Top 20 SEO Interview Questions & Answers

Introduction

You must have heard about the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Almost every business is leveraging digital marketing and SEO to make the brand visible and rank itself on the first page of the Google search. As more and more companies realize the need for SEO, businesses have started investing more in SEO-based branding. Whether a fresher or an experienced professional planning for an SEO interview, this article will help. It will give you a list of some common SEO interview questions and answers to ace your upcoming SEO interview. Before digging deep into the SEO interview questions and answers, let us take a quick look at what SEO is.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Whether you are going for an SEO interview or any other technical interview, the interviewer may ask you about what SEO is? Search engines like Google are libraries and search machines in this digital age. SEO is the practice and art of optimizing web pages and websites. SEO professionals perform this to enhance the quantity of traffic to the website by ranking the website on the first page of a Google search. With the increase in traffic, the brand or company gets more visibility online. To understand more about how SEO works, tap Board Infinity. Let us now jump straight into the SEO interview questions (2022).

SEO Interview Questions and Answers 2023

Here is a list of common SEO interview questions and answers (2023) you should know before facing your upcoming interview.

1. What are the various types of SEO? Can you explain them?

Answer: There are three different types of SEO available. These are:

• On-page SEO: The SEO professional optimizes the web site's content with this SEO technique. They use keywords, meta titles, meta descriptions, and internal links. All these on-page SEO elements help the search engine understand what your website comprises.
• Off-page SEO: It is another optimization technique that helps create visibility, trust, and exposure to your brand or business service. Off-page SEO works as link-building, where the SEO professional backlinks or redirects visitors to your brand's website. Quora marketing is one such example of off-page SEO.
• Technical SEO: It focuses on whether your brand's website is cached and compressed precisely for efficiency. One prominent example of technical SEO is procuring an SSL certificate for secure online payment on your website.

2. What are the prominent SEO tools you have used so far?

Answer: There are different categories of tools for different SEO approaches. Some of them are:

• I prefer tools like Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, and other premium keyword finders for on-page SEO.
• I know Moz, SEMRush, and Ahrefs for off-page SEO.
• Tools like Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), Screaming Frog, Hubspot website grader, etc., are prominent for technical SEO.
• Google Analytics and Google Search Console are prominent for tracking the website's performance.

3. What, according to you, makes a website optimized?

Answer: A website's optimization for ranking it at the top of the Google search depends on various factors. Some of them are:

• Use primary and secondary keywords precisely.
• Proper implementation of meta tags, title tags, and alt tags also helps optimize.
• We can optimize through off-page SEO by picking up & using quality backlinks through high DA (domain authority) websites.
• Other factors like a non-expired SSL certificate or the website's speed also work as pivotal factors.
• Adding Call to Action (CTAs) during off-page SEO can bring your audience to your brand page and help you in organic traffic.
• You can follow various essential best practices to optimize your website for SEO.
  

4. How will you define keywords in SEO? What are its types?

Answer: Keywords are essential words or phrases that define what your website or webpage content revolves around. The search engine also understands what your content wants to deliver through these keywords. These are often those words or phrases that users search in search engines.

There are nine different categories of keywords. These are the long-tail, short-tail, long-term, short-term, customer defining, product defining, geo-targeting, and intent targeting. These keywords have the power to amplify your site/page optimization efforts when used in various contexts.

5. Do you know what local SEO is?

Answer: Local SEO is a marketing practice that involves optimizing your brand's online presence for potential local customers. SEO professionals perform this search optimization for brand visibility concerning local search. Managing your Google business profile, local link building, and building citations are some well-known practices for local SEO.

6. What do you know about web crawling?

Answer: Every search engine has its crawler/spider or spider-bot, autonomous programs, and internet bots. They crawl all web pages and websites for indexing on the World Wide Web. Crawlers also use hyperlinks to link one website with the other and make our searching easier. This process of indexing web pages and websites for better browsing and searching is called web crawling.

7. How will you define backlinks?

Answer: Backlinks or inbound links are links created from one website to a page on another website. Some well-known search engines like Google and Bing consider backlinks endorsements or votes for optimizing a specific page. Pages having a higher backlink endorsement count or a considerable number of backlinks tend to gain higher organic search engine rankings.

8. How will you explain Content SEO to a beginner?

Answer: Content SEO is the technique where SEO experts create web content that helps rank the web pages at the top of the Google search. Apart from writing the content, the SEO professionals or content creators should also use meta tags and keyword strategies to make it optimized for the search engine to search.

