70 Advanced SEO Interview Questions And Answers

70 Advanced SEO Interview Questions And Answers

1. What is on-page & off-page SEO?

On-page: The process of optimizing web pages by influencing internal factors like content quality, HTML source code, content structure, keyword density, meta title and description, page title, url structure, internal linking, etc. is called on-page SEO.

Off-page: Improving the performance of a website on a search engine with the help of external factors like link building, blog directory submissions, forum submissions, social bookmarking, social media engagement, etc. is called Off-page SEO.

3. Apart from Google what other search engines can you name?

Some of the popular search engines other than Google are:

Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Ask.com, Vimeo, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex

4. What is crawling & indexing?

Crawling: Crawling is a process by which, a crawler/bot of a search engine, gathers data about a webpage. In simple terms, a crawler studies websites, related web-pages, links, and content to create entries for search engine indexing.

Indexing: A webpage is considered to be indexed when it is added to the database of a search engine. Once the indexing is done, the webpage will start appearing for queries on the search engine. However, it is important to note that the webpage will have to go through a process of search engine optimization to get reflected on top positions.

5. What is the importance of Keywords?

Keywords are terms that define what a particular content is about. Well-researched keywords are very important as they lead the way in optimizing content on your website and making it comprehensible for search engines.

6. What is your process for Keyword Research?

Keyword research can be a long and elaborate process, however, you can narrate the following process as a simple reply to this question:

Step 1 (Analysis): Research words relevant to the industry/business and analyze the keywords used in the website of competitors to create a Keyword Bucket.

Step 2 (Research related keywords): Find out the best related set of words along with the current set of keywords you have.

Step 3 (Prepare long-tail Keywords): Create a list of long-tail keywords that are most likely to be searched by users.

Step 4 (Test keyword phrases on Google Adwords Keyword Planner): Keyword planner will help you cut down your list and give you a set of keywords that will optimize the performance of your website. Google Adwords is also an effective tool for competitor analysis.

7. What is keyword density?

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword appears on your webpage as compared to the total number of words on that page. The idea behind maintaining proper keyword density is to help optimize your webpage on a search engine, without having it penalised for keyword stuffing. The ideal keyword density is considered to be 1 to 3 percent.

8. What is a long-tail keyword?

For understanding long-tail Keyword, it is first important to understand Head Keywords. Head keywords, also called short-tail keywords, are regular terms which a lot of people search about (e.g. – Sports Shoes). Long-term keywords are additions to head keywords that make the search more specific (e.g. – Sports Shoes under Rs. 2000).

9. What are canonical URLs?

When the same or similar content is being used at different places within your website, the canonical URL function helps in specifying the source that should be considered as 'original' by the search engine. It, therefore, solves the problem of duplicate content by directing the search engine to the most preferred source.

10. What is meta description?

The links that appear after a query is entered in a search engine contain a 155 to 160 character snippet below it, which describes the contents of the webpage. This snippet is called meta description.

11. What are alt-attributes used for?

In SEO, alt-attribute is used to give an alternative text to an image. If for some reason the image cannot be viewed, the Alt-attribute text gives information about that image.

12. What do you understand by backlinking & why is it important in SEO?

A backlink is a hyperlink on another website that leads a user to your website. In SEO, backlinks are of immense importance as the number and quality of backlinks have a huge impact on the popularity & performance of a website. Backlinks are one of the main factors that affect the domain authority of a website.

13. What are the different methods of backlinking?

Some of the popular methods of backlinking are forum posting, blog commenting, guest posts on related websites, broken link method, skyscraper technique, etc.

14. What are the most important SEO ranking factors?

Some of the most important SEO Ranking factors are:

Quality content

Relevant keywords

Secured website

Mobile Friendliness

High-Quality backlinks

15. What are Panda and Penguin updates?

Panda: The Panda update was introduced to lower the rank of sites with poor content quality and improve the performance of higher quality sites. It is updated time to time.

Penguin: Penguin is a machine learning algorithm. It was launched to penalise websites that use spammy backlinks or low-quality backlinks.

15. What is Google Hummingbird?

Unlike Panda and Penguin, which were just updates, Hummingbird is deemed to be a revamped and improved version of the old Google search algorithm. Launched in 2013, this algorithm is said to give more emphasis on context behind the words and is said to understand conversational queries.

16. What is domain Authority & why is it important?

Domain Authority or DA refers to the strength of a domain to rank high on search engines. This metric gives a score between 1 to 100. The higher the score, the better is the DA.

