Top 20 SEO Interview Questions and Answers
Search Engine Optimization is a vital component of digital marketing. Because of the constant increase in investment and focus on SEO, people seeking a profession in digital marketing can be confident in the job outlook. Your position can be robust if you have SEO skills, whether you are new to the field or are experienced digital marketers.
If you are seeking a new career in digital marketing, you must be familiar with SEO and might pursue the necessary SEO training. Apart from professional training and learning, you should also prepare to outshine in job interviews. For such robust preparation, you must know the common SEO interview questions. Thus, we have collected some of the top SEO questions to help you get your dream job.
Top SEO Interview Questions And Answers
Here are some commonly asked SEO interview questions with answers you must know before attending your interview.
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What is SEO and how does it work?
SEO is the practice or process of optimizing the website’s layout and overall performance to bring more traffic and enhance its visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, and more. SEO aims to captivate more users to a website and make them customers.
Typically, SEO works by optimizing the website’s content with suitable keywords and obtaining inbound links that raise the ranking of a piece of content and make a website more visible.
Why is SEO important to businesses?
SEO is important for businesses as it helps increase customers and improve sales, even without paid promotions. Unlike other paid digital marketing techniques, SEO provides lasting results, though one quits its practice. It brings trust and credibility to your brand, helps understand consumers, and, most importantly, does not require hefty investments like other marketing techniques.
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What are on-page SEO and off-page SEO?
On-page SEO is a method to optimize individual web pages to rank them on top and receive more relevant traffic from search engines. It refers to a component that influences how your website and web pages appear in the organic search results on search engines.
Off-page SEO is a method to optimize a website’s ranking on a search engine results page (SERPS). It is sometimes confused with link building, but it is more than that. Moreover, advertising strategies such as blogging, social bookmarking, and website design also use off-page SEO.
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What are the organic results and paid results?
- Organic Result:
Organic search results on a query are completely based on the quality & relevance of the content, along with other ranking factors. You don’t need to pay to appear in organic search results. These results are displayed after the sponsored results. You can only appear in organic results by assuring superior information and enabling user interaction.
- Paid results:
These are sponsored search results or advertisements businesses pay for to outrank organic results quickly. People spend money on SEM to promote their website to the front page of search results when users make the relevant query. The quality score and maximum CPC of a business determine its rank. This quality score increases with the money they save for the paid results.
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What do you know about web crawling?
Web crawling is a process of finding and indexing web pages. It is done by an automated script or program known as a web crawler, spider bot, or spider. In the web crawling process, a crawler thoroughly browses each page on a website to gather what it is all about. It then indexes this information update and retrieves it when a user makes a search query.
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What are SEO tools?
SEO tools are software resources that provide alerts and data about a website’s overall health and success on search engines. They also help identify flaws preventing websites from getting top ranks and earning visibility.
Some popular SEO tools are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and Moz.
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What is SEO writing?
The practice of producing web content with the aim of ranking it on the first SERP is known as SEO writing. It is achieved by performing keyword research on relevant search terms and writing original, optimized & quality content that addresses the user’s search purpose. SEO content writing makes the information on the website easier for search engines to crawl and assess.
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What are important Google Ranking Factors?
The most important Google ranking factors include the quality of content, relevant backlinks, mobile friendliness, technical SEO, page speed, user experience, domain strength, brand strength, and HTTP.
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Define keyword frequency, Keyword Density, Keyword Difficulty, and Keyword Proximity.
- Keyword frequency:
It refers to the number of times a specific keyword is used on a webpage. A higher keyword frequency means the content often repeats the keyword.
- Keyword density:
It is the ratio of the number of keywords used to the total word count in a content piece. 1-2% keyword density is considered ideal.
- Keyword difficulty:
It is a measure that shows how difficult it can be for a web page to rank in a search engine’s organic search results for a specific keyword. It is also known as keyword competition.