9. Have you heard of the term cloaking in SEO? Is it legit?

Answer: Cloaking is a deceitful practice of optimizing a website for a better search appearance. In this technique, dissimilar content gets shown to the crawler than what exists for the end-users to view.

No, it is not legit. We can consider it a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

10. Why do we use image alt (alternate) text?

Answer: Search engines cannot understand the context of the image. So to give the search engine an idea of what the image is about, we use image alt text. It can be a ranking factor for Google to optimize image searches.

11. What is Robot's Meta Tag?

Answer: With declarations like NOFOLLOW, FOLLOW, NOINDEX, and INDEX, the Robot's Meta Tag determines the search engines to manage the page.

12. What do you mean by bounce rate in SEO?

Answer: We can define bounce rate as the percentage of a single engagement visit to your web page or website. Bouncing from one website/web page to the other without staying in for a considerable time reduces SEO. Google Analytics tracks the number of visitors who come to your web page or website and leave without viewing any other website or webpage. This practice reduces the bounce rate. Again if a visitor engages with your page meaningfully without leaving your page or hopping to another website – your page rank boosts.

13. How does guest blogging help in SEO?

Answer: Guest blogging helps in building a relationship. Guest blogging can increase SEO because it hosts another business's post and redirects the visitors to your website or business. Again, the company will get exposure & potential leads from new audiences as the guest blog hosting site already have hundreds or thousands of regular readers. Such a way of boosting your website's traffic from external sites is called off-page SEO.

14. What, according to you, will make your website search engine friendly?

Answer: There are lots of essential factors that make the website search engine friendly. Some of these elements are:

• Proper placement of keywords
• Catchy title
• Quality content
• Suitable use of meta description and meta title

All these factors help rank the website on the first page or at the top of the search engine. Also, because of these elements, search engine crawlers can understand what your content comprises or talking about & in what context.

15. List the names for different types of off-page SEO.

Answer: Some well-known techniques used to achieve off-page SEO are:

• Blog Post
• Quora Answer
• Article Post
• Social Bookmarking
• Blog Comments
• Forum Posting
• Directory Submission
• Guest Posting
• Press Release Submission
• Regional Directory Submission
• Deep-link Directory Submission
  

16. What are anchor texts?

Answer: Anchor texts are clickable texts that help in creating a hyperlink. Apart from its web-related use, it also helps in SEO by making the search engine understand what content your page is holding. The SEO value increases if those hyperlinks carry proper keywords. But we should mind that over-optimizing can also lead to punishment by the search engine. In addition, we have to place these anchor texts naturally with diversity like a long tail, branded, partial, image-based links, and exact matches.

17. What, according to you, is an SEO-friendly URL?

Answer: A URL is SEO-friendly if it is easy for search engine crawlers and audiences to apprehend. So the SEO-friendly URL qualities are:

• They are static rather than dynamic
• They are reader-friendly
• They are optimized with appropriate keywords
• They are short yet precise, etc.

18. What do you know about 301 redirects?

Answer: It is an HTTP status code that the web server sends to a browser. It determines the users and search engines to redirect from an old URL to a new one. It is when the webmaster wants to divert or redirect visitors from one URL to another. There could be multiple reasons for such a 301 redirect, such as shifting to a new domain, a previous link to the server not found, etc.

19. What is Forum Posting?

Answer: It is an off-page SEO strategy in which the SEO professional needs to create a profile or account & engage with other various audiences and readers, and participate in discussions and suggestions by providing backlinks to your site or promoting your brand for better visibility. Such approaches evolve as an excellent standard to reach out to potential customers and visitors. Some advertisers try to spam the entire process, which leads to a loss of credibility. The engagement should be in a way where you can engage with users, educate them, help them find the solution, clear their doubts, etc.

20. What is a Penguin update?

Answer: Google often updates its algorithm to better ranking the crawled sites and hence name them. Penguin update came in 2012 that helps to detect websites with spammy backlinks and identify those websites that use every other black-hat technique for linking.

Conclusion

We hope this article has given a quick walkthrough of the top SEO interview questions & answers commonly asked during the interview.

If you want to enhance your SEO Skills and conquer this field, enroll in Board Infinity's Digital Marketing Course, where you'll acquire in-depth knowledge about this field through various video tutorials, PDFs, and one on one conversations from industry experts.