Top 50+ SEO Interview Questions and Answers for 2024

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a technique in digital marketing to optimize a website for search engines. Since everyone has access to the internet these days so it is an integral part of any digital marketing plan.  It plays a vital role in improving the visibility of a website, increasing web traffic and better branding. It eventually helps in attracting prospective customers and selling products and services online, thereby growing their businesses. The top 50 SEO interview questions and answers from basic to advanced levels listed below, will guide you to fetch a job as an SEO Manager or Digital Marketing expert.

Basic SEO Interview Questions and Answers

Keyword Related SEO Interview questions

Q1. What are a keyword and its role in SEO?

A keyword is a focus word or phrase that describes the content on your page. It is important for SEO professionals because a search based on keywords gives a fair idea of what people want. Therefore, a keyword is a term you search often so that it ranks with a specific page. In this one of the basic SEO Interview questions, interviewer expects to know the role of keywords which businesses can aim for any information, product, service, etc.

Q2. What is keyword frequency?

The number of times a keyword is used within the content is called Keyword Frequency. It is essential to limit the addition of keywords in the content. Otherwise, when optimizing the page, the search engine will put the content to the point of keyword stuffing or spamming.

Q3. What is the keyword Proximity?

Keyword Proximity represents the distance or nearness of words/phrases from each other in a piece of content. For example:

1. Henry Harvin’s Digital Marketing Course is excellent. I love the institute.
2. It’s great to do Digital Marketing Course. I love Henry Harvin institute.

If someone searches for the ‘Henry Harvin digital marketing course’ on Google, the chance of the first result is higher in contrast to the second. Therefore, in the first sentence, the keyword proximity is higher.

Q4. Explain Keyword Density.

Keyword Density is the proportion of times a keyword or phrase occurs on a specific web page. If the keyword density is far more than the optimal level, it might trigger search engine crawlers to consider it as keyword stuffing. Although there is no perfect keyword density, 3–4% is recommended as the best practice for SEO. In this SEO Interview question, Keyword Density Formula is following:

Keyword Density = (No. of times a keyword / total count of keywords) * 100

Q5. What does a good keyword difficulty score tell you?

The keyword difficulty score ranges between 1 to 100.

• The range of low keyword difficulty scores lies between 1 to 29
• Medium keyword difficulty score ranges between 30 to 70
• The range between 70-100 is a high keyword difficulty score.

The score of keyword difficulty is based on the number of websites targeting similar keywords to rank it on Google. For a high authority website with quality content and high traffic, we can go with the keywords that have high keyword difficulty. On the other hand, for a new website with low authority, it is advisable to use low or medium difficulty. Therefore, it would be better to use keywords that can be ranked easily. Eventually, we can build the authority and then go for higher-difficulty keywords. 

Q6. What is meant by keyword stemming?

Keyword stemming is a method of finding new keywords from the main keyword in the search query. And then building new keywords by joining suffixes, prefixes, and pluralization. Thus, the ability of the Google algorithm to understand the context of the page and match it with relevant keywords makes a page more searchable.

Other Basic terminologies asked in SEO Interview Questions

Q7. What is the bounce rate and how does it affect SEO?

The bounce rate depicts the percentage of visitors leaving the site without any action. This means visitors are not satisfied with the content, user experience, speed, or other things of a site. Since SEO is all about user experience, thus reduced bounce rate is a success factor for any website. The formula to calculate the bounce rate is:

Bounce Rate = (No. of site visitors leaving without action/total no. of visited pages) * 100

Q8. What is the exit rate and difference from the bounce rate?

The exit rate in SEO is when a user comes to a specific page and then goes to next or next and so on, and finally leaves it. The exit rate is calculated when the user leaves the website from a certain page.

Q9. What is search engine submission?

Search engine submission refers to the method of listing the website with search engines so that it gets crawled and indexed. Below are the following two methods:

1. Submission of one page at a time with the help of a webmaster tool.
2. Submitting the entire site to as many search engines as you want. Also, called a mass submission process. 

Q10. What is directory submission?

Directory submission is a process of seeding the website URL to various web directories just to get backlinks thus increasing business growth. You can present your website to a niche-relevant directory where searchers look for businesses.

Q11. What is a press release submission in SEO?

Press release submission on websites is writing newsworthy content, press releases, new events, company’s products or services etc. Thus, these platforms serve as sources of news and announcements for journalists and reporters ensuring the content is engaging and meaningful.

