SEO Interview Questions?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of strategies and techniques used to improve a website's visibility and ranking on search engines like Google. It involves optimizing website content, structure, and performance to attract organic (non-paid) traffic. SEO aims to increase a website's chances of appearing in search results for relevant keywords, ultimately driving more visitors and potential customers to the site.

Key SEO practices include keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and technical improvements to enhance the user experience and search engine rankings.

Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers

Below are some of the top SEO interview questions for freshers (with proper answers).

1. What is SEO and how does it work?

This is almost always the first SEO interview question you will need to answer. SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic in organic search results. This is done by increasing the visibility of a website or web page on a search engine without paying for it.

This is not even the starting. Know the whole working through

2. What does SEO stand for?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

3. Why do you think we need SEO for business?

1993 saw the first clickable web-ad banner. HotWired had purchased a few banner ads for their promotion and advertising. There has been no looking back ever since. Marketing had seen a paradigm shift, and every year something new has been available on the Internet for people to use and explore. With the increase in online behavior, the race to show up on the first page of search engines has become extremely competitive. For a business to succeed in the online world, it must implement SEO to stay on top.

4. What is local SEO?

Local SEO is targeted towards users and potential customers who are interested in local searches for a business’s products or services. These basically include location-based queries and results.

5. What is a search engine?

A search engine is a software system, which searches the world wide web for relevant information on a particular query raised by a user on the Internet.

6. Can you name a few search engines other than Google?

This is one of the popular SEO interview questions. Here are a few of them:

1. Bing
2. Yahoo!
3. DuckDuckGo
4. Yandex
5. YouTube
6. Amazon
7. Baidu

7. What does WWW stand for?

WWW stands for the World Wide Web. It is a collection of websites stored in web servers, which are connected to local computers.

8. What do you know about web crawling?

Web crawling is the process where a web crawler (spiderbot/spider/crawler), an internet bot, browses the World Wide Web for web indexing. It uses hyperlinks to visit pages and copies them for processing and indexing by the search engine so that users on the Internet can search more quickly and efficiently.

9. Do you know about Googlebot?

Googlebot is Google’s web crawler. It finds, crawls, and indexes web pages.

10. What is search engine submission?

Search engine submission is the process of submitting your website to search engines to ensure that it gets crawled and indexed. Even though search engines are smart enough to find your website and index it easily, it is advisable to follow through with the search engine submission as you will get the opportunity to submit some useful information about your website from your end, and the search engines will alert you if potential errors are there on your site.

11. What is SERP?

SERP stands for search engine results page. This is the page where users see all the results of their queries on search engines.

12. Can you explain the difference between organic and paid results?

Both organic and paid results are types of search results on SERP shown on the basis of quality and relevance to the user query. Organic results are not paid to show up on SERP. It is very hard to rank high organically, and it requires SEO.

Paid results require bidding on keywords, and based on the Max CPC (cost per click) and quality score, they are positioned above the organic search results on SERP, and these are paid advertisements. The more you score, the less money you need to pay.

13. What are on-page SEO and off-page SEO?

On-page SEO is used to ensure that the website performance is improving and better by optimizing the meta tags and descriptions, page title, URL structure, keyword density, body tags, internal linking, images, etc.

Off-page SEO involves activities such as guest blogging, reverse guest blogging, press releases, social networking, etc. These are done away from the website to promote and increase the visibility of the same.

14. Have you heard of Google Sandbox?

While the existence of Google Sandbox has long been a subject of discussion, Google has not addressed the matter directly. It is theorized that new websites go through a probation period before they show up on SERPs. It is also believed that two important factors cause this filter to come to play—the active age of a domain and the keyword competitiveness. If the search frequency is higher for the keyword used, it is most likely that the filter will be put into effect for anti-spam purposes.

15. What is a domain name?

On the Internet, a domain name is an address where Internet users can access your website, and it includes web addresses, email addresses, and the addresses of the Internet protocols. It is basically a shortcut to the server that hosts your website.

Without a domain name, one would have to enter the full IP address to visit a website. IP addresses are numerical labels and are not very convenient for regular use.

A domain name has two main elements:

1. The website’s name (e.g. Intellipaat)
2. The domain name extension (e.g. .com)

16. What is a URL?

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is the complete address of a web page or a document on www. A URL contains the following parts:

1. Protocol: A method used to process the URL (https, http, etc.)
2. Domain: The domain name
3. Path/File: The exact location of a page, file, other assets, etc.
4. Query string: Parameters for dynamic data
5. Hash: A specific section of a web page

17. What are SEO-friendly URLs?

URLs that are easily understandable by both search engines and users are SEO-friendly URLs. They will typically include keywords, and they are mostly self-explanatory and future-proof so that they will not become obsolete over the years.

18. What is web hosting?

Web hosting is the www equivalent of buying a property. Web hosting companies will provide you with space to build your website. The server will have to be connected to the Internet for this hosting purpose.

