10 Questions to Ask When Hiring a SEO Specialist

Techssocial |  Better search engine optimization can increase the visibility of any website in search results, which can boost visits to a website, resulting improved brand awareness and higher sales and profits. If you are looking to hire a digital marketer who can serve the best SEO services for your organization, then below interview questions and answers below will be helpful for you to find trained professionals for SEO for your organization.

1. Table of Contents

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   Please define SEO in brief? How will you divide SEO task?

Expected Answer:

SEO is an abbreviation of search engine optimization and it is a process that helps to improve ranking of web pages higher in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc for given keywords or search terms.

SEO can be divided into two types: 1. On-Page Optimization and 2. Off-Page Optimization (Back Link Creation or Link Building)

2. Is there any difference between SEO and SEM?

Expected Answer:

Yes, there is a difference between SEO and SEM. SEO naturally improves the ranking of webpages for specific keywords, whereas SEM is a paid process to fetch traffic on the website.

3. How will you improve search engine ranking for any website?

Expected Answer:

I will start with an on-site SEO audit to check any areas for quick wins. Then, I will look for the best keywords to fetch traffic to the website. Backlinks have been a major part of search engine algorithms and will continue to play an important role in the future too. I will build links for the website in order to improve rankings.

4. If I gave you a new website for optimization, what SEO activities you will perform?

Expected Answer:

I will perform all-important SEO activities including;

• Keyword research to find important search terms/keywords with high traffic and low competition.
• Complete on-page optimization for all web pages to make them search-friendly.
• Will work on link building to create quality backlinks along with off-page optimization.
• Will also work on social media optimization to enhance social signals and getting social media traffic.

5. What is the best practice to start keyword research and which tool you use for the same?

Expected Answer:

I prefer using Google Webmaster Tools for keyword research. The tool has various features like filters for the country, finding negative keywords, etc.

6. Can you please elaborate must to do on-page optimization activities for any website?

Expected Answer:

There are many on-page activities that we can apply to any website, few of them are:

• Use important keywords in the meta title, meta description, and page title.
• Also, add some keywords in H1/H2 tags and highlight those keywords using Bold/Italics.

7. Which techniques do you follow for link building?

Expected Answer:

I believe in quality over quantity and hence use white hat off-page optimization for link building. Before submitting anything to a third party, I will check domain/page authority, do follow or no follow, etc. I will do guest posting, profile link creation, blog commenting, and classified ad posting.

8. Differentiate between no-follow and do-follow links?

Expected Answer:

When a search engine crawls a website, they search for external links pointing to different websites. If links are ‘do follow’ then the crawler will follow the link and link juice gets passed. On the other hand, if the link is “no follow’, the crawler will ignore the link and no link juice is passed.

9. How to prevent the site from penalization?

Expected Answer:

The black hat SEO, over-optimization, and unnatural methods of creating backlinks are some of the reasons for site penalization. I will avoid using those techniques.

10. What content strategy you will follow to add more quality to the website?

Expected Answer:

Content is a piece of information about the website or business. The well-structured information with properly interlinked related pages and images will definitely improve user engagement.

You can also try asking the below questions that don’t have any specific answer, but will definitely help you to judge the consultant much better way:

Ask for their previous clients’ details.

An SEO specialist should be open to sharing a brief list of current as well as former clients and their contact details. This information can help you judge how effective the candidate is, and verify the actual work done by the person on specific SEO campaigns.

You can ask them about Google Analytics and SEO Campaigns.

An SEO specialist must have experience using Google Analytics to track improvement in a website’s search engine rankings, the number of links and their sources, the type of users searching your website or target audience, and much more.

Ask about Webmaster Guidelines:

The consultant must have knowledge about the latest webmaster guidelines posted by different search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. If the candidate doesn’t follow those best practices, a search engine can ban the website from search results altogether.

You can ask for a guarantee to achieve a number-one ranking on search engines.

If the consultant says YES, I will suggest don’t hire him or her, as it’s impossible to guarantee a number-one ranking on any search engine.

Conclusion:

If anyone answers these questions well, you can expect that he/she knows well about SEO services and practices white hat SEO. It is always a great benefit if you hire someone who has some certification course in SEO. However, years of experience is also good to check someone’s credibility in SEO knowledge.

editor

Hemant is Digital Marketer and he has 6 + years of experience in SEO, Content marketing, Infographic etc.

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