110 Most Common SEO Interview Questions with Answers in 2022

Anish Illuz

Anish Illuz

Helping brands grow digitally by applying Digital Marketing Strategies

If you are looking for a complete list of SEO interview questions and answers available online, you’ve come to the right place. Most of these questions are asked during SEO interviews for beginners as well as experienced people. I’ve attempted to cover everything from the basics to some more advanced SEO questions. Our goal is to answer every SEO interview questions you might be asked during your SEO interviews. I will continue to add more SEO interview questions as I come across them that we believe will be useful to others. Enjoy!

1. What is SEO & Why is it so Important?

In simple words, SEO or Search Engine Optimization denotes any activity performed for the improvement of Search Engine rankings of websites, products, services, or other content. It shows unpaid results which are also referred to as “free”, “organic”, “natural”, or “earned” results.

The importance of SEO starts with the desire of the companies to gain more traffic for their websites. The ranking over search engines matters because users pay more heed to the first 5 searches on Google. Moreover, the users tend to trust Google‟s refined search results because they consider these searches to be more authentic and specific

2. What is a Search Engine?

A search engine is a web-based software system that is developed to search and locate relevant information on the World Wide Web. Search engines generally answer the queries entered by the users and give them a list of search results.

3. Name of a few Search Engines?

The names of some search engines are- Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex.

4. Who are the Founders of Google?

The founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

5. In Which Year was Google Founded?

Google was founded on 4th September 1998.

6. What is the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web (WWW) or the Web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the year 1989, is an information system of internet servers containing webpages where specially formatted documents and resources, supported by Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP, can be located by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) with other hypertext links.

7. What is a Domain?

On the internet, the domain is simply a part of the network address and acts as a descriptor for websites. It includes email addresses, website addresses, and addresses of Internet Protocols such as SSH, IRC, and FTP.
For Example, in www.anishilluz.com, anishilluz.com is the domain.

8. What is Domain Extension?

Domain extension refers to the notation found at the end of web addresses. The extension is used to specify a country code or any web category. For example, .edu is a domain extension to specify educational institutions as the web category

9. What is a Website?

A website contains a collection of web pages or formatted documents that can be accessed over the Internet. Websites are generally identified with domain names or web addresses.

For Example. if you type the web address www.anishilluz.com over the internet, it would take you to the home page of the actual website.

10. What is a Web Server?

A web server is a computer program with an IP address and domain names that display web pages to users when requested. The web server accepts and processes requests sent via HTTP.

11.     What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting refers to any service providing space for websites over the Internet. Web host enables your website to be viewed by others via modem or network by making space over its server. There are different kinds of web hosting services available today which are used as per the needs and requirements of the web developers.

12.     What is Crawling?

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.

13.     What is Indexing?

Indexing starts when the crawling process gets over during a search. Google uses crawling to collect pages relevant to the search queries and creates an index that includes specific words or search terms and their locations. Search engines answer the queries of the users by looking up the index and showing the most appropriate pages.

14.     What is SERP?

Search Engine Result Page or SERP refers to the page that is displayed when a specific search query is entered over the search engine. Apart from showing a list of results, SERP might also include advertisements.

15. What is Organic Result?

Most common seo interview questions & answers
SEO Interview Questions with Answers – Organic Results

Organic result in SEO denotes the listing of the web pages that are most relevant to the search query entered by the user. It is also referred to as a “free” or “natural” result. Getting a higher ranking in the organic result over the search engines is the very purpose of SEO.

Also, read: Digital marketing opportunities in India 2022

16. What are Paid results?

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.

17. What is “Google Suggest” or “Autocomplete”?

Google Suggest is a part of the auto-complete function of the Google search engine. When any user enters a word or some letters over the search field, Google shows many associated terms to him/her in a drop-down menu. Such suggestions are a collection of the most frequently search terms over the Google search engine.

18. What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO refers to all the activities performed within the websites to get higher ranking and more relevant traffic from the search engines. On-page SEO is related to the optimization of the content as well as the HTML source code of any web page. Some of its aspects include meta tags, title tags, meta descriptions, and heading tags.

