Search engine optimisation is a field that is growing in popularity both as a profession and as a business pursuit. This is in part due to the increased understanding in what make a website successful and the necessity to develop and maintain great websites in order to be visible to potential customers and rank highly in search engines. Both factors lead to an increased level of organic traffic and ultimately revenue for a business.

Interviews can be stressful, even for the most experienced among us. SEO is also a vast and varied area with no set steps or how to manual. This combination of interview nerves and contrasting opinions within the industry can lead to some challenging questions. Presented here are some of the quirkier SEO interview questions and possible answers.

1. How can you check if a URL has been indexed by Google?

This can be considered a trick question. It may sound too simple so the interviewee may be left questioning and overthinking, eventually getting the answer wrong.

On the other hand, the seasoned cool-headed SEO will call the bluff and simply respond using the search operators “site:”

2. Is it possible to prevent a URL being indexed?

Even this question can lead the interviewee into a rabbit hole of SEO traps. Here is why. You cannot have the certainty that the search engine will not index a page. You can indeed communicate to it that ideally you would not like to see it indexed. You can issue a directive through robots noindex meta tag.

Bonus points go to the interviewee who can point out that to answer with the common misconception of disallowing the page through the robots.txt file would indeed be incorrect. As an SEO expert would know, this is because the disallow directive within the aforementioned file is used to discourage the search engine from crawling the page not in fact for the purpose of indexing it.

3. Outline the most important SEO ranking factors?

This can be a matter of opinion so the answers will vary. Often business will have their own set of priorities and strategies when it comes to SEO ranking factors. However, it is widely accepted that the following have most significant impact; content quality, backlinks and page experience factors.

Content quality is of utmost importance. Content should offer something to the user; clear information, a unique insight. In addition to this content should be grammatically correct, well structured and interesting.

A backlink is an endorsement from one site to another in the form of a link. A well ranking site in a search engine is one that is shared and referred to more widely than low quality spammy sites. Successful websites often engage in campaigns with Link Builder Italia to connect with online news outlets and blogs in order improve their websites and collaborate with similar niches.

Page experience factors combine user experience (UX), page speed and core web vitals. A website must be attractive to the user and easy to navigate. Page loading time should be swift to avoid users losing attention and exiting a site. Core web vitals can be utilised to examine the success of site.

4. Which SEO myth are you fed up with?

This is a great question especially when it comes to employing less experienced graduates. Often new comers to the industry pick up on the myths first. Answering this question well will showing you are knowledgeable and well versed in the field.

Many SEO myths exist, but one of the most common is the importance of keyword density. Keyword density refers to the frequency a word or phrase appears in comparison to the total number of words on a web page. It is often a tactic used by SEOs to optimise content on a page. Whilst it has a role to play when used in a balanced manner with other strategies it is not one to solely focus attention. There is not definite number to strive for.

5. Outline a quick technical SEO win?

Again, there are many responses when posed with such a question. It comes down to your personal preferences and strengths. One possible and straightforward answer is to prioritise only your most important pages in the XML site map instead of submitting the entire website.

This is because the search engine will find the less important resources regardless through crawling.

6. A website has been live for several months but getting no traffic, why might this be?

This question can have a more than one legit and valid answer and is there to show off problem solving skills. If you’re the kind of person who questions everything you might start by casting doubts on the analytics tracking. Meaning maybe the site is getting traffic, it is just a case of not being able to see it in the analytics platform of your choice.

If, as the interviewee, you want to keep the conversation in the field of technical SEO, it would be possible to suggest double checking the robot.txt file set up to ensure a request to the search engines not to crawl the site exists.

Other legit answers include ensuring that a search console is properly set up for the website or that a working XL site map has been submitted. Additionally, consider if the severs are properly fulfilling the request they are receiving from browsers.

7. What do you do when a website has countless duplicate pages?

When facing duplication issues the key to the resolution is to clearly pinpoint the nature of the duplication. Consider what the duplicate pages look like?

E-commerce sites are prone to a certain type of duplication that is connected with the use of filters necessary to recombine information on the pages in other words the total of the content is duplicate but the positioning can be different.

A possible but less likely scenario is that the content person while working between draft and final edit has pushed live two pages with the exact same content.

SEO tools often pick this up. There are also cases of near duplication that is one where the duplication revolves around the repetition of a specific element of the code such as the meta title or the H1 without noticing that the content on the page shows small differences. This can often be the case with paginated page series such as news and blog archives.

Based on the differences between these three scenarios the approaches would be totally different.

8. How do you remain current when it comes to SEO news?

It is vital that in the prospective employee shows a genuine interest in the area and keeps up to date with the latest news. Twitter is the place to be. Similar to all news, SEO news travels fast so unless you have string discipline of checking out your favourite SEO blogs daily you are not going to be exposed to the variety of news, hacks, case studies, ideas that are exchanged over the social media platform.