Advanced Level SEO Interview Questions And Answers - Ultimate Interview Guide

If you are preparing to appear in an SEO Interview, this SEO interview questions and answers guide is all you need to read today.

In the previous blog, we covered all the SEO interview questions for a beginner or fresher level. And here, this blog will cover all the important advanced-level SEO interview questions and answers. So, let's get started.

SEO Interview Questions And Answers For Your Next Job Interview

• What is SEO? What are the important types of SEO methods?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, a process or technique that helps you create and optimize your website according to search engines. Also, it helps improve the quality of your website, increase its visibility on SERP for relevant searches, and attract more customers to your business.

Three types of SEO are:

• On-Page SEO

• Off-Page SEO

• Technical SEO

• Explain Robots, Spiders, and Crawlers.

Robots, Spiders, and crawlers are all the same and referred to by different names. It is an automated software program that crawls or follows various links throughout the web, then grabs the content from the websites and adds it to the search engine indexes.

What is a Canonical URL?

When multiple variations are available for a webpage, a canonical URL is a way to tell search engines which specific URL is the original one and which one you want to be listed in the search engines. If you use canonical URLs, it helps websites to avoid duplicate issues. You can have canonical issues in multiple cases, such as different dynamic parameters of the same page, print version, and more.

What is Google Algorithm?

Google algorithm is a set of commands, rules and codes, and metrics that help the search engine find relevant search results for user queries.

SEO experts believe that there are more than 200 ranking factors Google algorithm uses to rank your website for specific keywords.

What is Google Penalty?

Google's penalty is a punishment against a website whose content conflicts with the marketing practices enforced by Google. A website can have a Google penalty as a result of an update to the ranking algorithm of Google or a manual review that suggests that a web page uses "black hat" practices.

• List down the tools you use for SEO.

Here, you need to mention the tools you use for SEO, such as

Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, SEMRush, Screaming Frog, AHRef, etc.

What are rich snippets?

Rich snippet, also known as schema markup, is a form of structured data that helps websites give more information to crawlers and readers. It can also help you get more clicks. Rich snippets do not directly improve the webpage ranking, but if well presented, they can surely increase the CTR of the web page, which can help you increase rankings in the long run.

What is Cloaking?

Cloaking is a black-hat technique where the user finds different content for a web page compared to the content found by search engines. Cloaking is a method of tricking search engine algorithms to index an entirely different keyword-stuffed web page but displaying the actual optimized web page only to the users.

What are doorway pages?

Doorway pages are a black hat SEO technique that should be avoided. These are the pages that users first visit after clicking a search engine result before they enter the actual landing page.

These pages are mainly optimized for search engines, and once the user visits one of the doorway pages, they are redirected to the actual landing page.

What does EAT mean?

EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.

What is the complete form of YMYL?

YMYL stands for Your Money, Your Life.

How many kinds of meta tags are there in SEO? What are their character limits?

Mainly, there are four types of meta tags in SEO.

• Meta Keywords Attribute

• Meta Description tag with a 150 characters limit.

• Title tag with a character limit of 70 characters.

• Meta Robots Attribute

What is Google Analytics

This is one of the most common SEO interview questions you will face during an interview.

Google Analytics is a free tool by Google that helps you to track and analyze your website's performance.

Google Analytics keeps a check on various activities of users when they visit your website, such as visitor flow and user engagement, along with multiple attributes, such as gender, age, and interests, with the help of a tracking code.

Google Analytics collects data in multiple ways, such as session level, user level, pageview level, and event level.

The primary purpose of the Google Analytics tool is to help you make decisions about improving the website's performance and revenue.

Name some of the reports in Google Analytics.

• Mobile performance report

• Content efficiency report

• Traffic acquisition report

• New vs. Returning visitors

• Keyword analysis report

• Bounce rate vs. Exit rate report

• Landing pages report

What can you get from Google Analytics?

The interviewer can ask this SEO question to check your Google Analytics knowledge.

The primary things Google Analytics offers are as follows:

• Real-time users report

• Best and worst performing channels

• Location of your users

• Speed of your webpages

• List of popular pages

• Funnel flow

• Goals and conversion

• Audience devices

• Visitor behavior and internal search

What do you mean by conversions, and how will you track conversions using Google Analytics?

Conversion in Google Analytics happens when your predefined goals in GA accomplish, thus generating ROI for the website.

For example, if a user performs any desired action on the website, such as signing up for the newsletter, filling out a form, or simply displaying a high level of engagement, etc. You can utilize goals in Google Analytics to set the conversion tracking.

Any activity the user completes that is important for your business is known as conversion. In simple words, the successful accomplishment of a predefined goal is conversion.

Most Common SEO Mistakes That You Should Avoid.