- Keyword proximity:
The closeness of individual terms within a search phrase is called keyword proximity. Keyword proximity in terms of SEO is the distance between the combinations of words that make up the target keyword. The indexing and ranking of a webpage will improve when the keywords are closer to one another.
What are anchor texts? What role does anchor text have in SEO?
A text or term with a hyperlink is called anchor text. It is a clickable text that directs users to another web page when clicked.
Natural anchor texts are essential in SEO practices as search engines use anchor text to understand the context of the page that the link is pointing to. This is important for SEO since it tells search engines about the site.
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What are white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO?
- White-hat SEO:
It refers to any technique that raises a website’ ranks on a SERP while preserving the integrity of your website and adhering to the terms of service of the search engines.
- Black-hat SEO:
It refers to the SEO techniques that break the rules and regulations of search engines to raise the rank of a website or page.
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Explain LSI keywords.
LSI refers to Latent Semantic Indexing. LSI keywords are terms that are considered to be semantically relevant to a primary keyword. The relevancy will increase when LSI keywords are used to optimize a web page. These keywords enable optimizing keywords without any keyword stuffing. To assess the relevance of a search query, Google’s algorithm uses LSI keywords. It helps search engines interpret the text’s meaning and decodes keywords’ semantic structure to get the best SERP results.
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How do you measure SEO success?
There are no fixed criteria to measure SEO success as it depends on various factors. We can measure it by analyzing web page ranking for certain keywords, organic traffic, time users spend on the webpage, CTR, returning visitors, domain authority score, and bounce rate.
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What is link building and why does it matter?
Link building is an SEO strategy that raises a website’s search engine ranking. Links are among the main ways search engine algorithms assess a webpage’s importance. A website’s content is useful if it attracts a lot of connections or backlinks.
Links are crucial for SEO since there is a direct relationship between the amount and quality of links pointing to your website and the volume of search traffic it receives. These links can be from the same website or other websites.
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What are long-tail keywords?
Long tail keywords are search terms consisting of more than three words. Because they are created to denote the way people search more accurately. These keywords enable you to target a specific population since they are more precise than broad phrases. They are also less competitive.
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What is the difference between a Dofollow link and a No-follow link?
A Dofollow link transfers the authority of the source website to the destination website. They are useful in terms of SEO.
Whereas a Nofollow link, often known as a backlink, is a link that doesn’t give the website its pointing to any authority. In terms of SEO, these links are useless.
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What are a TLD and ccTLD?
TLD stands for Top-Level Domain. It is the last part of a domain name. It is also called a domain extension, URL extension, or domain suffix.
ccTLD refers to the country code top-level domain. This domain type indicates a specific country or sovereign state in a TDL.
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What is an HTML Sitemap and XML sitemap?
- HTML Sitemap:
HTML sitemaps are developed for website visitors. They often contain links to a website’s pages and possible descriptions of those pages, which facilitate user navigation on your website.
- XML Sitemap:
A website’s key pages are listed in XML sitemap files so that Google can easily identify and index them. Moreover, these sitemaps aid search engines in understanding and indexing every important website page.
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Which SEO factors are not in your control?
The major SEO factor that even SEO professionals cannot control is Google. Google makes algorithmic modifications. The other elements include keyword difficulty and organic traffic, which are outside our control. You cannot even compel visitors to visit your website, share your material, stay there longer, or pay another visit.
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What are the common SEO mistakes?
The common SEO mistakes professionals often make include not knowing the target audience, not creating a roadmap for SEO campaigns, avoiding meta titles & meta descriptions, missing quality links, overlooking website speed and mobile friendliness, poor content quality, and using wrong tools.
These are some of the commonly asked SEO job interview questions that can help you get your desired job in this field. However, some questions may be in-depth, depending on the position you are interviewing for.
Search Engine Optimization will create thousands of new job opportunities in the near future. Whether you are a fresher or an experienced professional seeking a job change, being familiar with these questions will help you get the job you always wanted.
