keyword research – the spot where a keyword is narrower – where the keyword is targeted and has good search volume, and it is not highly competitive.
22. What is link construction, and why does it matter?
Google exists to help the searcher and searcher’s intent, and that means it is constantly trying to determine which are the most relevant results to any given searcher and at any given time. Besides relevancy, Google considers credibility and sees if other sites have linked to your site. If so, it means that your content is worth-linking, and it is more credible when compared to another site that is not linked externally. So, in simple terms, SEO professionals do link-building to get backlinks and improve search results.
23. What are backlinks?
Backlinks are links from one site to a web page on another site. Such links signal to search engines that people like your content and it is of high quality.
24. What is page rate, and why does it matter?
Page rate indicates how fast your website loads, and it is an important factor that Google takes into consideration. A website loading fast means it is directly translated to a better user experience. If SEO employment asks you what you’ll do to increase your page speed, here are the answers:
- By reducing image sizes
- Enabling compression
- Reducing redirects
- Removing render-blocking JavaScript
- Improving server response time
- Leveraging browser caching
- Optimizing the code
- Utilizing a content distribution network to compress files
- Etc.
25. What technique do you use to redirect a web page?
Generally, 301,302 and Meta Refresh are the top-3 most used redirects.
Meta Refresh – client-side redirect.
301 – “Moved Permanently’, recommended for SEO.
302 – “Found” or “Moved Temporarily.”
26. How can you do SEO for a video?
If a video can produce attention, then get shared and get backlinks, you can use it to improve SEO. If you want your video to get detected by many people, you first need SEO to get it found. Similar to text-based pages, videos require the same type of information that includes:
- The transcript as a text – in this way, search engines can crawl the text.
- Keywords
- Page titles
- Descriptions
27.Which meta tags matter?
The most important meta tags are the page title and meta description; both remain critical despite the possible changes since SEO became a common practice. Therefore, when answering this question, take into account the following explanations:
A page title or SEO title – is important for rankings, and it appears on the SERPs. It would help if you choose a keyword that ranks well and is compelling so that users will click on it.
The meta description –plays a huge role in the Search Results Page, but it doesn’t affect ranking. It makes users want to click on the search result pages.
28. What is the difference between do-follow and no-follow links? How are they used?
Nofollow links –these links exist because we don’t want that link to be something Google (or other search engines) crawl and rank. Such links tell web crawlers not to follow a link. Remember that no-follow links are clickable for users but not followed by search engine bots.
Dofollow links –all other links are considered do-follow. You need to understand that even if they do not have special attributes to tell bots to follow them, search engine bots will default.
29. Which SEO factors are in your control?
The number #1 factor (the biggest) that is not in your control is Google. That’s because the exact way Google ranks a website is still unknown. Google doesn’t make its search algorithms; however, SEO professionals have determined the best practices and methods you can use to achieve great results. Here are some other things you cannot control:
- – Google doesn’t like young domains –so if you are launching a new site, you cannot control that.
- – You can’t force people to link to your website, share your content, spend more time on your website, and return to your website.
Even though you know that Google looks favorably on all the above factors (and more), you must admit that such factors are beyond your control.
30. What is on-page vs. off-page SEO?
The first thing to know about on-page and off-page SEO is that these factors are in and out of your control (back the question 31).
On-page (or on-site) SEO – represents the factors you can control, including content, load time, keywords, page structure, internal linking, etc.
Off-page SEO – or off-site SEO includes the factors that you can’t control, for example, backlinks.
31. What are some black hat SEO techniques to avoid?
This could be a trick question to ensure you wouldn’t use any black hat SEO practices. Here are some of the practices you need to avoid in order not to get penalized by Google:
- – Cloaking
- – Keyword stuffing
- – Duplicate content (copying content from another website)
- – Trading (or exchanging) links
- – Buying links
- – Hiding text
- – Using a link farm
- – Etc.
32. What is the association between SEO and SEM?
SEO –stands for Search Engine Optimization
SEM – stands for Search Engine Marketing
The main dissimilarity between them is that SEO is free, and SEM is paid.
SEO – is the process of improving the quality of your website to increase its visibility on search engines.
SEM – includes the pay-per-click advertising and displays ads that are purchased.
Despite these differences, SEO and SEM work best in unison.
What qualities are required to be effective in an SEO role, in your opinion?
Even though this question might sound subjective and relative, you can not forget to mention all the set skills required to be good at this job. So, to be an SEO professional, you must have:
- Good research skills
- Strong analytical skills
- Ability to spot trends
- Ability to adapt to change
- Etc.