• Try to avoid Grey Hat SEO

• Black Hat SEO

• Exact-match Anchor text

• Spam comments

• Keyword Stuffing

• Unnatural links

• Duplicate content and cloaking

• Domain and Keyword Cloaking

• 3rd party "Paid" links

• Intrusive Interstitial Ads

• Automated link building

• Article spinners

• Link and article directories

• Doorway Page, bots, spam, Link Baiting

• Paid / spam blogging

• Duplicate Content and Cloaking

How do you optimize a URL?

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

What is competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis is the process of identifying your organic competition, analyzing how they are performing better or where they lack and using the information to improve your websites.

It includes on-page analysis, keywords used, content pattern and quality, internal linking and navigation, backlinks, and referring domain.

State the difference between the "nofollow" and "do follow" link.

No follow links do not pass link juice and have no impact on your website's ranking. Do follow link passes link juice and impacts the Google ranking algorithm.

How to see the list of pages indexed by Google?

You can check the number of web pages indexed by Google in the search console.

Another method that you can use to manually check if the pages are indexed by search engines or not is by using search operators in Google.

What is mobile-first indexing?

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

What are contextual backlinks?

Contextual backlinks are those links surrounded by the text in the content body. These links possess higher value than the other links from the header, footer, or sidebar.

What is AMP?

AMP stands for Accelerated mobile pages; it is an open source project that helps increase the speed and improve the readability of their web pages on mobile devices.

Google, Adobe, and WordPress have joined several other brands to make this possible.

What is an SEO Audit?

SEOAudit refers to the activity of evaluating the website's health. SEO audit involves multiple sections like On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical SEO.

When you conduct an SEO Audit, it helps you find the issues and problems in the website which should be fixed to improve the website's ranking, user experience, and conversion.

Some primary aspects are On-Page SEO, Indexability, content quality, technical SEO, website speed, navigation, anchor texts, the structure of the website, Off-Page, referring domain - backlink ratio, metadata, quality of the referring domains, competitive analysis, etc.

What is a link audit?

Link audit refers to the activity conducted to audit your domain's backlinks. It can help you understand the type and quality of the backlinks you receive and list the backlinks that should be added to your disavow list.

How often should you perform a link audit?

You may find link audit a tedious and complicated issue. If you have just started link building, you can often perform link audits. But, you should conduct a complete link audit approximately once a year.

How important is DA?

DA is an important metric for SEOs. They use it to identify and understand the quality of websites quickly. This metric helps to compare multiple websites and understand their authority.

Difference between DA and PA.

DA is domain authority. It simply explains the authority of a complete website. The higher the DA, the more possibility of ranking. DA is one of the 200+ SEO ranking factors.

PA is page authority. It explains the authority of a particular page based on social sharing, backlinks, etc. PA determines how well a specific page would rank on SERP. A score near 100 is considered good.

What are the social media platforms used for Search Engine Optimisation?

For online promotions, you can use various social media platforms. Some crucial ones are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.

What are social signals?

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

What is cross-linking?

Cross-linking is the process of linking one website to another. Cross-linking aims to increase the number of inbound links to a web page with relevant SEO keywords.

This activity can help a web page rank higher for particular keywords and generate referral traffic.

Types Of Cross Links

• Natural Cross Links

• Outreach Cross Links

• Private Cross Links

Which is better: High-quality content or a high amount of backlinks?

Obviously, if we offer high-quality content, we can earn high-quality backlinks. Quality is always better than quantity and applies the same in SEO. So, high-quality content is always better.

What is the primary purpose of using keywords in SEO?

The keywords or phrases are important because they tell search engines about the content of your website's page. Search engine stores keywords in the database, and when the user searches the keyword, it comes up with the best possible match results.

What does it mean when nothing appears while searching for the domain?

While searching for a domain, if nothing appears, there could be one of the following possibilities:

• Maybe the search engines have banned the website.

• Some canonical issues.

• Maybe no index by search engines.

What is the difference between PageRank(PR) and Search Engine Result Page(SERP)?

PageRank is the grade a webpage gets from headmaster Google. In contrast, SERP is the result displayed by Google for the keyword entered in the Google search bar.

What is Google's Rich Answer Box?

This is another question on the list of advanced SEO interview questions and answers.

Google Rich Answer Box is the method used by Google to help users to find the answer to their queries without clicking any website.

These can be found while you search for distance, weather reports, unit conversions, calculators, cricket score, text-based answers, and more.

What is a Disavow Tool?

Disavow tool is a part of the Google Search Console tool that allows publishers to convey to Google that certain backlinks from some specific domains should not be considered and should be avoided.

It helps search engines to avoid any kind of action on the website based on wrong links. But, you should use and handle this tool carefully, and if not used with caution, it can harm your website's performance in search engines.

What is Guest Posting?

