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 2022 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, 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 were 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 Gray 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?

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 its 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, help 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 are 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?

A 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 is 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: