1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.