19. What is DA?

Here is another commonly asked SEO interview question. DA or domain authority (a metric developed by Moz) is a search engine ranking score, which ranges from 0 to 100. The score predicts how well a website will rank on SERP. The higher your DA, the better chances you have at ranking higher.

20. Explain the difference between DA and PA.

While DA (domain authority) explains the authority of your entire website, PA (page authority) describes the authority of a specific page based on quality backlinks, social sharing, etc. The DA requires more time and effort than PA, but the former is more worthwhile in the long run. However, both are mutually beneficial.

21. What is TLD?

Top-level domain (TLD) is the final extension of an Internet address, for example, .com, .net, .org, .co.in, etc.

22. What is ccTLD?

In SEO, ccTLD, also known as the country code top-level domain, is a domain extension reserved for a country and has two characters. Here are a few examples for ccTLD: .it for Italy and .in for India.

23. What is PBN?

PBN or private blog network is a network of websites, which is built to link these websites to a single website for SERP ranking purposes. It is a form of black-hat SEO.

24. What are SEO tools?

SEO tools analyze the performance of web pages and give insights for high placement on the SERP.

25. Name some popular SEO tools.

This SEO interview question will be asked to gauge your expertise. So, here are a few popular SEO tools:

1. Google Search Console
2. Google Analytics
3. Moz
4. Ahrefs
5. Sprout Social
6. SEMrush
7. Screaming Frog
8. Yoast SEO
9. Majestic SEO
10. Serpstat
11. SE Ranking
12. SpyFu
13. Buzzsumo
14. Raven Tools
15. KeywordTool.io
16. Ubersuggest

26. Distinguish between a dofollow link and a nofollow link.

All hyperlinks are dofollow links by default unless specified as nofollow links. When search engine crawlers find a link, they crawl the page and pass the link juice as a vote of quality. The dofollow links from high-authority sites will help a site rank better in SERP by being quality backlinks.

Nofollow links are coded in a way that search engines do not crawl them or count them as votes of quality. You can use this when you want to link third-party sites on your website without passing the authority to those sites.

This is another popular SEO interview question, so make sure that you get the idea here.

27. What is SEO writing?

The usage of keywords and key phrases within a website’s content is known as SEO writing. This helps increase the organic visibility of the website on the SERP.

28. Explain keywords.

Keywords are words or phrases users on the Internet use to find relevant results to their queries. They are also known as search queries. Figuring out potential keywords and using them in your website content can help you get a better ranking by search engines.

29. What is keyword frequency?

The number of times a particular keyword appears in a web page content is called keyword frequency. While the appropriate keyword frequency can optimize your website, using them excessively can quickly become a case of keyword stuffing.

30. What is keyword difficulty?

Keyword difficulty gives the measure of how difficult it is to get ranked for a particular keyword based on its high usage.

31. What is keyword proximity?

The distance or proximity between two keywords within a body of text on a web page is called keyword proximity. If the keywords are closer to each other in a phrase, the phrase will carry more weight.

32. What is keyword density?

Keyword density is the ratio or percentage of keywords used on a specific page. Around 3 to 4 percent is considered best practice.

33. What is keyword stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is considered to be a form of the black-hat SEO method. Increasing the keyword frequency to rank for specific keywords is generally frowned upon and could get your website penalized.

If you are having a problem recalling your basics, then you can go through SEO Basics Blog.

34. What is keyword stemming?

Google algorithm’s ability to identify different word forms on the basis of a particular word in a search query is called keyword stemming. This is done by adding prefixes, suffixes, pluralization, etc.

35. What is keyword prominence?

Keyword prominence shows the prominent placement (on the header, in the opening paragraph, at the start of a sentence, in meta tags, etc.) of keywords within a web page.

36. How many keywords should you use on a page?

It is good to have three primary keywords and some secondary keywords, but it shouldn’t look unnatural within the content, and the number of keywords to be used depends on the content length, page flow, keyword difficulty, etc.

37. What are long-tail keywords?

Keywords can be made into a more specific combination of several words. These are called long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords can be very specific and, hence, can be good for attracting quality traffic from people who are interested in that specific search query, and they are more likely to transform this kind of traffic into conversions.

38. What is NAP?

NAP (name, address, phone number) helps search engines to identify the list of businesses to be displayed for location-based searches.

39. Define the bounce rate.

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who exit the website from the landing page without visiting any other pages or without any activity. It is the ratio of a single-page session to all sessions on a website.

40. What are header tags?

HTML header tags are used to highlight the headings (h1 level) and the subheadings (h2–h6 levels) within the content of a web page. These tags are also called header tags or heading tags. If you skip from h1 to h3, the hierarchy will be broken, and it is not advisable for on-page SEO. Every page should possess only one h1 tag unless it is using HTML5, which allows for more.