SEO Interview Questions for 3+ Years of Experience

Looking for SEO Interview Questions & Answers to prepare? We have an ultimate guide of knowledge-based SEO Interview Questions and Answers.

1. Slow Site Speed: Slow site speed can deter people when they try to access content on your page. 

2. Duplicate Content: Duplicate content refers to content that is either similar or identical to other content on your site. Although Google does not impose a penalty for duplicate content, it is very likely to affect the ranking of the webpages.

3. Broken Images and Missing Alternative Texts Alternative tags, or alt tags, are HTML attributes of images that help describe the content. With regard to on-page SEO problems, alt tags need to be addressed.

4. Outdated Content and Information on Site The old content on your website can drag down your site's authority. There are a lot of search results found on the SERP for a particular query, but not everything is relevant to the readers.

5. Not Optimizing Your Website for Mobile
Living in a mobile-first world now, many users rely on mobile devices rather than computers. There are several advantages to having mobile-friendly websites as they make up more than half the search results on Google.

The Google Sandbox effect is a kind of filter that stops new websites from ranking in Google’s top search results. Even though you may have done everything right, it is like building trust. Think of it as a probationary period.

Google’s Penguin update was launched in 2012. It is a ranking algorithm that tracks sites that violate the guidelines of Google Webmaster. It is aimed at reducing web spam. 

They have a penalty for websites that rank high with poor quality content or ingenuine ways that do not serve the end-user. And there was a recent update announced wherein Google can choose to nullify your practices instead of penalising. 

A doorway page is also referred to as a gateway page. It is a web page that is created solely to rank high for particular search queries and they do not offer what the user is looking for.

For example, if you create multiple domains or web pages targeting different regions and ultimately leading the user to that one main page is called doorway pages. Google doesn’t prefer such practices. 

Toxic links are links from websites that can tarnish your SEO efforts which can lead to fewer organic visitors. 

Google suggests that when you come across a bad link, you should ideally reach out to its owner by sending them a request. If this does not work, then using the disavow tool is recommended.

SERPs are Search Engine Result Pages, i.e., the web pages that come up as a result of any search queries. 

DA is domain authority – a search engine ranking metric developed by Moz and many other tools that estimates how likely a website is to rank in a SERP. 

It essentially helps evaluate your website with competitors on a scale of 0 to 100. The higher your score, the higher the likelihood of your page to rank. 

An XML sitemap acts as a roadmap of your website listing the most important pages so that Google can understand your website structure. The aim is to ensure that the search engine crawls every important page. 

Rich snippets are excerpts or previews of your page. It is additional data that is extracted from your page and displayed before a user clicks on your link. Some common rich snippets include reviews, recipes and events. 

Rich snippets increase the chances of a higher click-through rate as people prefer clicking on the preview that gives them enough data to understand what the webpage is all about.

Bounce rate is the percentage of users that leave a webpage immediately or without taking any kind of action. This can be any kind of action – scrolling through the article, filling a form, clicking on a link or making a purchase. 

A high bounce rate is indicative that your page needs improvement in layout, content or overall user experience. It is also a major Google ranking factor. Google prefers websites with a low bounce rate.

Web crawlers have many synonyms – crawlers and robots or bots being a few. These are automated programmes that crawl across the World Wide Web and index all the content on it. 

Once the spider crawls your page, it is put onto Google’s index or simply put, its search engine result page (SERP).

LSI stands for latent semantic indexing keywords. These are related terms or phrases related to a web page’s target keyword. Search engines have become smarter over the years. If a particular keyword density is high, then they would realize it is not an authentic page. 

For example, if your page is about SEO, then your content would include terms and phrases such as bounce rate, keywords, ranking, etc and not only the term ‘SEO’.

LSI keywords help the search engine understand what your content is about and also help your page rank for related keywords. 

There can be several reasons if your domain does not show up in the search. 

Some of them are that Google may not have indexed your website yet, your website just went live, the index tags might be missing, your keyword market is very saturated, your website is penalised or you may have unknowingly blocked spider from visiting your website.  

Google Analytics gives access to multiple kinds of reports. A few common and popular ones are the Mobile Overview report, audience report, referrals report, channels report, navigations summary, landing pages report, site speed review and goal overview report are some of the important Google Analytics reports.