Going to an SEO interview and thinking about what will be the SEO interview questions and conversations you will go through? Prior to going to an SEO interview, it’s smarter to have a thought regarding the sorts of SEO inquiries that will be posted so you can intellectually plan answers for them. 

To take care of you, I have made the list of top SEO questions in 2021 and their answers that can be asked by an SEO interviewer.

Basic Level SEO Interview Questions & Answers

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and SEO is the process of improving a site to increase visibility in search engines or we can say SEO is the process to improve ranking in search engines like Google, Bing, etc.

What are Search Engines and the names of some Search Engines?

A search engine is a place where we can search anything and find many similar results or search engines answer the queries entered by users and give them the list of relevant results based on various factors.

Names of a few search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and YouTube, etc.

What are the names of the founders of Google & when Google was founded?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the founders of Google and Google was founded in 1998.

What are the types of SEO according to the way of doing it?

There are three types of SEO-

White Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO

Grey Hat SEO

What is White Hat SEO?

White hat SEO is the opposite of Black Hat SEO. Generally, white hat SEO refers to any practice that improves your search rankings on a search engine results page (SERP) while maintaining the integrity of your website and staying within the search engines’ terms of service.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO refers to a set of practices that are used to increase a site or page’s rank in search engines through means that violate the search engine’s terms of service.

What is Grey Hat SEO?

Gray Hat SEO is an SEO practice that’s riskier than White Hat SEO, but one that may or may not result in your site being banned from search engines and their affiliate sites.

What are the main types of SEO?

There are two types of SEO or we can say there are two types of SEO strategies:

Onpage SEO (Onsite SEO)

Offpage SEO (Offsite SEO)

What are the main factors in on-page SEO?

Meta Tags (Meta Title, Meta Description, Headings)

Quality Content
Mobile Friendliness
Page Speed
Canonical Tag
Internal and External Linking
Domain Strength
User experience
Schema Code
SSL (HTTPS)
Sitemap Submission
Robots.txt Submission
Google Search Console and Google Analytics Setup

What are the Offpage SEO techniques?

Off-Page is basically link building process and there are many ways of link submission:

Press Release Submission
Article Submission
Guest Posting
Blog Submission
Video Sharing
Image Sharing
Infographic Sharing
PDF Sharing
Business Listing
Directory Submission
Forum Topic Creation and Reply
Advertisement Creation
Event Creation
Profile Creation etc.

What is a Canonical Tag?

A canonical tag (aka “rel canonical“) is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs for the same page.

What is Sitemap?

A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that helps search engines find, crawl, and index all of your website’s content. Sitemaps also tell search engines which pages on your site are most important.

What is Robots.txt?

A robots.txt file contains instructions for bots that tell them which web pages they can and cannot access. 

What is Schema Markup or Schema Code?

Schema.org (often called Schema) is a semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs.

What is SSL?

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a security protocol that provides privacy, authentication, and integrity to Internet communications.

What is SERP?

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. When you search anything on search engines, this is the page where you can see all the results. SERP includes PPC listings and organic listings. 

What is organic traffic?

Organic results are unpaid results and are also called ‘free results’, ‘natural results’. The ranking of organic results is based on various factors. Organic results can be seen under the paid results. You can’t manipulate organic results by paying Google but can be improved by having high-quality content and improving user experience.

What is paid traffic?

Paid results are what advertisers pay to get their ads displayed above organic results on SERP. Paid results are quick and advertisers don’t need to optimize their website content to rank. The position will be based on your Max CPC and your quality score. The more quality scores you have, the less money you need to pay.

What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is Google’s web crawler to find, crawl, and index web pages. Googlebot is also called Google Spider.

What is Google Sandbox?

Google Sandbox Effect is a theory that states new websites are normally in the probation period (inside a box) and cant be able to rank well for their most important keywords and Google sends websites in Sandbox when any website gets penalized by doing black hat SEO.

What is DA?

One of the most common questions in any SEO interview. DA which stands for Domain Authority is a metric developed by Moz. It ranges from 0 to 100. The higher the better. The more DA you have the better the possibility of ranking. DA is still an important metric for SEOs. They use it to quickly understand the quality of websites. It helps them to compare multiple sites and understand their authority.

What is the difference between DA and PA?

DA is a Domain Authority. It explains the authority of your entire website. PA is Page Authority. It explains the authority of a specific page, based on the backlink, social sharing, etc.

What is the full form of WWW?

WWW stands for World Wide Web.

What does URL stand for?

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator.

What is a PBN?

A private Blog Network is a website built on a dropped or auctioned domain. Some black hat SEOs build them to link to their important website and transfer authority.

Google is against this method as it can uplift a spammy website so they are most often hidden from search engines.

What are all the popular SEO tools available in the market?

