Today I will discuss 12 toughest SEO interview questions and answers that every recruiter should ask before hiring any candidate. Hiring candidates for SEO jobs is always tricky so this post will make it much easier.
This SEO interview questionnaire is divided into 3 sections consisting of 4 questions each.
Related: Top 5 Questions to Ask Before You Hire Any SEO
- Section 1: General SEO Job Profile Related Questions
- Question 1: Which are the 3 questions that you will ask your client prior to start working on any project?
- Question 2: What is your biggest achievement and biggest failure as an SEO?
- Question 3: How do you measure success?
- Question 4: What qualities you have that make you better than the other candidates?
- Section 2: Technical SEO On Page/Off Page Questions
- Section 3: Google Analytics and Webmasters Questions
- Question 9: How can you find mobile queries for which your site is ranking?
- Question 10: I wish to remove visits from my own office from getting counted in Google Analytics. How can I do so?
- Question 11: What is the difference between the exit rate and bounce rate?
- Question 12: How will you accurately filter out all brand-related queries from getting reflected under queries section in Analytics?
Section 1: General SEO Job Profile Related Questions
Question 1: Which are the 3 questions that you will ask your client prior to start working on any project?
Answer:This could be a tricky question to answer. You should answer by saying that “I will frame 3 specific questions targeting three different areas of the client’s business. These would be focussed around business demographics, target location, the KPI (key performance indicator of the business, the CPA (cost per acquisition) values for each channel the client is investing at present.”
Question 2: What is your biggest achievement and biggest failure as an SEO?
Answer:You should explain about the independent decisions that you took in order to improve ROI for the business as an achievement. As a failure you should point you some early failures that you had when you started your career and what you learned from them.
Question 3: How do you measure success?
Answer: Success always depends on the key performance indicators and how well they perform for any business. For SEO, the best measurement of success is the performance of KPI.
Question 4: What qualities you have that make you better than the other candidates?
Answer: This should a creative and intelligent answer. You should answer some unique qualities that you have in yourself.
Section 2: Technical SEO On Page/Off Page Questions
Question 5: How does a semantic search, social signals, and Google rankings are related to each other?
Read the related sources for answer:
Question 6: How can the page layout algorithms affect the site’s rankings?
Read: Google’s Page Layout algorithm
Question 7: Do exact match anchor internal text links hurt any website?
Read: Exact match anchor internal links
Question 8: Can 404 pages affect rankings?
Answer: No, 404 pages do not have any direct effect on rankings.
Section 3: Google Analytics and Webmasters Questions
Question 9: How can you find mobile queries for which your site is ranking?
Read: Find mobile search queries
Question 10: I wish to remove visits from my own office from getting counted in Google Analytics. How can I do so?
Answer: We can do so by filtering out visits from a particular IP address.
Read: Set up IP address filtering
Question 11: What is the difference between the exit rate and bounce rate?
Read: Exit rate Vs Bounce rate
Question 12: How will you accurately filter out all brand-related queries from getting reflected under queries section in Analytics?
Answer: We can do so with the help of regular expressions. Queries like brandname* or *brandname can do the trick.
