Are you wondering what your SEO manager’s interview questions should be? And what are the best ways to approach such a situation? This article will answer these queries. We’ll go over the general interview practices as well as typical questions you can use to evaluate the skills and expertise of your SEO candidates. It will make sure you’re selecting the proper person for the position.
We will cover the 10 most fundamental questions and a bonus question to make the hiring process easier for you.
Let’s take a look and dive into the questions and their expected answers:
1) What is your favourite part of SEO?
Beginning the interview with this question will let you frame the others that follow. By asking this question, you will get an insight into your candidate’s interest in SEO. There is no right answer to this question but asking this question is a great icebreaker. It will mak the atmosphere less tense for the candidate and they might actually give you the best answers. This question will further open up the scope to understand how much information they possess when it comes to SEO manager roles and responsibilities.
2) What is your best achievement in SEO?
The candidate will speak of an accomplishment or accomplishments that they are most proud of. You might follow up this query and inquire about the scope of the candidate’s prior projects as well as the kinds of clients they are most interested to work with.
3) How do you approach SEO techniques?
This question will highlight the clarity that the candidate has in terms of their SEO routine. The expected things that you want to hear are:
- Distinguish website audits based on the three pillars of the SEO approach: technical basis, content/relevance and authority.
- The reasons why they chose a specific audit frequency and certain tools.
- Set up alerts for massive SEO problems and ranking drops.
- Track the changes.
4) What is the best thing to optimize a webpage?
Of course, the answer is SEO. But make the candidate describe the process. Ask them to give you a step-by-step explanation. They should cover all the basics such as the quick response of pages, well-structured content, use of natural language, etc.
5) What is your procedure for undertaking keyword research?
Now that the basics of the candidate’s knowledge of SEO are determined, you can dive into the technical aspects.
What you should expect is that they have a systematic approach toward keyword research. From brainstorming inputs to organizing the final keywords, the candidate should have a clear-cut idea of the different steps necessary to exercise keyword research.
6) How does a search engine work? Give us a basic outline.
There are various steps involved in this process but if we talk about the basics, the candidate should be able to mention and explain these three aspects:
- Crawling- It means continuously checking the internet for brand-new and up-to-date content.
- Indexing- Document processing, document canonicalization, and page rendering (including the execution of code such as JavaScript).
- Ranking: Ranking of the documents for questions or queries.
7) What is the process of optimizing an image?
The candidate should be able to mention the following methods:
- Context: Content surrounding the image and things like the title of the image.
- Alt attribute: Provides alternative information for an image if a user for some reason cannot view it.
- Title attribute: Gives extra information about an element
- External link acquisition: Links that are built on other websites and point back to your domain.
- Serving images via a CDN to speed up loading
- Image Compression: Reducing the amount of space an image takes.
8) If you get a link penalty from Google, how do you deal with this situation?
There are a few things your candidate should mention here:
- The candidate should mention that they would conduct a link check to identify possible bad links and then disavow these links and request their removal.
- Disavowing bad links by itself is not enough to deal with the penalty; everything should be done to remove the links. Still, removal isn’t always possible, so it should at least be shown that you’re trying.
9) If your rankings suddenly drop, how do you identify the problem?
Your candidate should not only give solutions but identify problems as well. In this case, the question shows whether your candidate understands all the possible reasons as to why rankings can drop and then reprioritize. You want your candidate to list the possible reasons for exclusion, starting with the most important and then working downwards.
10) What will the process of SEO be like in the next couple of years?
Aspects of SEO that the candidates might at least want to mention are:
- The need for answers: People will continue to search and need answers. The only thing that will change is the way you do it. One example can be text search to voice search.
- Authority: What is the role that links will play and what role will social media have in the future?
- Machine Learning: Machine learning is being used in search engines and their algorithms. This will only increase and at some point, engineers working on search engines may also try to figure out what page ranks well, just like SEOs today.
- Machine Learning: Machine learning is being used in search engines and their algorithms. This will only increase and at some point, engineers working on search engines may also try to figure out what page ranks well, just like SEOs today.
- Machine Learning: Machine learning is being used in search engines and their algorithms. This will only increase and at some point, engineers working on search engines may also try to figure out what page ranks well, just like SEOs today.
- Machine Learning: Machine learning is being used in search engines and their algorithms. This will only increase and at some point, engineers working on search engines may also try to figure out what page ranks well, just like SEOs today.
- Machine Learning: Machine learning is being used in search engines and their algorithms. This will only increase and at some point, engineers working on search engines may also try to figure out what page ranks well, just like SEOs today.
- Machine Learning: Machine learning is being used in search engines and their algorithms. This will only increase and at some point, engineers working on search engines may also try to figure out what page ranks well, just like SEOs today.
- Machine Learning: Machine learning is being used in search engines and their algorithms. This will only increase and at some point, engineers working on search engines may also try to figure out what page ranks well, just like SEOs today.
- Machine Learning: Machine learning is being used in search engines and their algorithms. This will only increase and at some point, engineers working on search engines may also try to figure out what page ranks well, just like SEOs today.
- User Experience (UX): SEO is about answering users’ questions and a good UX is essential to answer these questions well in the shortest amount of time.
BONUS QUESTION:
11) What are anchor texts, and why are they required?
Your candidate should be able to define what an anchor text is. It is really just text attached to a clickable hyperlink. It is the most practical way to include more information about you and your company by incorporating links to different pages of a website.
Further, the candidate should be able to highlight the importance of anchor text in optimization. It is vital that the anchor text is included naturally in the content. It should have a flow to it so that it perfectly blends-in without looking odd or out of place.
Conclusion:
Hiring an SEO manager can be quite challenging. There are many things to analyze. But the above-mentioned SEO manager interview questions should help you determine the best fit for your company.
