SEO Interview Questions - Whiteboard Friday Moz

Key Takeaways

[Music] howy seo's fans welcome to another edition of whiteboard Friday this week we're talking about SEO interview questions uh there's a lot of times in your professional life when you're going to be either interviewing someone who might be working with you on a SEO team uh inside your company who might be contracting for you perhaps a consultant you're interviewing someone you're the CMO or the VP of marketing and you want to know how well these SEO people know their stuff and it can actually be kind of tough to know what questions to ask unless you've got some background experience and likewise if you are someone who might be interviewing for an SEO position if you're someone who uh is a consultant and might be talking to some clients and you want to be prepared for the questions that they're going to throw at you this whiteboard Friday is for you so in the SEO interview process the the questions that I would ask these are very SEO specific ones right so in every interview particularly when you're bringing someone onto your team you're going to be asking questions about cultural fit and background and uh their biography like what have they done in their past and are they going to be a good fit for your team are they going to uh be able to handle the responsibilities does their work life balance work with the sort of organization you've got I'm not going to talk about that stuff I am going to talk about the very specific knowledge kinds of things that you want to uh use with an SEO or that you want to be prepared for as an SEO when you're going into these types of discussions so the first general section right the section that I start with is general knowledge and this is a great way to feel out whether someone is comfortable and capable I would use these honestly if we were doing this I would be using these on phone screens right or or maybe even in the interview process like right in the form field just to just to get a sense like does this does this person have a good sense of SEO do they know things like what's a real canonical what does it do how does it work right how does search engines uh treat The Meta refresh uh what's an image title versus an ALT attribute right so you've got you know you've got different properties of a particular graphic or an image and you want to know that the SEO person understands yeah I know that the image title uh describes the image but it doesn't necessarily it isn't necessarily being used by search Eng to the same degree that the alt tach is it doesn't show up when you hover in Firefox uh it's going to become the image label in Google image search those kinds of things versus the alt attribute which might or it won't become the uh this this gets used the alt attribute gets used as anchor text when the image links off to somewhere right so those kinds of things uh you might even a question like how do you remove personalization from search results right and what you want to see is somebody goes oh yeah yeah yeah you know it's google.com search uh question mark Q equals uh whatever the search term is uh Ampersand PWS equals Z you know you find someone who can write off search strings and and tell you and how do I change the country language code well you just add an amand GL equals UK right to get the UK or us to get the US you want to see that sort of knowledge it indicates that they're really you know deep into the process of doing SEO this is they live and breathe this stuff they know it like the back of their hand that's what you want to see from an SEO and this general knowledge section great way to get a sense of that now next up I like to get a little deeper right and and understand a person's thought process and be able to explain your thought process to somebody else and that's why we have a section on strategy and tactics so this is kind of asking questions that will elicit a response that indicates to you how well this person can can really do the functions of SEO a lot of this general knowledge stuff they should have a good background but they miss a few of these questions it's fine they can always go learn them right they can go look them up they'll figure it out it's okay but you really want want to know things like do they understand how to run a keyword research campaign do they understand how to run link building do they understand what's involved in a Content strategy what does that what does that mean it doesn't just mean a Blog does it right it's it's all sorts of different things and so I like asking broad questions like how would you create a site to rank for give them a keyword right give them or or a set of keywords like I am getting into the men's fashion industry just imagine for me brainstorm with me a site that's going to perform really well in men's fashion and if you hear things like well you know I would like to build a site that uh naturally incense lots of creators lots of designers of clothing and uh lots of Brands to put their stuff on our site right so it'll be a big important site where lots of people will come to they'll put their stuff and then they'll essentially promote it for us but we have a lot of unique form fields and unique content that they have to fill out so that the content itself is unique and it doesn't just look like the manufacturer suggested description across everything else because we don't want to have duplicate content problems that shows some level of depth in terms of thinking right and it it gives you a sense of how they'll tackle problems you can ask questions like what are some of your favorite scalable link building tactics and if they say something like well I really like contacting web Masters no like nope that was you probably like you're clearly missing this word scalable uh and also probably favorite right because nobody really likes contacting web Masters that's like the least fun part of the SE link building job but if they say things like well uh I really like building up popular social accounts or I like running a Blog and and building up uh content to attract a community those are pretty good answers if they say things