Q12. What do you mean by TLD?

TLD stands for Top-level domain. It is the concluding part of an internet address or the part of a domain that comes after the dot. For example, .com, .org, or .net, etc.

Q13. What do you mean by ccTLD?

ccTLD is an acronym for country code Top-Level. These domain names have targeted customers in a particular country. For instance, .in for India, .us for the United States etc. So, for businesses in India and the targeted customers in the US, ccTLD can convey to Google that the searchers belong to the US. Therefore, can help in international SEO if used the right way.

Q14. What is Google My Business?

Google My Business is a service for listing businesses on the google search engine to gain more visibility. Therefore, adding business information, pictures, responses to customers and google reviews works as an effective SEO and lead-generation tool.

Q15. What do you mean by Keyword Prominence?

Keyword Prominence is the process of using a primary keyword of the content within the initial part of a web page. The main keyword should appear within the first 100 words of the page. Eventually, the keyword prominence in content helps in search engine optimization.

 Q16. Define Spiders, Robots and Crawlers

Spiders, robots, and crawlers are software programs that explore the internet and then grab the content from websites and index the web pages.

Q17. What is a Domain Authority?

Domain Authority is one of the ranking factors that define the authority of your entire website. Therefore, the ability of a page to rank better increases with high Domain Authority. MOZ has developed Domain Authority for the Page ranking algorithm.

Q18. What is HTTPS?

Hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) encrypts all the data for secured communication on the world wide web. The data is transferred in a combination of non-secured HTTP protocol with a Secure Socket Layer (SSL)/ Transport Layer Socket (TLS). Hence, the HTTPS connection offers benefits like data integrity, website authentication and data encryption.

Q19. Mention the difference between long-tail and short-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords contain more than three words which make searches highly specific. Therefore, these have relatively low search volume, but also low competition. Whereas, short-tail keywords have one or two words. For this reason, these keywords have high volume but high competition as well. Thus, long-tail keywords in SEO help to build some traffic for a new or low-authority website in comparison to short-tail keywords.

Q20. What are canonical issues?

A canonical issue happens when there is the same content with duplicate links.  For this reason, Google penalizes such duplicate content. Therefore, more than one URL with identical content can be fixed by adding 301 redirecting or canonical tagging to the websites.

Q21. What is Image Alt Text in SEO?

An image alt tag describes an image on a web page that can be read by search engines. Therefore, images should also be optimized using alt text to impact a page’s ranking.

Q22. What is a Page Ranking?

PageRank is one of the algorithms used by Google which includes both organic search and paid results. These page ranking measures the performance of the webpage and are not just random positions.

Q23. Define Googlebot.

Googlebot is a web crawler software to search and indexes web pages. The two types of  Googlebot crawlers are desktop and mobile crawlers.

Q24. What is off-page optimization?

Off-page optimization focuses on the page ranking factors that happen outside your website. It aims to increase the authority of your domain by getting links from other websites. Some of the most important off-page ranking factors are backlinks, blogging, social media engagement, etc.

Q25. What is on-page optimization?

On-page optimization refers to optimizing different parts of your website to improve and earn organic search engine rankings. The main factors of On-page SEO that help a site to rank are title tags, keywords-based content optimization, page speed, URL Speed, meta description, image alt tags optimization, internal linking, etc.

Q26. What does 301 redirect mean?

The user and crawlers are redirected from an old URL to a new URL using this method. Google moves the page permanently and then indexes the new page. 301 redirects used in specific areas are the following:

• URL change.
• Content creation.
• Migration of content to the other domain.

Q27. What is 302 redirect?

It is a method for temporary redirection for a particular period. Therefore, Google will not remove the previous URL page from indexing. 

Intermediate SEO Interview Questions and Answers

Page Ranking Related SEO Interview Questions

Q28. How is Page Rank different from SERP?

A search Engine Result Page (SERP) is the list of pages displayed when a user searches for something on a search engine. The search results may be a result of sponsored Ads, organic searches or related searches. Page rank is based on the quality of inbound links from other websites.

Q29. Describe Google’s Rich Answer Box.

Google’s Rich Answer Box is a way of assisting users to see the search result without clicking the link on any website.  They are not part of SEO but will get more traffic from the search results. Thus, the rich snippet refers to the featured text at the top of the search results page organically.