This SEO Interview Question is to understand your expertise over tools. The most popular and important SEO tools are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, Bing Webmaster Tools, Ahref, SEMRush, Alexa, Moz, and more.

Google Search Console: If you are an SEO, you need to master the Search Console. It helps you to check your website’s health in the eyes of Google. It helps you to analyze the performance of your website and helps you optimize it better. It helps you to find the list of errors on the website. It is a completely free tool from Google.

Google Analytics: Free version of Google Analytics is sufficient if your website is mid-level. It helps you to understand the performance of your website, understand the behavior of the visitors, helps you perform better in terms of conversions, and so on.

Apart from these free tools, some notable paid tools are

Moz: It helps businesses to analyze and get insights about their websites and their competitors.

Ahrefs: Ahrefs is the best tool if you want to check your or your competitor’s backlinks.

SEMRush: SEMRush helps you check the health of your backlink, the position of your keywords, and errors in your website.

Screaming Frog: It crawls your entire website and lists out all key elements like internal links, external links, titles, descriptions, HTTP status code, and more.

What is the difference between do-follow and no-follow links?

A Do-follow link passes the link juice from one domain to another and the no-follow link doesn’t pass the link juice.

A Do-follow link is more valuable in terms of SEO and No-follow links are less valuable.

What is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO method that increases the number of keyword densities to a far higher range in order to rank for potential keywords. After the Panda update, it’s not recommended to keyword stuff to manipulate search engines and should be avoided at all costs.

What is the bounce rate in SEO?

Bounce rate is the percentage of website users who leave the website from the landing page without visiting any other page or without taking any specific action.

What is 301 redirection?

301 redirect is a permanent redirect method to redirect users and search engines to redirect from old URL to new URL. 

What is 302 redirection?

302 redirect is a temporary redirect method to redirect users and search engines to redirect from old URL to new URL. 

What is PPC?

Pay Per Click or PPC is a kind of advertisement campaign in which advertisers are charged when users click on the advertisement. The amount charged to the advertiser is called Cost Per Click (CPC). 

What is EMD?

EMD or Exact Match Domain is a domain that includes search keywords.

For example:

Bestseoexpert.in

What is Google Algorithm?

Google algorithm is a set of rules, commands, and codes that helps the search engine to find relevant search results to user queries. There are said to be more than 200 ranking factors Google algorithm uses to rank a web page for specific keywords. Hummingbird is the name provided to the Google algorithm and every year thousands of updates are improving the algorithm in multiple ways.

What is Google Penalty?

According to Wikipedia:

“A Google penalty is the negative impact on a website’s search rankings based on updates to Google’s search algorithms or manual review.[dubious – discuss] The penalty can be a by-product of an algorithm update or an intentional penalization for various black-hat SEO techniques.”

Google algorithms automatically penalize your website when you violate any Google guidelines. Google executives manually penalize any website if they catch the website doing anything against the guidelines. You receive a notification in your search console when that happens.

What is Panda Update?

Google has introduced a Panda update in 2011 to penalize or devalue lower-quality websites based on low-quality content and reward high-value websites.

Google panda de-ranks or penalizes pages with less amount of useful content and pages with duplicate content.

What is the Penguin update?

Google introduced the Penguin update in 2012 to find sites that have spammy backlinks and devalue or penalize them. Penguin was intended to find link farms, buying links, blog networks, and every other black hat link-building method. Penguin update helped Google find websites that are violating Google’s guidelines and building backlinks just to improve the ranking in SERP.

What is Hummingbird Update?

Hummingbird is the name of the Google search algorithm overhaul that happened in 2013. Hummingbird has helped to make search more about context and less about keywords and it helps Google better understand the intent of the keywords not just keywords.

The better and improved interpretations of the intention is what is special about the hummingbird.

What is the Mobilegeddon update?

Mobilegeddon update is the way of Google telling webmasters to make their websites mobile-friendly in order to be given priority on search engine results. As the number of people using Google on mobile devices keeps on increasing, Google’s intention is to give the best experience to all mobile users by providing them mobile-friendly web pages as a result. After the Mobilegeddon update, the mobile-friendliness of a page has become an essential factor in ranking the websites in the SERPs.

Google Pigeon Update?

Google Pigeon is an update to increase the relevancy and quality of local searches.

What are rich snippets?

Rich snippet is a form of structured data which helps websites to give more information to the readers and helps them to get more clicks. Rich snippets don’t directly improve the ranking of a web page but if presented well, they can increase the CTR of the web page which can increase the ranking in the long run.

What is Cloaking?

Cloaking is a black hat technique where the user finds different web page content when compared to that web page content search engine finds. Cloaking a method of tricking search engine algorithms to index a totally different keyword-stuffed webpage but displaying the actual page only to users.

What are Doorway Pages?