19. What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-page SEO relates to the other aspects that influence the search ranking of websites on the Search Engine Result Page. It refers to the promotional activities, such as content marketing, social media, and link building performed outside the boundaries of any web page to improve its search ranking.

20. What is the Definition of a Keyword?

Keyword means any word serving as a key. The 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.

21. What is Long Tail Keyword?

Long-tail keywords are phrases containing over 4+ words that make search results highly specific. These long phrases are used by smart SEO experts when they attempt to draw quality traffic to their websites rather than having random traffic and increasing their lead conversion rates. Also, long-tail keywords are easy to rank compared to single-word keywords.

22. What are LSI Keywords?

LSI keywords or Latent Semantic Indexing are semantically associated with the main keyword that users enter over the search engines.

23. How to Find LSI Keywords?

Let’s say you are writing about On-Page SEO. Now, search for your keyword (On-page SEO) in Google and scroll down to the “Searches Related to…” area at the bottom of the page

With the use of LSI keywords, that are linked with the main keywords in terms of relevancy, search engines can identify the semantic structure of the keywords and extract the hidden meaning of the text to bring the most appropriate results on SERPs.

This is one of the most asked SEO interview questions during the SEO interviews

24. What are Heading Tags?

In SEO, heading or header tags are used to separate the heading and sub-heading of any content from the rest of the web page. There are 6 heading tags used in SEO in a top-down hierarchy. Ranging from h1 to h6, header tags bring coherence in content along with relevancy and keyword consistency in the search results displayed on SERPs.

25. What is Canonical URL?

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 the 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.

26. What makes a website search engine friendly?

Several factors make a website search engine friendly, including keywords, quality content, titles, metadata, etc. A website needs these factors to be ranked by a search engine and therefore found by a user.

27. How do you measure SEO success?

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.

28. Which SEO tools do you regularly use?

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, SEMRUSH, and AHREF.

29. How do you approach keyword research?

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 is narrower so it’s targeted and has good search volume, but is not highly competitive.

30. What is link building and why does it matter?

Google exists to serve the searcher. That means Google is constantly trying to determine which results are most relevant to any given searcher and any given time.

In addition to relevance, Google considers credibility too. So the search engine looks to see if other websites have linked to yours. If so, that means your content is worth linking to and is, therefore, more credible when compared to a website not linked externally. In a nutshell, link building is what SEO professionals do to try and get links to their websites in order to improve search results.

31. What are backlinks?

A backlink is what we call the links to a website from an external source, as mentioned in link building.

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

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 a 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, improving server response time, using a content distribution network to compress files, optimizing the code, etc.

33. What method do you use to redirect a page?

In general, a 301 redirect is the best way to redirect a page so you don’t lose any SEO value that has been accumulated.

34. Which meta tags matter?

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).

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

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.

36. Which SEO factors are not in your control?

The biggest SEO factor not in your control is Google! How exactly Google ranks websites is unknown. The company does not make public the search algorithms it uses, although SEO professionals have determined the best practices we adhere to in order to achieve results.

However, Google doesn’t like young domains that aren’t yet tried-and-true, and you can’t control that if you’re launching a new site. Nor can you force people to link to your site, share your content, spend more time on your site, or come back to your site for another visit.

Google looks favorably on all of these factors and ideally a marketing department is working hard to create content and user experiences that will make these happen, but these factors are beyond the control of the SEO person.

37. What is on-page vs off-page SEO?

This gets back to the question about the factors that are outside of your control. On-page SEO includes the factors you can control, such as keywords, content, page structure, internal linking, load time, etc. Off-page SEO includes those factors you can’t control, such as backlinks.

38. What are some black hat SEO practices to avoid?

Ideally, you won’t interview with an organization that condones any black hat SEO practices, but it might be a trick question to make sure you wouldn’t use them either. Cloaking, keyword stuffing, copying content from another site, exchanging or trading links, buying links, hiding text, and using a link farm are all underhanded techniques frowned upon—and penalized—by Google.

