Technical SEO Questions
Google is not only a search engine, it has become a part of our life now. Millennials can’t even begin to imagine their life without searching for information on Google. Be it searching for a handyman near you, a flower shop, or searching for exotic recipes online, the search engines have made our life easier in many ways. Thus, SEO becomes a necessary tool if you want to get noticed in the digital world. However, it is still an unexplored field for a common person. Whether you are a business owner who wants to understand the importance of Search Engine Optimization to your business, or a student, or maybe you are someone who is preparing for an SEO job – you will require a guide including all the important SEO questions.
That’s why we have created a list of SEO interview questions that will give you a deep insight into the world of SEO. These are the most commonly asked SEO interview questions in most digital marketing interviews. So dive in and find the answers to our brief list of 25 SEO interview questions for beginners.
25 SEO Interview Questions and Answers
1. What is SEO?
What is SEO is the first and basic question in any SEO interview. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s the process of ranking a website higher on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing. It’s is all about increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to your website. The process involves making lots of changes to the website structure, content, and links going to the website.
2. What are the types of SEO?
There are 4 main types of SEO. All aim at greater visibility on search engines.
White Hat SEO: This is the most preferred type of SEO as it adheres to the Google guidelines. It usually takes longer to achieve success through white hat SEO. However, it delivers lasting and compounding results. This is a risk-free process as it is done as per the guidelines defined by the search engines.
Black Hat SEO: This is believed to deliver faster results as compared to white hat SEO. Black hat SEO takes a shortcut route by going against the published Google Webmaster Guidelines. Black hat SEO assures you faster results but also carries a substantial risk of getting your website ranked lower or banned from search results.
Grey Hat SEO: Grey Hat SEO takes a middle way and finds its way through Google guidelines. These techniques are technically legal but not ethically questionable.
Negative SEO: This is the practice of implementing techniques on a competitor’s website with the intent of causing harm. Some of the negative SEO techniques are posting negative reviews, stealing content, bombarding spammy links to the competitor’s sites, hacking websites, etc.
3. What are various SEO tools?
SEO tools make the optimization process easy by providing all the relevant data of the website. It also tracks the progress of ranking. Some of the widely used SEO tools are Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, ahrefs, MOZ, Alexa, serped.net etc.
4. What are backlinks?
The incoming links to a website are called backlinks. Google uses backlinks as a ranking factor when one website links to another, which means the content of the website is noteworthy.
5. What are outbound links?
Outbound links are also known as external links. These are the links that navigate you to another website. Outbound links send visitors to a different website.
6. What is Cross-linking?
Cross-linking is the process of linking two different websites together. Cross-linking is an important process on which the internet is built.
7. What is link building and how It matters?
Link building is a process of getting web pages linked to each other with the help of hyperlinks. Building links is an important technique used by many SEO experts. Anyone who masters the art of link building can put themselves ahead of their competitors.
8. What is on-page and off-page SEO?
On-page SEO is a practice of optimizing individual web pages to attain higher search engine ranking and attracting relevant traffic. On-page involves optimization using both content and the HTML source code of a page.
Off-page SEO or off-site SEO refers to efforts taken outside the website to improve your website ranking.
9. What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are one of the widely used and the most basic techniques used by all SEO practitioners. Meta tags are an invisible snippet of codes that tells search engines about the content on your website. It gets displayed on the search engine results pages when Google shows your website in the searched list.
10. What is the difference between PR (PageRank) and SERP (Search Engine Result Page)?
PageRank is Google ranking in a numeric format, which represents how important a webpage is on the web. Google is pretty secretive about the PRs, though it plays an important role in Google algorithms.
SERP (Search Engine Result Page) is the searches displayed by the search engine in response to the query by a searcher. SERP typically means all the search results, but SEO practitioner only considers the results on the first page of the search results.
11. What are the differences between SEO and SEM?
SEO is about optimizing your website for achieving a higher ranking on the search engine.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is the process of achieving a higher ranking on search engines either organically or by paid search ads.
12. How can you cross-check whether your SEO campaign is working or not?
To know whether your SEO campaign is working or not, the first approach is to check the website statistics. The data tells us about the origin of the traffic. Another way to check is to search manually on search engines by using all the relevant keywords and key phrases. The position at which your website appears will tell you whether your campaign is working or not.
13. What is PPC?
PPC (Pay Per Click) is also known as cost per click. PPC is an internet advertising model in which an advertiser pays a fee every time one of their ads gets clicked. If you ever paid attention to your search results, you would notice paid ads appearing along with your search results with a prefix AD before the link.
14. How to optimize a page that has millions of pages?
Optimizing a large website is not an easy task, as millions of pages mean a lot of content. Additional SEO techniques are used in this case, such as:
- Removing Duplicate Pages
- Creating a good link structure
- Generating dynamic title and descriptions
- Dynamic XML sitemap generation
15. What are the latest updates in Google?
The latest algorithm updates by Google are:
- BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer): Natural Language processing update
- Core updates: Done regularly
For Google Update history, you can visit, https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
16. What the key aspects of the BERT update?
BERT is used by Google to understand natural language. It processes words’ relation with all the other words in the sentence, much like how the human brain comprehends a conversation. BERT has no doubt created a much higher challenge for people in the SEO industry to create optimized content.
17. What is keyword stemming?
Keyword Stemming is the ability of search engines to understand different word forms of a particular search query. It is an important SEO technique where you take one popular keyword and add suffix, prefix, or pluralization to make it a new word. This process gives websites the option to explore more keywords to drive traffic.
18. What is Google sandbox?
Google sandbox is a metaphorical term used by Google to prevent new websites from getting high ranks. Google sandbox is a hypothetical theory created by SEOs over the years.
19. What is the meaning of competition analysis?
Competitions analysis is comparing the current ranking of your website with the high-ranking competitor’s site. The process includes knowing the strength (DA, PA, Backlinks) of the competitor’s site and preparing ranking strategies based on that.
20. What are webmaster tools?
Webmaster tools is a free service by Google that provides backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, indexing data, CTR, etc. This service helps you evaluate and maintain your position in search results.
21. How often one must perform a link audit?
A link audit is a tedious and time-consuming process. In the initial days of optimization, the website may require frequent link audits. However, a complete link audit should be done once a month.
22. How do you use social media marketing for SEO?
Various popular social media platforms can be used for SEO like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Social media is very important for SEO. It not only empowers optimization activities but also makes them lucrative. It is still not known to what degree social media influences search ranking, but yet it matters. Social media helps build your brand, which increases the possibility of getting more visitors to your website, thus higher ranking.
23. What is Google hummingbird?
Hummingbird is a name given to a major Google algorithm change. The algorithm works on natural language queries. It doesn’t merely look for the particular searched keyword, but also considers the context and meaning of that.
24. What will you do if the search engines ban your website for black hat practices?
If your website gets banned, you can apply for re-inclusion after correcting the mistakes.
25. What are the most important places to include in your keywords?
The most important areas to add your keywords are:
- URL
- Title
- H-tags
- Meta Description
- Content