DA is important as it gauges the quality of a website and also its ability to rank high in future. Generally, a website with an excellent quality of content and reasonable number of high-quality backlinks gets a high DA score.

17. What is RankBrain?

An artificial intelligence program developed by Google, Rankbrain uses machine learning to gather data from a variety of sources and teaches itself to generate the most relevant search results for the user. Many SEO commentators say that 'user intent' is the primary motive behind RankBrain.

18. What is an XML sitemap?

XML Sitemaps (Extensible markup language) is a list of URLs on your website in machine-readable format, which facilitates search engines to crawl the website more effectively.

19. What is AMP and how is it useful?

An open source coding framework launched by Google, Accelerated Mobile pages (AMP) is used to create a simple mobile responsive website which loads quickly on mobile devices.

AMPs are very useful as it speeds up loading, reduces bounce rate, and gives a boost to SEO efforts.

20. Explain organic, referral & Paid Traffic.

Organic traffic: When visitors come to your website after finding its link as a result of a query in a search engine.

Referral traffic: When traffic comes to your website not through a search engine but through a hyperlink on another website.

Paid traffic: Traffic that gets directed to your website through 'paid' search engine marketing & paid social media marketing campaigns.

21. What is the limit of description & title tag?

Meta Description: The suggested limit for meta description is between 150 – 160 characters.

Title tag: The suggested limit is between 50 to 60 characters.

22. What is structured data?

If you want your webpage to be reflected as a 'rich snippet' in search engine results, you must integrate structured data in your website. In simple terms, it is data coded in a specific format that makes it easier for search engines to understand it comprehensively and present it to the users in a structured rich snippet format.

23. What is anchor text?

A hyperlink visible in the form of text on a website is called anchor text. Anchor texts are valuable in SEO as they are often backlinks to other websites. Relevant anchor texts have a positive effect on websites search engine performance.

24. How will you go about optimizing a website for SEO?

Here is a list of simple steps which you can narrate in an SEO interview:

Conduct keyword analysis and list down accurate long-tail keywords.

Develop high-quality long-form content, preferably between 1600 to 2000 words.

25. What is your process of conducting competitor analysis?

Different SEO professionals use different ways to conduct competitor analysis. However, for the purpose of the interview you can narrate the following steps:

Step 1 (Shortlist keywords): To begin with, shortlist the keywords (words, phrases, and longtail keywords) that best define your website and which are used frequently.

Step 2 (Create a list of competitor’s): Search for shortlisted keywords on google and make a list of websites/webpages that rank on the top

Step 3 (Analyse competitor’s website): Do a thorough analysis of the competitor’s website & check key factors like keywords, meta data, backlinks, domain authority, blog frequency, social media engagement. etc.

Step 4 (Identify the gaps): Compare your website with that of your competitors, and identify the gaps.

26. How do you assess the performance of an SEO campaign?

Some of the metrics by which you can assess the performance of an SEO campaign are:

Keyword ranking: The rank of your website for a specific keyword is the primary metric for your SEO campaign. If your SEO campaign is doing well, your website will rank higher in the search engine result pages (SERP’s).

Backlinks: The number & quality of inbound links to your website also indicate its growing popularity.

Traffic (Organic, referral & Paid): The traffic and its source will help you gauge the efficacy of your SEM (Search engine marketing) & SMM (Social Media Marketing) strategy.

Conversion: Conversion is the ultimate goal of all marketing activities and SEO campaigns are no different. This therefore, makes CTA (Call to action by way of sales, sign-ups, services, etc.) one of the most important metrics to assess the performance of an SEO campaign.

27. What is the importance of social media in SEO?

Increased visibility : Although social shares do not affect your ranking on Google, it does have the ability to reach a wider audience. This eventually leads to more people visiting your website, thereby improving the search engine ranking.

Increased brand awareness: SEO and Social media marketing are two methods that complement each other. A brand with good social media engagement along with high-quality content on its website is likely to rank well on a search engine.

Helps in link building : There’s a good chance that influencers who use your website often, may share the link on their own websites or blogs.

28. What are some of the common errors that can derail an SEO campaign?

Some of the common errors that can harm an SEO campaign are:

Choosing the wrong keyword

Not using alternative keywords

Using mediocre or low-quality content

Publishing content that does not drive 'Call to action'

Ignoring backlinks

Ignoring technical aspects like site speed, schema markup, mobile compatibility, website security, etc.