Q30. What is an SSL Certificate and how it is a ranking factor?

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, a digital certificate that secures and encrypts the information submitted by users on a website. This information further travels from the browser to the website server. If an SSL certificate is not added, this means that data can be compromised to keep customer information secured. Since SSL certificates can hamper the user experience if intercepted by hackers. For this reason, it is also considered a ranking factor.

Q31.  What is Panda update and its key aspects?

Google Panda update is a search filter that lowers the rank of “low-quality sites”. Similarly, high-quality sites are seen at the top of the search results. Thus, the focus of this Panda update is to reward websites with high-quality content, proper design and good speed.

Q32. What is the Penguin update and its key aspects?

The Penguin update was launched to decrease the ranking of those websites that are violating the Google Webmaster guidelines. Its main target is to reward good websites for their quality. While penalising the sites that are manipulated using link farms, spammed backlinks, cloaking and keyword stuffing, etc.

Q33. What is Google Hummingbird update?

Hummingbird is the biggest google update to its algorithm. The unique ability of the update is to read the intent of keywords rather than just keywords. Indeed, the Hummingbird is a total redesign that provides searchers with precise and more accurate results.

Q34. What is the meaning of Cloaking?

Cloaking is a deceptive way of optimizing your website where the user receives different content or URLs in contrast to search engine crawlers. Consequently, the user lands on low-quality pages that don’t answer the questions we were asking. Thus, cloaking also known as a black-hat SEO practice is a mix of indexing and spamming that tries to fool a search engine.

Q35. Which tool is used to remove toxic links to a site?

A Backlink quality checker tool can be used to find out toxic links to the site. Further, Disavow Tool is a Google Search Console tool to remove these harmful links. The disavow eases the websites after link auditing or when it loses rank but still, the tool should be managed very precisely.

Q36. Explain the differences between SEO and SEM.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website through unpaid forms of advertisement. It is inexpensive and suitable for low-budget companies. Thus, it helps to increase the traffic potential of a website. For example, Backlinks creation. Whereas, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of improving the visibility of a website through paid advertisements. It is expensive and suitable for big-budget companies. Examples of SEM are Adsense, Pay per click, Adwords, and so on.

Optimization Techniques Related SEO Interview Questions

Q37. Describe NAP.

Name, Address, and Phone Number(NAP) is important for businesses that want to rank well in the local organic search results. The search engines identify these list of companies for geo-targeted searches. 

Q38. Explain AMP.

AMP is an acronym for Accelerated Mobile Pages, an open-source web framework to manage the readability and speed of pages on mobile devices. And makes possible to load simple mobile websites almost immediately for a better user experience.

Q39. What is the meaning of the Sandbox effect?

Google sandbox is an imaginary area where new websites and their search rating are put on hold until they prove worthy of ranking. In other words, even if a website qualifies for all the SEO factors, the website will not be ranked for a few months. Thus, it checks the standard of the website before a ranking can commence.

Q40. How does robots.txt work?

A robots.txt is a file that a search engine bot reads and further instructs the crawlers about how to crawl and index the website and its pages. Generally, this is the first file on the site to manage crawler traffic to the website. Hence, the role of the robot.txt file is to avoid unnecessary visits by search engine bots on the websites.

Q41. What is the advantage of Meta Robot tags over robots.txt?

A robots.txt file is a part of the robot exclusion protocol that gives instructions to crawlers about the entire site Meta tags, also known as meta robots directives are HTML code snippets. They instruct search engine crawlers on which pages to crawl and index on your website. Generally, the meta tags are snippets added to the head section of a web page. However, unlike robot.txt, they cannot prevent image, video and audio files from appearing in search results.

Q42. What is RSS Feed?

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is the method that updates information automatically into an easy-to-read format, XML files. Thus, content is distributed in real-time so that the latest published content for a website ranks at the top.

Q43. Describe Forum posting.

Forum posting is an off-page SEO technique where you build a profile to participate in online discussion forums. Also, respond to different questions to divert traffic to your site. Thus, it ultimately helps to reach out to potential users and engage them. 

Q44. What is the meaning of article spinning?

This is one of the important SEO interview questions to measure your expertise. Article spinning is a black hat SEO technique used to write content that appears to be new. Thus, creating an illusion with low quality and repetitive content as if original article.

Q45. What is a doorway page?