39. What is the relationship between SEO and SEM?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. The biggest difference between the two is that SEO is free and SEM is paid. SEM includes pay-per-click advertising and display ads that are purchased. Despite the major difference between the two, they work best in unison.

40. What is keyword stemming and why does it matter?

Keyword stemming is adding to the stem of a word. For example, if the word interview was your stem, variations could be interviewing, interviewer, or interviews. Using keyword stemming helps you to use more relevant keywords on a webpage without keyword stuffing or ending up with content that reads poorly.

41. What is the most important thing to look for when doing keyword research?

This is a subjective question! People new to SEO tend to focus on popular keywords without considering the competitiveness of that keyword, so that’s something you could mention. Search volume and relevancy are other factors you might discuss.

42. What is a canonical issue?

A canonical issue happens when you seem to have duplicate content. (Google penalizes for duplicate content.) This might happen if you have different versions of a URL pointing to the same webpage, for example, http://exampleURL.com and http://www.exampleURL.com.

43. How have you dealt with link penalties?

We hope you haven’t had any link penalties slapped on you by Google due to your SEO efforts, and you might want to make that clear to your interviewer! Then address the steps you’ve taken to find bad links, and either fix them if you can or disavow those you can’t.

44. What are rich snippets?

Rich snippets are the featured text that appears at the top of the organic search results, in a box, and sometimes with an image. Webmasters can use structured data to mark up content so that search engines can easily identify the type of content and deliver it as a rich snippet. Rich snippets are not part of SEO, but if used, they can deliver better results on the SERPs.

45. What is Google Autocomplete?

Google Autocomplete is a function in Google and other search engines. When a user starts typing in the search box, the Google autocomplete function gives you a list of options to complete your search.

46. What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is Google’s web crawler to find, crawl, and index web pages. Important SEO interview question

47. What is web crawling?

Web crawling is the process where search engine bots crawl websites for indexing. Those are called a spider or spider bot. Crawlers use hyperlinks to visit other pages, and documents and bring information back to the web servers for indexing. Once the crawler visits a page, it makes a copy of it and adds its URLs to indexing.

The more fresh content you produce, the more frequently your website will be crawled from search engines.

48. What are the most important Google Ranking Factors?

Quality Content

Quality & Relevant Backlinks

Mobile First

Page Speed

Brand Strength

Domain Strength

User experience

Technical SEO

Social Signals

Content Freshness

Schema Code

HTTP

Domain Authority

Content-Type

Content Depth

49. 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.

50. How important is DA?

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.

51. Difference between DA and PA.

DA is Domain Authority. It explains the authority of your entire website. The higher the DA, the higher the possibility of ranking. But, DA is one of the hundreds of ranking factors.

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

52. What is White Hat SEO?

One of the most common questions in any SEO interview question and answers guide. White Hat SEO is a process of improving your search engine rank by following the guidelines of search engines without compromising on your methods.

White Hat SEO doesn’t involve manipulating search engines with shady methods but instead involves building search engine-friendly websites and user experiences. White hat involves creating quality content that provides value to the visitors and helps them to earn links instead of building backlinks.

53. What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO is a process of trying to manipulate search engine algorithms to improve the search engine ranking. It violates search engines’ guidelines. Black Hate SEOs practice the methods to get immediate results instead of building a website with users in mind.

There are so many Black Hat methods they utilize and search engines identify and offer penalties if get caught. Black Hat methods might be helpful in the short term but if you are planning for the long term, black hat definitely is not the solution. If your site gets penalized, it takes so much time and effort to remove it.

54. What is a PBN?

Private Blog Network is a website built on dropped or auctioned domains. 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.

55. What is a do-follow link?

Any SEO Interview Question and Answers guide won’t be complete without this question. Do-follow is the default hyperlink. When search engines find a do-follow link, it crawls the page and passes authority (also called link juice) from one website to another. More do-follow links from high authority sites mean the possibility of better ranking in SERP as a backlink is still an important ranking factor.