Doorway pages are a black hat method that should be avoided. Doorway pages are the pages search engines users first visit after clicking a search engine result before entering the real landing page. They are optimized for search engines and once the user visits the doorway pages they are automatically redirected to the real landing page.

What are the common SEO Mistakes to be avoided?

This SEO Interview Question is to check your experience and cautiousness. Some of the common mistakes to be avoided are:

Not considerate about the freshness and the quality of the webpage

Not having a unique title and description

Optimizing for very broad keywords

Keyword stuffing

Building multiple low-quality backlinks

Using poorly-written content

What is Competitive Analysis?

Competitive analysis is the process of identifying your organic competitors and analyzing how they perform better, where they lack, and using the information to make your site better.

It normally includes on-page analysis, keywords they are using, content quality and pattern, internal linking and navigation, backlinks, referring domains.

What are contextual backlinks?

Contextual backlinks are the links surrounded by text in the body of the content. Contextual links possess a higher value than the links from the header, footer, or sidebar.

Contextual links are the most valuable backlinks but are difficult to attain.

What is cross-linking?

Cross-linking is the activity of linking one site to another. It provides users with reference sites that contain the content related to the search. If owned by the same person, Google recommends it to be no-follow.

What is AMP?

AMP stands for Accelerate Mobile Pages is an open-source project which helps publishers to increase the speed and improve the readability of their web pages on mobile devices. Google, WordPress, Adobe have joined hands with a few other companies to make this possible.

What is a Disavow Tool?

Disavow Tool is a Google Search Console Tool to allow publishers to convey to Google that certain links from other domains should not be considered and should be avoided. It helps the websites to avoid any actions based on bad links. But, the tool should be handled very carefully and if not used with caution, it can harm the website performance in search engines.

What to do if your website got penalized?

First, to understand why it happened and fix the issues completely. Then apply for re-inclusion.

How can we improve the landing page quality?

Landing page quality can be improved in the following ways:

• A strong headline and supportive tagline
• Original and quality content
• Page load time
• User-friendliness and user experience
• Following Google guidelines
• Easy to navigate and understand
• Clear call of action message
• Visual imagery
• Not having too many links
• Should connect with Brand and proposition
• Simplified lead capture form
• Trust symbols.

Contact SEO Expert Prempal Singh for more details.

What is SEO?

Getting organic traffic on a commercial or a business website is not an easy task. A company’s success depends on its ability to retain old customers and get new customers every day. There is no doubt that the performance of a site is indirectly linked to its customer retention rate. So, the big question here is how can a website engage more customers and generate more sales and profits for the business owners? What if there was an easy way for you to get quality backlink profiles and get the optimized elements and content for the on-page of your site? The answer is simple- SEO.

SEO is short for search engine optimization. It is the process by which your business site whether old or new can become more accessible and visible to your target audience. Nowadays, brands are competing with each other to stay ahead in both offline and online markets. Every brand wants its site to be the first thing a customer sees every time they look for a particular product or service to buy.

It is a technique that is used to increase online traffic in terms of both quantity and quality. If you are thinking of launching a new product in the market, you can use SEO to generate brand awareness and reach potential customers. The website can be used as an effective marketing tool only if its search engine rank is higher. With the use of precise keywords and the right content, the customer will be able to come across your website and get the required information about the type of products and services offered by your brand. Their buying decision will be affected if the consumers find the content available on your site interesting.

Various benefits and advantages of using the technique of Search Engine Optimization for your business-

Raising brand awareness-

With the right use of SEO, you can create a brand image for your company. As soon as your site gains the top position in the online market, more website traffic will be generated. This is a cost-effective way to raise brand awareness. Your site will automatically become the prime search result in Google.

The desired outcome-

Every company and business organization has one goal that is to make more profit and sales. SEO will help you achieve the desired goals and objectives in less time. More customers will get access to your site and you will be able to expand your business and your target audience located all over the world. High visibility on the internet is the fastest way for your business to succeed.

Networking-

SEO is not just limited to commercial websites, you can also use it to gain more followers on social media. Creating a social media profile for your brand will help you build a network and bring potential clients and customers every day. You can use this opportunity to hire employees and collaborate on a joint business venture as well.

Quantitative results-

SEO uses special Google algorithms so that you can see the total number of website views your site gets in a day. Seeing the rise in numbers will help you keep a track of your success. You will be able to implement the SEO campaign and marketing strategy and view the results and site statistics.

Accessible site-

SEO will help you build a user-friendly site that will be easy to access. The customers will be directed to your webpage by using specific keywords.

It is a well-known fact that SEO is very crucial for the expansion of your business. From gaining online visibility to branding, SEO provides dynamic support to your site. Online customers prefer to click on the first search result that appears as soon as they enter the keywords. SEO is considered one of the most effective inbound marketing strategies that help customers to find the right product on time.

