Top 40+ SEO Interview Questions And Answers 2023

SEO Interview Questions And Answers prepared from Codingcompiler experts. These Search Engine Optimization(SEO) Interview Questions were asked in various interviews conducted by top multinational companies across the globe. We hope that these interview questions on Vagrant will help you in cracking your next job interview. All the best and happy learning.

In this article, you’ll learn

SEO Interview Questions
SEO Interview Questions And Answers
Advanced SEO interview Questions And Answers
The Best SEO Digital Marketing Interview Questions And Answers
Real-time SEO Interview Questions And Answers

Table of Contents

SEO Interview Questions

What is SEO?
How do you measure SEO success?
How did you learn SEO?
What is onpage SEO?
What is Off-page SEO?
What do you understand by a search engine?
What is the difference between On Page SEO and Off Page SEO?
What is the usage of an anchor tag in SEO?
Which SEO tools do you regularly use?
How do you approach keyword research?

[Related Article: Digital Marketing Interview Questions]

SEO Interview Questions And Answers

1. What is SEO?

Ans. According to Moz, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is:

The practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

Quality of traffic. It’s about being targeted. Having the right people clicking the website who have demonstrated an interest in the site’s content (product or service).

The quantity of traffic. Once it’s the right people, the more the better.

Organic results. People trust the organic search results more than they do the paid ads. You get more clicks and better conversions. Most importantly, a better ROI.

2. How do you measure SEO success?

Answer: You might want to answer this question based on the type of company you’re interviewing for, as goals might differ. In addition, there are a variety of ways to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and, therefore, success. During an SEO interview, possible answers might include increasing traffic to a website or particular landing page, increasing conversions such as newsletter signups or sales, growing the number of inbound links, driving traffic for a particular keyword phrase, or increasing referral traffic. It’s critical that an SEO professional measures result to know if the tactics and strategy need to change to succeed.

3. How did you learn SEO?

Answer: Obviously, this answer will depend on your individual situation, but it matters because a potential employer wants to ensure that you are well-versed in SEO best practices. If you learned SEO by the seat of your pants at your last job because someone had to do it, an employer might doubt the quality of the skillset you offer. And, if that’s the case, you can always get certified before applying for that job to ensure you are well trained!

4. What is onpage SEO?

Answer: On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.

5. What is Off-page SEO?

Answer: Off-page SEO (also called “off-site SEO”) refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs).

6. What do you understand by a search engine?

Answer: A search engine is a web-based software program that is developed to search and find information on the World Wide Web. It enables internet users to search the information via the World Wide Web (WWW). The user is required to enter keywords or phrases into the search engines and then search engine searches websites, web pages or documents containing the similar keywords and presents a list of web pages with same keywords in the search engine result pages.

We can say that it generally answers the queries entered by the users in the form of a list of search results. So, it is a web-based tool that enables us to find information on the World Wide Web. Some of the popular search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

7. What is the difference between On Page SEO and Off Page SEO?

Answer: In On Page SEO, optimization is done on the website that involves making changes in the title tag, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problem, managing robots.txt, etc. Whereas, in off page SEO, the primary focus is on building backlinks and social media promotion.

On page SEO techniques:

It mainly involves optimizing the page elements such as:

Page Title
Page description
Canonical URL
Open Graph Tags
Page Headers and Sub-Headers
Paragraph Text
Alt Image Tags
Internal and External Links

Off page SEO techniques:

It mainly focuses on the following methods:

Link Building
Blogging
Social Media
Press Release Submission

8. What is the usage of an anchor tag in SEO?

Answer: The anchor tag is used to make click-able text written on a hyperlink, i.e., it is a clickable text in a hyperlink. It enhances the user experience as it takes the users directly to a specific area of a webpage. They are not required to scroll down the information to find a particular section. So, it is a way to improve navigation.

It also enables webmasters to keep things in order as there is no need of creating different web pages or splitting up a document. Google also sends users to a specific part of your page using this tag. You can attach anchor tag to a word or a phrase. It takes the reader down to a different section of the page instead of another page. When you use this tag, you create a unique URL on the same page.