56. What is a No-follow link?

Again, one of the important SEO interview questions. No-follow is another type of backlink where webmasters can tell search engines not to follow the specific link.

Well, it doesn’t guarantee Google not follow the links. Businesses use Nofollow links when they link to social media sites or any other third-party sites and don’t want to pass their link juice to those websites.

57. 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.

58. What is keyword frequency?

Keyword frequency is the number of times a specific keyword phrase appears on a web page. While optimizing a web page, we have to make sure we don’t use the keyword so much that becomes keyword stuffing.

59. What is Keyword Difficulty?

Keyword difficulty is a metric to define how difficult it is to rank a specific keyword based on its popularity and competition. The higher the keyword difficulty, the more time or number of backlinks might be needed.

60. What is Keyword Proximity?

Keyword Proximity tells the distance between two keywords on a web page.

61. What is Keyword Density?

Keyword Density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a specific web page. When the keyword density is far higher than the recommended level, it might trigger search engines to think it’s keyword stuffing. So, we need to make sure the keyword density is not too high for any primary or secondary search phrases.

For example, if a keyword appears 5 times in an article of 200 words, the density would be 2.5%. There is no ideal keyword density but 3-4% is considered as best practice for SEO.

62. What is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO method that increases the keyword density 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.

63. What is Keyword Prominence?

Keyword Prominence tells where your keyword is located on a web page. For example, in a blog section, it is better to have your keyword in the article, especially the first and last paragraph.

64. What is NAP?

NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone Number.

NAP is one of the critical aspects of Local SEO. It helps search engines to understand and identify the list of companies to be displayed for specific location-based searches.

65. How do you know if you are using the right number of keywords on a page?

There is no right number or range. You have to make sure the keywords in the content look natural and don’t look forced. It is a best practice to have 3 primary keywords and a few secondary keywords and again, it depends on the length, keyword difficulty, competition, flow of the page, and more.

66. What is a long tail keyword?

Long tail keywords are phrases that have more than 4 words and are very specific in nature.

Unlike short keywords which are very broad, long tail keywords show the intention and nature of the search and thus get a good number of conversions if we target accordingly.

Blogs are the best places to utilize long-tail keywords. Unlike broad keywords, the number of searches for long-tail keywords is very less but if we combine multiple long-tail keywords, we get a good amount of traffic with a very high conversion rate.

67. What is the bounce rate in SEO?

Any SEO Interview Question and Answers guide won’t be complete without this question. One of the most common questions in any Google Analytics interview question. Bounce rate is the percentage of website users who leaves the website from the landing page without visiting any other page or without taking any specific action.

According to Google, the Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.

To lower the bounce rate, increase the engagement on your page (with the help of internal links, CTA, etc), increase page speed, match user experience, and more.

Bounce rate benchmarks change from genre to genre. Blogs tend to have high bounce rates and B2B sites should have lesser. Benchmarks also change based on the industry.

68. What are meta descriptions?

Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that convey what the page is about. It provides a description of the webpage not only to search engines but also to users. Users can read the meta descriptions beneath the Title of the web page on the search engine results page.

Meta descriptions are one of the important SEO tags where it’s recommended to optimize for keywords. Apart from that, it is crucial to design a meta description in a way that users want to read more about your web page and thus improve your CTR.

69. What are Internal Links?

Internal links are hyperlinks that connect one webpage to another webpage of your domain. Internal links structure is very important for both user experience and search engines.

The internal links structure should be well planned to keep users in mind so they can navigate the website without any confusion. Keep every important page within 2,3 clicks from the home page. Link Depth is the number of clicks required to reach a page from the home page. Keep all your important key page links on the home page.

Internal links help search engines to crawl and index the web pages of the website and helps link juice pass from one page to another. If properly optimized, the right placements of internal links reduce the bounce rate of the web page.

70. What are outbound links?

Outbound links are links that link your website to another website.

Having too many outbound links might hurt your SEO as they pass link juice from your domain to another domain. It is recommended to have no-follow links to outbound links to avoid passing on authority.