Gaining insight into what exactly it is that your customer wants will help you offer new and improved services. The purpose of using Google Analytics in SEO is to measure the daily amount of web traffic. The data and statistics will help you set the goals and objectives accordingly.

Following are the factors that will help you determine the success rate of your company-

• How does a particular customer view your site?
• The set of keywords used by them to come across your site.
• The total amount of time spent by the customer on your site.
• The kind of technology used by the customer to open your site.
• The geographical location of the customer.

Such type of data and information can be used by your company to make informed decisions and execute the right SEO strategy.

Know all about the different types of SEO techniques-

On-site SEO-

When it comes to onsite SEO, a business website is optimized and relevant content is provided so that the site can become more accessible. Special attention is paid to the keyword research in order to analyze the words used by the customers to search the brand along with their frequency. It also involves technical auditing where the website is indexed and geo-targeted so that the brand can reach out to the target audience. The objective behind using on-site SEO is to make the site easy to use. Various SEO tools are used such as- Title tags, Meta tags, headings, images, and URLs.

Offsite SEO-

In the case of offsite SEO, backlinks are provided to the site. Google determines the ranking of the site on the basis of the overall structure of your site. With the on-page alignment and the use of relevant content, the site’s search engine ranking is improved. Link building helps the site get more reputable links from other sites which makes it more credible and trustworthy.

Methods to do SEO:

White hat SEO-

In the case of white hat SEO, every strategy, plan, and tactic used is according to the Google terms and conditions. Better quality content is offered so that the site can load quickly. Here keywords that contain meta tags are used so that the webpage can gain online visibility. It includes features such as content development, website HTML optimization, and website restructuring.

Black hat SEO-

In the case of black hat SEO, every strategy, plan, and tactic used is against to the Google terms and conditions for example Keyword Stuffing, Use of tools to create backlinks, Spam links, etc.

How does Search Engine Optimization work for your website?

Analysis of the business websites-

The first step includes analyzing the text and keywords to identify the current position of your business website online. The type of code and text used on the site is also analyzed. Not only your site but the business side of your current competitors are also analyzed to determine their search engine positioning strategy. A special list containing the names of targeted keywords and search terms is created based on the market segment and target audience.

Research for keywords-

Once the business sites of the competitors are analyzed, the right set of keywords is created. The second step involves finding out the total number of websites that are competing for the same keywords and phrases. You will be able to see improvements in your search engine ranking in the upcoming days and weeks. You will be able to measure the ROI for any SEO strategy implemented. Whether your company’s goal is to increase the total visitors per day or increase the conversion rate, SEO will help you achieve your goals and objectives before the set deadline.

Content optimization-

You will be able to create the articles, blogs, descriptions, reviews and product specifications, names of the products and services using the keywords provided to you by the SEO Company. This way whenever a customer types a certain keyword, they will be redirected to your webpage. With more customers coming across your site, the online webpage traffic will automatically increase. You will also be able to use the meta description tags to improve the search engine ranking. To optimize the content with ease, phrases can be used in the web pages for better search results. The keywords are simply added to the source code of your site and the content that is made available for the customers.

Use of new sitemaps-

The development of new Google sitemaps makes your site more accessible and easy to search. You can create both XML and HTML versions of the sitemaps so that they can be submitted through Google and other webmaster tools. Your website will be submitted to the directory which will make your website pages indexed.

Testing and Measuring-

After implementing the right SEO strategy, you will be able to analyze the search engine rankings as well as the web traffic. You will be able to test the effectiveness of the strategy and how well your business site is performing in both on-site and off-site SEO. You can also evaluate the performance of each keyword.

Maintenance of the site-

SEO is a dynamic process that keeps on evolving. The keywords you used a few weeks back may not generate the same result as they used to. That is why it is necessary that you keep on researching new keywords and use them instead of the old ones. You can start by reviewing the outbound links. The best way to maintain your site is by posting regular articles and blogs so that you can use the keywords more effectively.
SEO will help you to monitor the result of each and every SEO strategy. If for some reason, if your site doesn’t get enough visitors, then you can change the strategy and implement a whole new SEO plan. Search engine optimization is the right way to increase the lead generation rate and streamline the site thus engaging more clients.

Investing in the services of SEO will be beneficial for you on a long-term basis whether you own an e-commerce site or a non-e-commerce site. Once you take the services of SEO, you will be able to assess every SEO-oriented move that is implemented to increase website traffic and rate of conversion. You can access the demographic information of your valuable customers and build a level of trust with your target audience. Being a cost-effective online marketing strategy, SEO is a widely used technique as it specifically targets the customers who want to buy a certain product or service sold by your company. Contact Prempal Singh If you are looking to hire an SEO expert.