29. What training do you have as an SEO analyst or specialist?

This is a question only you can answer, but be prepared to answer it in a way that emphasizes your experience and any advanced SEO training you’ve done.

30. What kind of analytics do you perform and what do you look for?

Because of the job you’re applying for, you might be asked several of these types of SEO analyst interview questions. Be ready. Talk about the tools you use for analytics, what you look for, and how you use those metrics to measure results and plan to make changes.

31. Which SEO analytics don’t get enough attention, in your opinion?

As per the question above, you’ll answer this based on your own experience. It might be that there are features of Google Analytics that many people don’t know how to use, or that people get caught up in the details and forget to look at the big picture, or perhaps they neglect to align analytics to the SEO strategy. Answer the question as you see fit, but do be prepared to answer it.

32. What is keyword stemming and why does it matter?

Keyword stemming is adding on to the stem of a word. For example, if the word interview was your stem, variations could be interviewing, interviewer, interviews. Using keyword stemming helps you to use more relevant keywords on a webpage without keyword stuffing or ending up with content that reads poorly.

33. What is the most important thing to look for when doing keyword research?

This is a subjective question! People new to SEO tend to focus on popular keywords without considering the competitiveness of that keyword, so that’s something you could mention. Search volume and relevancy are other factors you might discuss.

34. What is a canonical issue?

A canonical issue happens when you seem to have duplicate content. (Google penalizes for duplicate content.) This might happen if you have different versions of a URL pointing to the same webpage, for example, http://exampleURL.com and http://www.exampleURL.com.

35. How have you dealt with link penalties?

We hope you haven’t had any link penalties slapped on you by Google due to your SEO efforts, and you might want to make that clear to your interviewer! Then address the steps you’ve taken to find bad links, and either fix them if you can or to disavow those you can’t.

36. Which webmaster tools do you use and why?

Google offers so many valuable tools! Demonstrate your knowledge of them and your proficiency with them when answering this question.

37. What is Google’s preferred method of configuring a mobile site?

Google prefers that mobile websites are configured using responsive web design.

38. 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. Webmasters can use structured data to mark up content so that search engines can easily identify the type of content and deliver it as a rich snippet. Rich snippets are not part of SEO, but if used, they can deliver better results on the SERPs.

39. 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.

40. 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. SEO experts to link audits prior to doing a link building campaign, but also to make sure external links are of the quality you want to help with SEO.

41. Which are the major Google updates that have impacted SEO?

Panda and Penguin were the two most significant Google updates, although the search giant is constantly making changes to its search algorithm. Panda was introduced in 2011 and targeted poor quality content. The Penguin update was released in 2012 and targeted spammy link building techniques. Both are regularly updated by Google.

42. How has Hummingbird changed the landscape of search?

Released in 2013, Hummingbird has helped to make search contextual, moving us away from the strict adherence to keywords toward understanding a searcher’s intent.

43. What are accelerated mobile pages (AMP)?

MP is a Google-back project to push for pages that load quickly on mobile devices.

44. How do you stay up-to-date on the near-constant search algorithm changes?

You’ll want to answer this question based on the sources that you rely on for up-to-date SEO and Google news.

45. How will you measure success as an SEO analyst or specialist at our organization?

As with the answer above, this will be subjective, but be prepared to answer it by showing you understand SEO’s role in the bigger picture. Talk about aligning with business objectives, achieving goals and driving results, not just “winning more searches.”  

47. What are some common SEO mistakes you’ve seen in other organizations?

If you’re an experienced SEO executive or manager, this should be an easy question for you to answer! You can talk about the obvious mistakes such as using the wrong keywords (which is possible in so many ways), not keeping up with changes made by Google, not optimizing for mobile, ignoring analytics, and so on, but mention others that are particular to your experience too.

48. What is RankBrain and why does it matter?

As with so many things Google, no one can say exactly what it is. RankBrain is part of Google’s search algorithm. It’s an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system used to process billions of web pages to help determine which results are the most relevant, in particular, queries that are new and not necessarily related to specific keywords (to really dumb down the explanation). There isn’t a way to optimize websites for RankBrain other than to continue to focus on quality content because RankBrain is less about keywords.

49. What is PageRank and why does it matter?

PageRank is about credibility and it is used to help rank your pages. Credibility is determined in part by the age of the page, the amount and quality of the content, and the number of inbound links.

