SEO Interview Questions

Are you preparing for an SEO Interview and looking for a list of SEO Interview Questions?

You’ve probably landed (rather, ‘clicked’) on the right page.

Of course, you do know a lot of what SEO is, but framing the correct answer for the questions that will be asked in the interviews are critical to cracking the interview. Don’t you agree?

If yes, here’s a long list of questions which you should prepare yourself before heading for the SEO interview. The questions range from the very basics to advanced and are suitable for anyone looking for an SEO-based role.

We’ve divided the questions into different sets that can help you skip through to the ones which you need to brush up.

Questions about Basic SEO:

  • What is SEO & why is it so important?
  • What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
  • How do you differentiate between On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO?
  • What is Black Hat SEO?
  • Can you name a few Black Hat SEO techniques?
  • How do you do a competitive analysis for Organic Search?

Questions about the SEO Industry:

  • What attracted you to the SEO industry?
  • What do you enjoy most about working in SEO?
  • How do you think your experience of SEO will benefit our business?
  • What are you looking forward to working in the SEO field?
  • What steps would you follow to optimize a website to get ranked on Google?
  • What are the common SEO mistakes while producing digital content?
  • Have you ever dealt with link penalties? How?
  • After implementing your SEO strategy for a site, if you are still not able to impact the business. What would be your next step?
  • What SEO activities should businesses stay away from, to avoid a penalty?
  • Have you made any mistakes in doing SEO and how did you rectify them?

Questions about Keyword Research:

  • What is the definition of a Keyword?
  • What do you mean by Keyword Research? What approach would you take to do keyword research?
  • What is a long tail Keyword?
  • What are the LSI keywords?
  • How will you start keyword research? Which tools would you use for doing it?

Questions about On-Page:

  • What are Header tags?
  • How many H1 tags should be there on a page?
  • How many H2s, H3s, H4s should be included in a page?
  • What is a Page Title?
  • What is the definition of a URL?
  • What is an SEO friendly URL? Should you use special characters in URLs?
  • What is a Meta Description? Is a meta description important for SEO? Why?
  • What is Keyword density?
  • What is keyword frequency?
  • What is the usage of anchor tag in SEO?
  • Which are the most important areas to include your keyword for the SEO purpose?
  • Why is the title tag valuable?
  • Does Google use the keyword meta tags?
  • What is keyword proximity?

Questions for Off-Page/Link building activities:

  • What are backlinks?
  • Why are backlinks important in SEO?
  • How do you do link building?
  • What are the different Off-page SEO techniques?
  • What is the difference between Do-Follow and No-Follow link?
  • What is internal linking? What are some creative ways to do Internal linking?
  • What is an incoming or outgoing link?
  • Why is an anchor text important is Backlinking?
  • What do you mean by Anchor text over-optimization?
  • What is meant by Anchor Text Diversification? Why is it recommended?
  • What is contextual backlink? How do you decide if a link is contextual or not?
  • How will you check the number of backlinks to your competitor’s site? Which tools do you trust and why?
  • What are the best ways of acquiring natural backlinks to your site?
  • Do you have any examples of gaining multiple natural backlinks?
  • Why is there a need to use the disavow tool?
  • How do you decide which domains need to be disavowed?
  • What is Guest posting?
  • What is Outreach? What is your approach to doing outreach?
  • What is Blog commenting? Is the link value same as that of a normal link?
  • What is Domain Authority?
  • What is Directory Submission?
  • What is Article submission?
  • What is Press Release submission?
  • What are Classified ads?
  • What is Forum Posting?
  • What is a Business directory?
  • What is Social Bookmarking?
  • What is Social Networking?

