Why do you want to pursue a career in SEO?
This can be the first question your hiring manager will ask. They want to understand your intentions in SEO as a career.
You can answer using the example below:
Digital marketing has always fascinated me, so I decided to pursue a course in it in college. After completing the course, I chose SEO as my career and have built my website, as well as started writing my blog. I have applied various SEO tactics to grow my organic traffic, including content creation, on-page, off-page SEO, and analyzing the data to solve the issues.
SEO is challenging and changing every day, which keeps me motivated to learn new techniques and apply them to my work.
Can you explain what backlinks are?
This question surely makes your hiring manager understand how well you know SEO technical terms and how you can explain them to any non-technical person.
You can answer the question like:
Backlinks are incoming links to your website from other authoritative websites. For example, if a website named Medium links to my website xyz, that link is a backlink for my website.
Google considers backlinks as votes of credibility from other websites to your site. The more high-quality backlinks, the higher the chances of ranking high on Search engines.
Explain important Google Ranking Factors.
By this question, your hiring manager wants to know if you know Google ranking factors or not.
Simply answer:
Some important Google Ranking Factors are:
- High-quality content that is informative and relevant to the user’s query.
- Backlinks: Links pointing to your website from other authoritative websites.
- User experience (UX): UX shows how easy it is for users to use your website. It includes mobile friendliness, navigation, and loading speed.
How would you know where your competitors are building backlinks?
Your interviewer wants to know if you have any knowledge about SEO tools and how to use them.
Answer:
There are a lot of third-party tools available in the market for analyzing the competitors’ backlinks, including SEMRush, Moz.
These tools give an idea of where our competitors are building their backlinks, and we can use some of those ideas for our website.
Explain the difference between On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO refers to the process of optimizing the parts of your website that are under your control. It includes optimizing title tags, heading tags, meta description, internal links, images alt text, etc.
Whereas Off-Page SEO refers to the process of focusing on improving a website’s authority by taking actions outside of your website. For example, earning backlinks from an authoritative website.
What do you understand by Organic Search Result?
The interviewer can ask this question to understand your knowledge of SEO terms.
Answer:
Organic search results are unpaid listings that appear on search engine result pages (SERP). These results are ranked based on search query and relevance and are not influenced by paid advertising.
Can you explain what meta tags are?
Meta tags are HTML tags that are placed in the <head> section of a webpage to provide information about a webpage to search engines.
Meta tags help search engines to understand the content of a webpage and can influence how the webpage appears in the search results.
Titles, descriptions, and robots are examples of meta tags.
How Do You Check the Organic Traffic of a Website?
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are the best ways to check the organic traffic of a website. These tools give data about visitors coming from unpaid results.
Alternatively, Ahrefs and Semrush can be used to determine competitors’ organic traffic.
What Do You Understand by Redirects?
Redirects is a way of sending web users from one URL to another. These are used when a website or a webpage has been moved to a new URL.
Redirects guides users to new URL even if they’re using outdated links.
What Do You Understand by URL Slug?
A URL slug is the last part of the URL that comes after the domain name and provides information about content on webpage.
What Do You Mean By Crawling?
Crawling refers to the process where search engine’s bot or crawlers discover the webpages on the internet.
Crawlers first start with crawling seed URLs and follow the hyperlinks between them to find new pages.
Explain Canonical Tag?
Canonical Tag is an HTML tag that tells search engines the main version of a webpage especially when duplicate or similar content exists.
Difference Between a 301 and a 302 Redirect?
A 301 redirect refers to a permanent redirect that tells search engines that a requested page has been moved permanently to a new location. And most of link equity of old URL should be passed to the new URL.
A 302 redirect refers to a temporary redirect that tells search engines that requested URL has temporarily moved to a new location and is expected to return to its original URL.
What Do You Mean By Local SEO?
Local SEO refers to the process of optimizing a business’s online visibility in unpaid local search results.
Local SEO focuses on location based searches happening on Google search, Google Maps, or any other search engines.
What Do You Mean by Image Alt Text?
Imag Alt text or alternate text is a short description of an image that appears on the web page to help search engines and users to understand the image when it fails to load or they are using screen reader.
What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in an HTML Hyperlink. This text helps users and Google understand the linked page’s content.
What is the Robots.txt File?
A robots.txt is a file that tells search engine crawlers which pages of the website they can access and crawl.
If you don’t have a robots.txt file on your website, then crawlers will try to access every page on your website.
Explain the Sitemap?
A sitemap is a file that lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all.
A sitemap is important for SEO as it helps search engines discover new pages and understand the website’s structure.
Explain a Follow and a No-follow Link?
A Follow Link, also known as a Do Follow Link, allows link juice to be passed from one website to another, which can improve the linked page’s ranking in search results.
A No-follow link doesn’t pass link juice, but they are still valuable for driving referral traffic to your site.
Explain a 404 Error?
A 404 error is an HTTP status code indicating that the requested page does not exist and the server could not locate it.
This error usually means that the requested page doesn’t exist or has been moved or deleted.
How Do You Find the Organic Traffic of the Website?
The best way to find the organic traffic of the website is to use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
But there are other third-party tools available to check organic traffic, like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest.
What Do You Understand by Page Speed and Tools to measure it?
Page Speed refers to the time it takes for a webpage to completely load in a user’s browser.
Page speed can be measured by using tools like Page Speed Insight, GTmetrix, etc.
What is Keyword Density?
Keyword density refers to the number of times a specific keyword has been used within a piece of content compared to its total word count.
Keyword density is calculated by dividing the keyword count by the total word count of an article and multiplying the same by 100.
What Do You Mean By Rich Snippets?
Rich Snippets, also known as Rich results, are more appealing search results that provide additional information about a webpage alongside the title, URL, and description.
Common types of rich snippets include reviews, prices, recipes, and more.
What Are Long-tail Keywords?
Long-tail keywords are more specific keyword phrases that are longer and have lower search volume than short or broad keywords.
These keywords have a higher conversion rate and are often easier to rank better than short or broad keywords.
How Do You Write an SEO Friendly Title Tag?
To write an SEO friendly title, I make sure that it is concise, relevant, and includes the primary keyword and is within a 50-60 characters limit.
How to Submit a Sitemap to Google?
To submit a Sitemap to Google, I will be using Google Search Console.
Go to Google Search Console > Indexing > Sitemaps > enter the sitemap URL > Click submit
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave the website rather than continuing to view other pages.
A higher bounce rate indicates poor user experience and can negatively impact conversion rates.