50. How do you use content marketing for SEO?

Content marketing is crucial to effective SEO because Google wants quality content, it gives you content to optimize for SEO, and it creates content other websites will link to (when done right). Content marketing is often done via a blog, but content can be created in many other forms as well, such as video, podcasts, infographics, ebooks and so on.

51. How do you use social media marketing for SEO?

The degree to which social media influences search rankings is not known, but social media still matters. For example, it can help you get backlinks when you share website content via social media platforms, and it builds your brand, which makes your website more likely to get the clicks on the search results page.

52. How do you see SEO and PPC working together to improve results?

This is another SEO interview question you’ll answer based on your experience, but some specifics you might mention include how PPC can be used to drive traffic while waiting for pages optimized for SEO to start ranking. Also, we no longer have keyword research tools just for SEO, so we have to use PPC tools. PPC can be used to try out a keyword before committing to using it for SEO.

53. What is your approach to developing an SEO strategy?

Again, you’ll answer this question based on your own experiences and knowledge. Factors you might mention include knowing the short- and long-term goals, knowing the competitive landscape, understanding the audience, etc. But how you as an SEO expert go about developing the strategy will probably be unique to your experience.

54. How do you evaluate web analytics to measure SEO performance?

As part of your answer, you will want to talk about how you use Google’s web analytics to look at direct navigation, referral traffic, numbers of visits, conversions, time on page, etc. and how you interpret all of that data to measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.

55. What’s your greatest digital marketing success story?

Obviously, this is an advanced SEO interview question we can’t help you with, but you have to anticipate and be ready to answer the question, preferably with some hard data to add credibility to your story.

56. What is your experience with managing a marketing or SEO team?

Again, this is an advanced SEO interview question we can’t help you with, but you are interviewing for an SEO executive or manager job, so you will need to talk about your experience as a manager

Explain Google’s projected plan for indexes in 2018.

Google is going to have two indexes, starting at some point in 2018: one for desktop searchers

and one for mobile searches.

57. What is Hummingbird?

Hummingbird was an overhaul of Google’s search algorithm, released in 2013. It strives to move beyond just keywords and understand a searcher’s intent.

58. Why do internal links matter?

Internal links are links within your website linking to another page within your website. Internal links help all of the content on your website to get crawled and ranked.

59. What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz. It predicts how well a website will rank in search results.

60. How do you stay current with Google’s changes as well as industry changes?

To answer this question, you’ll want to talk about those blogs or newsletters you follow, probably including the well-known SEO websites such as Moz and SearchEngineLand, but also including any others, you find beneficial.

61. How do you see SEO changing in the near future?

This answer is more subjective and no one will fault you if it turns out your predictions were wrong, but giving a well thought out answer shows you pay attention to the industry. You can talk about the two indexes Google will start using in 2018 and how that will affect mobile SEO and the continued importance of providing a good user experience (and what that might look like). Local search is still a hot topic, as is voice search. Take a look at what the pundits are saying prior to your answering your SEO interview questions and you’ll come across as someone in the know.

62.  What is Cross-linking?  What is the function of Crosslinking?

Cross-linking is the process of linking one site to another site.

It provides users with reference sites that contain the content related to the search.

The 2 websites cross-linking do not be owned by the same person.

In other words, cross-linking is a barter wherein I link to you, and you link to me.

It could be a 2-way link or 3-way link. In a 2-way link site A links to site B and site B links to site A. In a 3-way link, site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links to site A.

63. What does it mean if nothing appears while searching for the domain?

On searching for your domain and if nothing appears, then there are three possibilities.

Maybe the site is banned by search engines

Maybe no index by search engines

Some canonical issues

64. What are Webmaster tools?

Webmaster tool is a service provided by Google from where you can get backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR, etc.

65. How can you optimize the website which has millions of pages?

From an SEO point of view, for dynamic website, special additional SEO stuff has to be implemented.

Good Internal link structure

Generation of dynamic title and description

Dynamic XML sitemap generation

66. How will you neutralize a toxic link to your site?

Through Backlink Quality Checker you can know who links to your website. Now, you have to go to ‘Toxic link’ report, where you will find all the links, that are harmful to your websites. If there is any link in ‘Toxic link report’ that matches with the link on your website, then you can remove it by using ‘Google Disavov tool’.

67. Which is the most important area to include your keywords?

The most important area to include your keywords are,

Page title

Body text

Meta Description

68. What are the social media platform used for SEO ?

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn are some important platform which is used for online promotion.