like I really think that uh content syndication or image licensing or Badges and embeddable widgets is a great uh link building strategy that's scalable those are those are great answers right you want to hear that kind of stuff how would you get video content into Google more of a tactical question but it gives you a sense of of some of the knowledge and then how they do it so you you know if you hear a question like that and the person gives you a response and they say well Google has um like this video protocol all right they do Google does have a video protocol but what you really want to hear is oh it's great you know what I like to do is uh make content using YouTube or Wisa or Vimeo or whatever it is whatever they're preferred re uh you know video hosting service of choice is and let them tell you why that is and then embedded on our pages and we use the video XML sitemaps feed to send to Google so that it appears as Rich Snippets in the search result perfect right like this person's clearly understands the the Tactical knowledge and maybe they don't even know how to craft I don't know how to write a video XML sitemap right I couldn't start writing you the protocols from scratch but I can go find it online and copy you know what Google suggests it it needs to be I just need to have the knowledge of how to do that uh and so that strategy and tactics section also really important last up I do like to ask about some tools and metrics because this can give you a great sense of uh both an seo's depth as well as the way they think about a lot of problems because the the field of SEO granted is uh some art some science and a lot of uh research and learning and trying new things the the tools and metrics you know the statistics that we use the the the correlation data kinds of things the uh you know link data that comes out of Yahoo site EXP or or Bing Web Master tools or the Google link command or Exel lead or a majestic SEO or SEO Mo right that you want to know that they've got a good grasp on oh here's all the ways that I could potentially get that data and here's why I like this one and I don't like this one I I like the Bing or the MSN ad Center keyword tool I don't like the Google Keyword tool I you know really don't like um I don't know some keyword tool here but I think uh uh keyword spy is great or spy fu is awesome or whatever it is and you want to know not just what those tools are but how do they evaluate them that gives you a really good sense for how that person thinks about problems how they're going to attack things whether they're a critical thinker or whether they just take things on face value which in the SEO world it's not a great idea like even the things that I might be telling you on whiteboard Fridays you probably want to verify for yourself right so things like what data would you use to judge the value of a link and you want to hear things like well I I try and get some metrics around how important the domain is how important that specific page is I'd try and get some metrics about where is that link going to be placed what sort of anchor text will it use how many other links are on that page where to they point to are they spamming or manipulative or are they good and authentic those kinds of things what tools do you use to measure competitors keywords and traffic right and if they tell you well you know I really like this um uh uh spyfu or key compete or or some of these other ones compete.com has a competitive intelligence tool hitwise has one very Enterprise level uh hey yeah you know those those are those are good ways to measure keywords and they on the traffic question right if they say well I really like Alexa kind of be like you do why why do you like Alexa you know what what do you find useful about it and there are good answers which is well for the top thousand 5,000 sites on the web Alexa is pretty good at saying that the relative difference between them which is which is relatively true most of the time at least but then for you know those sites in the tail sites in the mid-range like Alexa is terrible you know you kind of want to hear well none of the data sources are particularly excellent but I like to look at I don't know Google trends for websites or compete.com or uh I like to look at quantcast I like can compare across the set but I really like to look at maybe how many people are subscribing to their blog through Google Reader that's a great signal right it get it lets you know that person is thinking more deeply about these questions uh how do you measure social activity on a site and that's that's more of a broad-based question like do you just track tweets do you have some sort of an analytics tracking what do you set up for that are you using something simple like a a shared count do you have a a statistics dashboard would you be using um you know a Twitter client to be measuring that whatever they've got if you ask these questions or you can answer these questions I think you're going to do a lot to cement a good relationship between things and if if if you're an SEO right now and you're thinking to yourself boy I'm I'm not sure I could answer all those questions that that Rand had on the board I mean these are these aren't the the toughest things that'll get tossed at you in an interview they they shouldn't be definitely so you might want to spend some time having good answers to these questions thinking hard about these things researching them and likewise if you're an employer or you're a contractor and you're uh trying to find SEO people to work for you do Consulting work you definitely want to amass a good set of these and I would actually recommend trying to ask relatively consistently again and again with the same people because having that consistency between questions lets you really grade uh people on the same level if you change up your questions every time uh it can get tough to remember how well a candidate might have done against another one all right everyone I hope you've enjoyed this edition of whiteboard Friday I hope you're going to find some great jobs and some great seos and I look forward to seeing you again next time take care