SEO Interview Qustions

Following are most frequently asked SEO Job Interview Questions for both beginners as well as
experienced Digital marketing professionals.

These interview questions are more like a jump start towards your aim, and fully prepare you for
your job interview.

Q1. What does SEO stand for?

SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Q2. What is SEO? Name the significant types of SEO methods?

SEO (Search engine optimization) is a process of changing the position of a web site or a web
page in a search engine results by using keywords.

Two Types of SEO are:

• On Page Optimization
• Off Page Optimization

Q3. Why are search engines so important?

Search engines are the workhorses of the World Wide Web. They allow people to search for
related data and internet sites without any particular technical expertise.

Q4. What is a domain?

Each site has an IP address, which is the location of the website. Quite than having to keep in
mind other strings of numbers for every site you need to visit, we allocate a name to every
domain which is easier to keep in mind.

Q5. What’s a SERP?

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are the different pages displayed by search engines in
response to searches by people

Q6. Why SEO is so important to businesses?

If you want your business to be successful in the digital world, it is crucial to have a well-
optimized website. One big advantage of SEO is, if you stop your SEO activities now, your
results won’t stop tomorrow. It is very important for businesses if they desire to make more sales
without changing high marketing costs.

Q7. What makes a website search engine friendly to customers ?

Several factors are accountable for making a website search engine friendly to people, including
different keywords, quality content, titles, metadata, etc. A website needs these factors to be
ranked by a search engine and therefore found by a user.

Q8. What’s an organic search result?

Organic search result primarily refers unpaid search results displayed by Google in response to
a query entered by the, known as the SERPs (Search Engine Result Page). Relevant options are
found just under the paid results.

Q9. How do you measure the success of SEO?

People might want to answer this question based on the type of company they are interviewing
for, as their goals might differ . In addition to it, there are many ways to measure KPIs (Key
performance indicators). During the interview, likely answers might include increasing traffic to
a website and increasing conversions such as sales, growing number of inbound links, driving
traffic, or increasing referral traffic. It’s important that an SEO professional measures the result to
know if the strategy need is viable.

Q10. What is a Search Engine?

Search engine is a program that searches and identifies different types of items in a database that
correspond to keywords used by the user, especially for finding particular sites on the World
Wide Web in reference to the search volume. It answers the queries of the user by directing them
to relevant results. Hence, improving search engine rankings and search engine marketing.

Q11. Name a few search engines?

Most widely used search engines around the globe are Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Bing,
Youtube & Yandex.

Q12. Name the most important Google ranking factors :

• Content Type
• Content Depth
• User experience
• Quality & Relevant Backlinks
• Quality Content
• Page Speed
• Brand Strength
• Social Signals
• Content Freshness
• Schema Code
• Mobile First
• HTTPS
• Domain Authority

Q13. How do you approach keyword research?

Everyone in general will have a different approach to this answer. You’ll want to share
information about which tools you use for research, with brief knowledge of keyword density to.
If you use Google Keyword Planner to do your keyword research, then that will be your answer
for the tool used. You must also explain how you go about it.

Q14. What is web crawling?

It is the process where search engine bots crawl websites for searching for relevant keywords and
integrating data. Those are called a spider bot.

Q15. What is a paid result?

Paid results is a way in which advertisers get their ads displayed over the organic results on
SERP by paying for their content. It is a quick way for advertisers to get their content to rank.

Q16. What is link building and why does it matter?

The primary reason for Google’s existence is to serve us with information . That means at any
given point Google is constantly trying to show the most relevant to any given searcher. In
addition to it, Google considers every criteria possible, search engine constantly looking if other
websites have linked to yours. If yes, that means your content is worth linking and is highly
credible and is responding to search queries.

Q17. What is Google Autocomplete?

Google Autocomplete is a function in Google and other search engines. When a user starts
typing in the search box, the Google autocomplete function gives you a list of options to
complete your search.

Q18. What are backlinks?

A backlink is the links into a website from an external source, as mentioned in link building.

Q19. What is page speed and why does it matter?

Page speed refers to how quick your web-site loads for a user, something Google takes into
account while ranking websites since a faster loading page directly translate to better user
experience. If the interviewer asks what you would do to increase page speed, describe how
you’ve achieved this in the past with examples such as reducing image sizes, enabling
compression, reducing redirects, removing render-blocking JavaScript, leveraging browser
caching, improve server response time, using a content distribution network to compress files,
optimizing the code, etc.

Q20. Define Googlebot?

Googlebot is referred to as the Google’s web crawler to find web pages.

Q21. What is DA?

DA (Domain Authority) is a developed by MOZ, ranging from 0 to 100. The higher the better.
DA, if more then you have the better the possibility of ranking.

Q22. Difference between DA and PA.

DA refers to Domain Authority, explaining the authority of your entire website. Higher the DA,
the higher the possibility of ranking.

PA refers to Page Authority. It explains the authority of a specific page,

Q23. Why are keywords important?

Keywords are the links between what individuals are searching for and your website. Right ones
will reach to right searchers. Going ahead with the correct keywords and using them, will
guarantee most benefit to you as Google understands who will most benefit from discovering you
and improved search ranking.

Q24. Describe On-page SEO?

On-page optimization tells about the changes you can execute on the webpage to optimize the
site and increase upgrades in rankings.

Q25. Describe Off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO is referred to as the process of depicting exercises, we perform on a site to
improve rankings.

Q26. What is a long tail keyword?

Long-tail keywords are explicit keyword phrases that are longer and increasingly searchers
might use in a search. They help in generating far less traffic and are very specific, but are easy
to rank for and they generate much better conversions as compared to larger root keywords.

Q27. Explain SSL/HTTPS Update?

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and HTTPS stands Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure.
The update helped in providing security. When websites move to HTTPS we are encoding the
data sent between our browser and the webpage, offering a secure encounter.

Q28. What is a Google Penalty?

Wikipedia clarifies it best when they characterize a Google Penalty:

“A Google penalty is the negative effect on a website’s search rankings dependent on updates to
Google’s search algorithms or manual review. The penalty can be a by-product of an algorithm
update or an intentional penalization for different black-hat SEO techniques.”

Q29. How to optimize a URL?

List of things to consider when looking to optimize URLs.

• Add your mobile URLs to a sitemap
• Canonicalize your URLs
• URLs must be readable by everybody
• Include your target keyword

Q30. What’s the difference between White Hat and Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO doesn’t hold fast to the terms and conditions of Google’s search engine

White Hat SEO will try to give their users the most relevant experience and and acquire links
organically.

Q31. What is Keyword Difficulty ?

It is a type of measurement used by Ahrefs to tell how difficult a keyword would be to rank for.
Higher the number, more difficult it would be.

Q32. How do you stay updated on SEO news?

Some acceptable resources which help us are :

• Search Engine Roundtable
• Search Engine Land
• Search Engine Watch
• Search Engine Journal

Q33. Which types of links are the most valuable?

Contextual links are the most powerful and valuable links that one can get. However, a home
page link is also going to have the most value.

Q34. What is Keyword Stuffing?

It is a black hat SEO method which escalates the number of keyword density to a very high range
in order to rank for potential keywords. After the panda update, it is advised not to manipulate
keyword stuff.

Q35. Define Keyword Prominence?