Keeping few outbound links to high authority sites might be helpful as you tell search engines more about the content you have and it creates a connection from your website to other relevant websites.

71. What are inbound links?

Inbound links are links coming from another domain to your own domain.

72. Difference between an inbound link and an outbound link?

Inbound links are incoming links from other domains to your domain. Outbound links are links that links your website to another website.

73. What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text file. It is through this file. It instructs search engine crawlers about indexing and caching a webpage, file of a website or directory, or domain.

74. What are anchor texts?

Anchor text is clickable text in a hyperlink. Anchor texts help users to understand what the page is about. It also holds SEO value if keywords are implemented. But in case of over-optimized, might get punished by Google. This is also a most asked SEO interview question.

Anchor text should be natural and diversity is important like branded, long tail, image links, and partial and exact matches.

75. Why is anchor text important to SEO?

Search engines use anchor text to understand the context of the page it is linking to. This holds some SEO value in terms of understanding search engines what the page is about.

76. What is Title Tag?

Title tag helps Google and users to understand the purpose of a web page. Optimizing page title is an important on-page task where it’s recommended to use your primary keyword. Also, the title tag should be good enough to make search engine visitors click on it and visit your web page.

77. What is SEO Friendly URLs?

Again, one of the popular SEO interview questions. SEO Friendly URLs are URLs that are easy for both search engines and users to understand. URLs that are static instead of dynamic, without parameters, keyword optimized, reader-friendly & short.

78. What is Robots Meta Tag?

Robots Meta Tag tells the search engines how to treat the page with commands like FOLLOW, NOFOLLOW, INDEX & NOINDEX.

79. What is 301 redirect?

This SEO Interview Question is to understand your technical knowledge. 301 redirect is a permanent redirect method to redirect users and search engines to redirect from the old URL to the new URL. When a webmaster wants to redirect from one URL to another for various reasons, 301 is considered the best as it passes most of the link juices from the old page to the new page.

301 is better for SEO compared to 302 or other JS-related redirects in terms of passing authority and value.

80. What is Search Console / Webmaster Tools?

Google Search Console, previously known as Webmaster Tools is a tool Google provides to webmasters to check the health of their website in the eyes of the search giant.

Not only webmaster can analyze the various aspects of the website like checking indexing status, crawl errors, crawl status, keyword performance, and backlinks, but also can be able to disavow URLs, apply for page reindex, upload XML sitemap, etc. If you are attending an SEO interview learn & practice more on this.

81. What are backlinks in SEO?

When one website links to another website, that is called backlinks. Backlinks are an important SEO ranking factor. There are two types of backlinks. No-follow and Do-follow backlinks.

When a web page gets multiple relevant backlinks from authority sites, Google and other search engines consider the page to be more relevant to the search query, thus improving the rank of the web page.

The number of backlinks is not always important but the quality and relevancy make a big impact.

82. How important are backlinks?

Google considers backlinks like a vote. The more backlink a website has, the more popular and important it is. But as we mentioned in the early answer, just the number is not the only factor. There is so many other factors that decided how much value every backlink brings to your website. The authorization of the website, the relevancy of the website, the value of the page where we get backlinks from, the location of the page where we get backlinks, and so on.

One high-quality backlink is more valuable than ten low-quality backlinks. If you are into ERP businesses, the links you get from websites/blogs related to ERP has more valuable than non-ERP-related websites.

83. What is Search Engine Submission?

Search engine submission is the process of submitting your website to popular search engines to make sure it gets crawled and indexed.

But, this process is not necessary anymore as search engines are way smarter and have the capacity to find your website and index it easily without you needing to submit it to them manually.

84. What is Forum Posting?

Forum posting is an off-page technique where you create a profile on relevant forums, create a thread, engage with other users, and participate in online discussions to get backlinks to your site. This could have been a great way to reach out to potential users and engage but some advertisers spammed the process and thus lost its trustability. But still, if you can engage with users and educate them, clear their doubts, and help them find the solution, we can still utilize this method.