9. Which SEO tools do you regularly use?

Answer: You will likely have tools you’re familiar with, and you’ll want to talk about those. If you don’t yet have much of a toolbox because you’re new to SEO, check out the multiple webmaster tools Google offers, as well as the tools offered by Moz.

10. What is webmaster tool in SEO?

Answer: A webmaster is a free service by Google which provides free Indexing data, backlinks information, crawl errors, search queries, CTR, website malware errors and submits the XML sitemap. It is a collection of SEO tools that allow you to control your site in Google as well as allows Google to communicate with webmasters. For example, if anything goes wrong like crawling mistakes, plenty of 404 pages, manual penalties, and malware identified, Google will speak to you through this tool. If you use GWT, you don’t need to use some other costlier tools. So, it is a free toolset that helps you understand what is going on with your site by providing useful information about your site.

Advanced SEO interview Questions And Answers

11. How do you approach keyword research?

Answer: As with the question above, your answer might vary. You’ll want to explain which keyword tools you use for research, as well as how you go about it. For example, if you use Google Keyword Planner to do your keyword research, then that’s your answer for the tool used. But you must also explain how you go about it. You must demonstrate you do more than simply guess at a keyword and type that into the tool before checking the results. For example, perhaps you use personas to consider potential problems a prospect faces, and you look for keywords around that. You should also explain that you consider longer keyword phrases, search volume, and the competitiveness of a keyword. Demonstrate that you know how to find the sweet spot in keyword research, where the keyword narrower so it’s targeted and has good search volume, but is not highly competitive.

12. Why is SEO so important?

Ans. This is probably the most pertinent SEO interview question you’ll be asked…

Almost everyone uses Google to search for products and services. Searchers trust the results of a Google search, so much so, less than 5% of people bother to check page 2 of the search results.

By having your business at the top of the search results you allow people who are interested in your product or services to find your business.

If that’s your website or business that means making more sales without high marketing costs.

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

Answer: Page speed refers to how fast your 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.

14. Does Google use the keyword meta tags?

Answer: No, Google does not use the keyword meta tags in web search rankings. It is believed that Google ignores the meta tags keywords due to their misuse.

15. Which meta tags matter?

Answer: Meta tags have changed since SEO became a common practice, but two remain critical: the page title and the meta description. Stick to these when answering your interview question. The page title (sometimes called SEO title) plays an important role in ranking but it is also important because it is the title that shows on the Search Results Page (SERP). It must use a keyword to rank well with Google but it must also be compelling so a user will want to click on it. The meta description does not affect ranking, but it also plays a role in the SERP because it also must make the user want to click on the search result. You should also mention that Google recently increased the character length limit of meta descriptions to around 280 to 320 (no one is sure of the actual limit yet).

Advanced SEO Interview Questions And Answers

16. What is the difference between a do-follow and no-follow and how are they used?

Answer: Nofollow links exist because we don’t want every single webpage or link to be something a search engine crawls and ranks. Therefore, no-follow link attributes tell search engine bots not to follow a certain link. The link is still clickable for a user, but not followed by a bot. On the other hand, all other links could be considered do-follow links, even though they don’t have to have special attributes to tell the search engine bots to follow them—the bots will by default.

17. What is Crawling?

Ans. Crawling or web crawling refers to an automated process through which search engines filtrate web pages for proper indexing.

Web crawlers go through web pages, look for relevant keywords, hyperlinks and content, and bring information back to the web servers for indexing.

As crawlers like Google Bots also go through other linked pages on websites, companies build sitemaps for better accessibility and navigation.

18. What are paid results?

Ans. Paid results in SEO mean the exact opposite of organic results. It generally denotes to advertisements that are displayed above the organic results.

Several website owners make payments to Google to display their websites for certain search terms or keywords. Paid results show up when some user enters a search query with those keywords.

19. What is the definition of keyword?

Ans. Keyword means any word serving as a key. Keyword in SEO refers to the key phrases and words included in the web content which helps the users to find the specific website by entering relevant search queries over the search engines.