Guest Posting is one of the best link-building activities where you contact a relevant and high-quality website and offer to write for them and get a contextual backlink for your page.

Some guest posting websites allow links only on the author bio, but others also let you have links in-body for a small fee.

Guest posting also helps you increase the visibility of your website among the potential traffic to your website and your targeted customers, along with improving your website's authority.

What is Schema Markup?

One of the most common SEO interview questions. Schema markup refers to structured data that you implement in your website for search engines to understand your website better and provide additional information to users on the SERP.

It is not a ranking factor, but the rich SERP snippets help you improve the CTR of the listing and thus improve the ranking in the long run.

How can you increase the crawling frequency by the search engines?

We can increase the frequency of crawling by adding new content, updating the web pages regularly, updating the sitemaps, removing unnecessary content and web pages, improving quality backlinks, enhancing the loading time of your website, etc.

What is "(not provided)" data in the keyword planner?

This is one of the frequent questions you can ask during an SEO interview to analyze your knowledge about Google Analytics.

To answer this, first, you need to understand why Google does this.

In October 2011, Google changed its way of harvesting data from searches to protect users' privacy.

How to solve this:

• Use traffic sources data from the queries report.

• Examine Google ads data.

• Use search console - search queries data.

How to optimize a website with millions of pages?

For these kinds of websites, you need to give special attention to the following sections:

• Creating dynamic meta tags.

• Dynamic XML sitemap.

• Strong internal structure for navigation.

What to do if your website gets penalized?

First, you must understand why it happened and fix the issues completely. Then, you may apply for re-inclusion.

How can we improve the landing page quality?

We can improve the quality of the landing page using the following ways:

• A strong headline and supportive tagline

• Page load time

• Original and quality content

• Following Google guidelines

• User-friendliness and user experience

• Clear call of action message

• Easy to navigate and understand

• Not having too many links

• Visual imagery

• Simplified lead capture form

• Trust symbols

• Should connect with Brand and proposition

What steps will you follow if your SEO methods and techniques do not work?

The first thing you should do is analyze your website's problems and resolve them step by step.

• First, check whether the project is new and then re-check the keywords.

• Next, look out for the relevant keywords that can be helpful.

• Even though the website and the web pages have been indexed well and still do not appear in the first ten results on the search engine result page, you may make some changes in the page text, titles, and description.

• If the website has a problem with indexing, such as not being indexed well or dropped from the index. Then, it might comprise some severe issues and require re-work.

What will you do if the company website you work for decides to move all the content to a new domain?

The first step is to update the previous website with a permanent redirect to a new page for all the pages. And after that, you should remove the previous content from the search engines to avoid duplicate content issues.

How will you neutralize a toxic link to your website?

You can check who links to your website using various backlinks checker tools. Now, you need to go to the "toxic link" report, where you can find all the harmful links to your website. If you find any link in the "toxic link report" that matches the link on your website, then you can use the "Google Disavow Tool" to remove it.

What is Event Tracking?

Another common Google Analytics question in an SEO interview.

Events are user interactions with the content that you can track independently from a web page or screen load.

Some activities you might want to track as events are downloads, mobile ad clicks, gadgets, flash elements, AJAX elements, video plays, etc.

For example, you can set up event tracking if you want to know how many visitors watched a video or downloaded an ebook.

What does an SEO manager do?

If you are attending an interview for the position of SEO manager, you might be asked this as one of your SEO interview questions.

So, let me answer this question: the main work that an SEO Manager is responsible for is to identify techniques, strategies, and tactics to increase website traffic and obtain a higher ranking placement on the search engine result page(SERP).

Primary tasks of an SEO Manager:

• Plan and execute SEO campaigns and projects to improve website leads/purchases.

• Analyze and report the performance of the campaigns and projects.

• Overlook the work done by other team members and guide them to work efficiently.

• Optimize the website landing page, fill the content gap and track KPIs.

• Guiding the team with the challenges they face and recommending suggestions to fix problems.

SEO managers should have excellent communication skills to collaborate and lead the team efficiently.

What is a model comparison tool?

This is one of the most complex SEO interview questions related to Google Analytics you can get asked during the interview.

Attribution models are widely used to identify the appropriate marketing channels and give credit. But how to decide which attribution model would work for your business?

Model comparison tool helps to compare conversion metrics with the help of different attribution modelling such as first interaction, last interaction, time decay, and more. This tool also helps you to compare three attribution models with each other.

For example, you can compare how Facebook or Twitter advertising works when you apply last clicks with linear and time decay attribution.

Conclusion

We hope the advanced SEO Interview questions and answers guide has been helpful for you. It includes all the essential questions you may ask during an SEO interview.

So, make sure you go through all these questions and prepare yourself for an SEO interview.

We hope that you have found this article valuable. You may comment below if you have any doubts or reviews about the article. We will be more than happy to respond.