A doorway page is a black hat method, created for spamdexing. It has invisible text that search engines could read but users couldn’t. Thus, the page is optimized to rank well in search results and then tricked to automatically redirect to the actual landing page, once the user hits the page.

Expert Level SEO Interview Questions and Answers

Page Optimization Analysis Related SEO Interview Questions

Q46. What are the ways to decrease the loading time of the website?

In these type of SEO interview questions, the interviewer expects you to know all the possible ways to decrease the loading time of the website. Hence, following are the ways to achieve it.

•       Optimizing the Images.
•       Optimize through content writing.
•       Reduce 301 redirects.
•       Scale down the size of the images.
•       Put style sheet references to the<head>
•       Minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS files.
•       Enable browser cache.
•       Enable compression to reduce the bandwidth of pages.

Q47. What is the role of Schema?

Schema is structured data which uses unique semantic vocabulary. Although search engines are powerful tools that use algorithms. But they still need help reading, identifying and categorising the content of web pages. Therefore, schema markup is a language that search engines can understand to read the content of the pages.

Q48. What is the role of Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free service to maintain and evaluate the performance of a website in search results. Additionally, it also helps you monitor, and fix errors. On the whole, it is also called the Google Webmaster tool that helps understand and optimize the website better.

SEM Related SEO Interview Questions

Q49. What does PPC mean?

Pay per click or PPC is an advertisement campaign in which you pay a fee to rank your website on the search engine result page. When someone types specific keywords or phrases, the search engine display the ads created for the visitors and you pay price only when the user clicks on the ad.

Q50.What are Google Ads and how does it work?

PPC uses Google Ads as the most commonly used advertising system. It works on a bidding system on a set of keywords to appear on search results. Therefore, optimize quality score and bid amount should be optimized for better ad positioning from Google AdWords.

 Q51. What does CTR mean?

Click Through Rate abbreviated as CTR is an important metric to measure the success of site optimisation. To calculate this, divide the number of impressions by the number of clicks. Sometimes keywords are ranking but still, significant traffic is not coming. Thus, it means the CTR score is poor. Therefore, improving the score optimisation of meta titles and descriptions is important.

Q52. Explain E-A-T and its importance in SEO.

Expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, an acronym for E-A-T is a principle under the Search Quality Raters Guidelines by Google. Quality raters are real people to determine the quality and effectiveness of search results. Therefore, Google search results should meet the needs of users based on the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. To enumerate, Google does not give E-A-T score to the website. However, following E-A-T, guides, Google engineers improvise algorithms to adjust rankings in search engines. This one of the important SEO interview questions is asked to both intermediates and experts in the digital marketing field.

Top SEO Interview Questions

Q53. What is the importance of Dwell Time in SEO?

This is one of the top SEO Interview questions. Dwell time is the amount of time a user stays on a page before clicking back to the search box. If a web page has a low dwell time, it means the user did not find the page useful. Thus, it is a part of the machine learning algorithm of a search engine but not the only deciding factor for ranking a page.

Q54. What is the role of Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytic tool to know the performance of your website. It provides statistics support to optimize your website for search engines. Thus, helps you achieve better in terms of conversion.

Thus, the above SEO interview questions are just a quick revision of what you knew, therefore your viable ability will also help you fetch a job. If you still feel the need to enhance your skills, you can join Henry Harvin’s Advanced SEO course.

How to prepare for SEO Interview Questions

About Henry Harvin Advanced SEO Course:

Henry Harvin provides the Advanced SEO Course to master the skills and expertise for site management using SEO tools.  The skills acquired will eventually help identify, implement, and validate SEO metrics for the success of your clients.

Benefits:

• Optimize and manage websites.
• Analyse critical reports of competitors and create a marketing plan accordingly.

• Learn all functions of the Search Engine Optimization in a complete Business Scenario
• Earn a Certified Advanced SEO Specialist certification from the institute that is the winner of the Top Corporate Training Award.
• Become an SEO Specialist and tap a high-paying job in Digital Marketing.

Conclusion:

The scope of digital marketing is evolving with the increased use of smartphones and other technologies. Businesses are forced to create an internet presence and move from traditional modes of marketing and selling. Therefore, the future lies in learning digital marketing strategies. We advise you to join Henry Harvin’s Advance SEO course not only to crack SEO interview questions for a job but also to work as a freelancer or own an agency. Hence, with great preparation and the best approaches, you can develop the necessary potential to achieve desired results for all your clients.

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