20. What is long tail keyword?

Ans. Long tail keywords are phrases containing over 4+ words that make search results highly specific.

The Best SEO Digital Marketing Interview Questions And Answers

21. What is Canonical URL?

Ans. Canonical URLs relate to the concept of selecting the best URL for the web pages that the visitors want to see. Also, known as canonical tags, these URLs help in content syndication when multiple versions of a same page become available over the Internet. Thus, it is used to resolve issues related to content duplication.

For example, most people would consider these the same urls:
www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different.

22. What is the definition of URL?

Ans. Uniform Resource Locator or URL acts as a generic term used to specify all kinds of web addresses found on the web.

URLs provide users with ways to identify and locate resources and documents on the web. URLs contain internet protocols, IP address of the host and the domain name along with other information.

23. What is SEO friendly URL?

Ans. SEO friendly URLs are used to optimize the structure and word usage in URLs so that the process of indexing a website by search engines become improved.

SEO techniques, such as putting keywords and having proper length and file structure in the URLs, help in improving website ranking and enhancing website navigation.

Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) and users may have problems with complicated URLs. Clean and simple URL helps users and search engines to understand a page topic easily.

Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that the first 3-5 words in a URL are given more weight.

So try to make your URLs short and simple. And always include your target keyword in your URL.

24. What are backlinks?

Ans. Backlinks are also called incoming links that help users to shift from one web page to the other web pages. These links play an important part in SEO.

When Google search engine views multiple quality backlinks to a page, it considers the page to be more relevant to the search query, which helps in its indexing process and improves its organic ranking on SERPs.

25. What is robot.txt?

Answer: Robots.txt is a text file that gives instructions to the search engine crawlers about the indexing of a webpage, domain, directory or a file of a website. It is generally used to tell spiders about the pages that you don’t want to be crawled. It is not mandatory for search engines, yet search engine spiders follow the instructions of the robots.txt.

The location of this file is very significant. It must be located in the main directory otherwise the spiders will not be able to find it as they do not search the whole site for a file named robots.txt. They only check the main directory for these files, and if they don’t find the files in the main directory, they assume that the site does not have any robots.txt file and index the whole site.

Real-time SEO Interview Questions And Answers

26. What is keyword proximity?

Answer: Keyword proximity refers to the distance between the keywords, i.e., it tells how close keywords are to each other in a phrase or body of text. It is used to measure the distance between two keywords in the text. It is used by some search engines to measure the relevancy of a given page to the search request. It specifies that the closer the two keywords in a phrase or a search term, the more relevant will be the phrase. For example, see the keywords “Delhi Digital Photographer” in the search term “Delhi Photographer Ram Kumar specialized in digital photography.” The proximity between Delhi and Photographer is excellent, but between the “Photographer” and “digital” proximity is not good as there are four words between them. So, a search term’s keywords should be as close to each other as possible.

27. What is Webpage SEO? How it is different from a Web SEO?

Answer: Webpage SEO is nothing but making efforts to improve the rank of a specific webpage on the search engine where as Web SEO is the process of boosting the rank of entire website on a search engine. Generally, the latter is complex and time consuming as compare to the Webpage SEO.

28 Is it possible to optimize a website on search engine in one day?

Answer: Well, one of the common sayings is “Rome was not built in a day”. SEO is a complex terms and needs a lot of factors to be paid attention to. In fact, it needs more analysis than the efforts one need to make. Therefore, optimization of a website is not possible in one day. It takes time depending on a lot of factors.

29. What is Latent Semantic Indexing?

Answer: It is becoming a good approach in SEO. Actually, it’s an approach with the help of which the users can simply make sure of extensible results in all the searches they made. It enables users to get the results that closely match with the keyword used by them.

30. Can Blog optimization provide similar results as a Web SEO?

Answer: Although, the target of both these approaches is same and both are different in many aspects. A business cannot have similar result from blog SEO as compare to what can be driven from Web SEO.

31. What do you mean by the term web traffic?

Answer: Web traffic is the exact or estimate figure about the number of people which open, access features, create account or visit a website in a specific time frame. Websites with more traffic are often considered as best ones.

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