85. SEO Value of blog commenting

It is obvious that the value and practice of blog commenting are not how they are used to be. The links don’t hold any value as they are mostly no-follow these days. It can only be valuable if you choose the right blog, share the right link, and if people follow your page based on that link. You don’t normally find this question in many SEO interview questions and answers guides but you should be prepared anyway.

86. What is referral traffic?

Referral traffic is the visits you get from third-party domains. You can improve referral traffic by building or earning links from potential and relevant websites.

87. Is directory submission still working?

Directory submission is an off-page SEO technique still getting utilized by some businesses. It works only if your business is getting listed on popular directory websites where people actually look for businesses. Listing the website in dozens of websites just to get backlinks is an old concept that should be avoided.

You can submit your website to a niche-relevant directory for citation if it’s a local business.

88. What is CTR?

It is one of the common SEO interview questions. CTR stands for Click Through Rate. We can get the CTR by dividing the number of impressions by the number of clicks. For example, if you got 15 clicks out of 150 impressions your CTR would be 10%. CTR is not a direct ranking factor but in a long run, it can improve the ranking on SERP.

89. What is EMD?

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

For example:

BuyTabletsOnline.com

90. What is the difference between page rank and Search engine result page?

Sometimes a tricky SEO Interview question. Page rank is a Google algorithm. This is a metric for measuring the performance of the webpage submitted by webmasters to search engines. Google discontinued revealing the page rank to the world.

SERP lists the pages that relate to any query made by the user. These results include both organic search as well as paid results. The results in the SERPs hold some positions, and these are not just random positions. The ranking positions are decided by the search engines using sophisticated algorithms, and page rank is one of them.

91. What is an HTML Sitemap?

One of the important SEO interview questions.

An HTML sitemap is a web page where users can able to access the list of pages in a proper structure, organized in a way that they can understand and navigate the site smoothly.

It is not necessary to create an HTML sitemap if your website has a handful of user-accessing webpages. If you have a big website, an HTML sitemap is particularly useful.

92. What is an XML Sitemap?

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. The XML sitemap is intended, designed only for search engines, time of the last modifications performed on them. It lists the web pages and how frequently those get updated. The XML sitemap is a way for us to ask search engines to crawl and index all our important pages frequently. The sitemap is one of the first thing search engines search when it finds a website.

93. 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. It is 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.

94. 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.

It takes so much effort and time to uplift the penalization once you fix the issues and submit your website for consideration.

95. What is Panda Update?

Google has introduced the 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.

96. What is 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.

97. 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 special about the hummingbird.

98. What is Mobilegeddon update?

Mobilegeddon update is the way Google tells 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 with mobile-friendly web pages in results. After the Mobilegeddon update, the mobile-friendliness of a page has become an essential factor in ranking the websites in the SERPs.

99. Google Pigeon Update?

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

100. 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 displays the actual page only to users.

101. 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.

102. 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

103. How do you optimize an URL?

URLs should be optimized for keywords, and URLs should be simple, short, and easy for readers to understand.

104. 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, and referring domains.

105. How to see the list of pages indexed by Google?

In the search console, we can be able to check the number of website pages google indexed. Another method is to use the search operator in Google to manually check the list of all pages indexed by the search giant.

106. What is Mobile First Indexing?

Mobile-first indexing implies that Google uses the mobile version of the content for indexing.

107. What is the value of press releases?

We can get the value from press releases only when we earn new links from third-party websites. As it costs money to publish press releases, it’s very important to make sure the story is interesting enough to earn quality backlinks.

108. What are contextual backlinks?

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

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

109. What are social signals?

Social signals are engaging activities people have with your accounts on social media platforms as in likes, dislikes, comments, shares, views, etc.

110. What is cross-linking?

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

Parting Note – SEO Interview Questions

These SEO interview questions will certainly help you prepare for your dream job. Try being honest about your answers and give as many examples to highlight your understanding of technical SEO concepts.

If you’re looking for guidance in solving SEO Interview questions do reach out to me.

Good luck!

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Anish Illuz

Anish Illuz

Helping brands grow digitally by applying Digital Marketing Strategies

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