Questions about Technical SEO:

  • What is robots.txt? Why it is important?
  • What is an HTML and XML Sitemap?
  • How can I see what pages are being indexed in Google? Suggest a manual method to do this.
  • How do I request Google to Index a page?
  • What are doorway pages?
  • What are 404 errors? (Or, types of 4XX errors)
  • What is a 301 redirect?
  • What is a 302 redirect?
  • In what cases you should redirect your pages? When should you do a 301 or 302 redirect?
  • What do you understand by an SEO Audit? What all factors would you consider doing an audit
  • What is Cloaking?
  • What is Google sandbox?
  • How do you separate words in URL?
  • Why do you think Google considers the loading time of a website in Ranking?
  • What method should you use to decrease the loading time of a website?
  • How would you maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines?
  • When is re-inclusion applied in a search engine’s index?
  • What does it mean by “repeat the search with the omitted results included”?
  • What is Duplicate content?
  • What is CTR and how to boost it?
  • What is bounce rate?
  • What is Pogo-Sticking?
  • What is the difference between bounce rate and pogo-sticking?
  • What are the advantages of submitting sites to search directories?
  • What will you do to make a website search engine friendly?
  • What will you do for the company website you are working for, decides to move all the contents to a new domain?
  • What is a Canonical issue? How will you resolve them?
  • Share a list of scenarios when you should use a canonical?
  • If an advertiser does a PPC campaign, will it affect the organic SEO ranking?
  • What is an Image Alt Text?
  • What is an RSS Feed?
  • What is a Search Engine? Name a few search engines.
  • What is a Domain?
  • What is a Domain Extension? What factors need to be considered to choose a domain extension?
  • What is ccTLD?
  • What is a Web Server?
  • What is Web Hosting? Will the choice of a web-host vary based on the type of business?
  • What is Crawling?
  • What is Indexing?
  • What do you mean by Spider in SEO?
  • What is the main usage of search engine spiders?
  • What is a SERP? How has the SERP layout changed over the years?
  • What is an Organic Result?
  • What are Paid results? Do paid results impact organic results?
  • What is “Google Suggest” or “Autocomplete”?

Questions about Google Algorithm:

  • What do you mean by Google Algorithm? How often does Google make changes in that?
  • What are the most important Google ranking factors?
  • Can you share highlights of Google Panda? Google Penguin? Google Hummingbird? Mobilegeddon? Google Pigeon?
  • What is a Google Penalty?
  • What is HTTPS/SSL Update? Which sites need them?
  • What is the Google Knowledge Graph?
  • What are Image Packs?
  • What is Google PageRank? Is it still being used or is a similar feature in place?
  • What is RainBrain Algorithm? What impact does it have on the overall organic strategy of a business?
  • What is Mobile-Friendly Update and when was it launched?
  • How many times does Google release the algorithms and updates visible to users?
  • What is the EMD update?
  • If we use a keyword in domain, Will it hit with EMD filter?
  • What is a Google Dance?

Questions about Local SEO:

  • What is Google My Business?
  • How would you go about building your Local SEO Strategy?
  • Why is there a need to have a uniform address & Phone number across all places?

Questions about AMP:

  • What is AMP?
  • What type of sites should implement AMP?
  • How much has AMP changed over the years?
  • Have there been similar initiatives by other Organizations/groups like AMP?
  • What are the new updates which AMP plans to roll out?
  • What are the benefits of an AMP page?

Questions about SEO Tools:

  • Can you name of a few Popular SEO Tools?
  • Have you used Google Webmaster Tools/Google Search Console? What are the highlight features?
  • What is Google Analytics?
  • What are the keyword research tools available in the market?
  • Why is Google AdWords Keyword Planner not displaying actual no of searches?
  • Which tool do you use to analyze the present trending topics in Google?
  • What is the goal in Google Analytics?
  • What is a funnel in Google Analytics?
  • What are Google Trends?
  • What are Crawl Stats?
  • What is a Disavow tool?
  • What is Google Fetch

Questions for Structured Data:

  • What is Schema?
  • What are common types of Schema’s used in websites?
  • How do you check if the Schema added onto a page is correct or not?
  • What is Google’s Rich Answer Box? How can a website get featured?
  • What are the various SERP Features and how can structured data help make the most of it?

Do you feel any other question can be added to the list? Share it in the comments and we’ll add it up.

And if you’re just starting in Digital Marketing, here’s a 5-step guide to get started with Digital Marketing.

In case, you’re preparing for a Social Media Interview, click here for Interview Questions.

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Payal Pawar

Payal Pawar

Thanks for sharing interview questions and answers for SEO. This site is best for SEO. This was the Very helpful and informative article for any SEO students. I’m very hopful that u will keep sharing this type of articles in near future for d benefits of SEO.Thank u sir…

digitortoise

digitortoise

Thanks for reading Payal! Glad it helped.

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