Trending SEO Interview Questions and Answers for 2024

Want to start your SEO journey in approaching 2024? Then you are at the right place. This article will guide you through the most asked SEO questions on the basic level, technical, and local SEO.

Through our carefully crafted collection of mostly asked SEO Interview Questions and Answers for 2024, enter into the booming field of SEO! Learn important topics in an easy-to-read and interesting way as we explore the secrets of search engine success. This knowledge will guide you to success in the continuously evolving digital market, regardless of your experience level with SEO.

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SEO Interview Questions & Answers for Entry-Level and Junior SEO Roles

Q1. What is a keyword and its role in SEO?

Keywords are the phrases or terms that searchers enter in a search engine.

We can target potential customers to drive traffic on the web page by understanding and selecting the right keywords.

Q2. What are the different types of keywords?

There are four categories of Keywords which are targeting keywords, keywords by length, on-site keywords, and buyer’s journey keywords. All these categories contain 15 types of keywords.

Some of the popular types of keywords are brand keywords, product keywords, competitor keywords, local keywords, primary keywords, secondary keywords, short-tail and long-tail keywords, informational keywords, commercial keywords, and navigational keywords.

Q3. Name 5 major Google Algorithms.

Google Algorithms play a vital role in searching for the best-matching results from its index and helping search engines resolve user queries. The top and most important Google Algorithms are Panda Update (2011), Penguin Update (2012), Mobilegeddon Update (2015), Medic Update (2018) and Helpful Content Update (2022).

In 2011, Google launched the Panda update, which mostly targeted thin and duplicate content. This Penguin update’s major goal is to reduce the ranking of websites with spammy and irrelevant links. This Mobilegeddon update’s primary objective is to offer mobile-friendly websites more importance in Google’s search results. Measuring the site’s weak E.A.T signal is the main purpose of the Medic algorithm upgrade. Google introduced the Helpful content update in 2022 to encourage the generation of more unique, high-quality content by users for the targeted audience, resulting in a happy user experience.

Q4. What are the different types of SEO techniques?

There are three types of SEO techniques and those are On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO.

On-page SEO: On-page SEO techniques can help one rank higher on search engines, enhance organic traffic, and optimize each page of the website.

Off-page SEO: This is referred to the technique for enhancing a website’s ranking in SERPs.

Technical SEO: Technical SEO is aimed at making a website easily accessible for search engines, crawling, understanding, and indexing.

Q5. What is search intent and how does it help in SEO?

Search intent is the intention or motive behind keyword typing in a Search Engine.

Search Intent helps SEO in choosing the right keywords to drive traffic and conversions.

Q6. What are the vital Google ranking factors?

There are some major factors that one should keep in mind while raking their site on Google and those are mentioned below.

Well-structured, relevant, and high-quality Content to meet the user queries
Quality backlinks to enhance the credibility of the website
Good Page Speed to enhance UX and rank higher in SERPs.
Positive User Experience (UX) to have higher page rankings.
The mobile-friendliness factor of websites helps them to catch the attention of Google in order to rank higher on SERPs.
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A powerful Domain authority increases the chances of search visibility.
Higher Social Signals serve as a factor in impacting the website ranking positively.

Q7. What do you mean by keyword density?

The frequency of the appearance of keywords on a webpage is referred to as its keyword density. As an average percentage of all words on a web page, it indicates the density of a specific word or phrase on a website.

Q8. What is keyword difficulty?

The level of difficulty a keyword has in ranking in Google’s organic search results is defined by its level of competition or keyword difficulty. The keyword difficulty is measured by a number of factors such as page authority, quality content, and domain authority.

Q9. When was the latest major Google Algorithm update?

Google’s Helpful Content Update was the latest and major Google Algorithm that was introduced in the month of September 2023. This algorithm encourages the creation of more high-quality, and unique content by users for the potential audience to have a happy user experience.

15+ advanced SEO questions for answers

Q1. What is robots.txt?

Search engine bots can be directed via a text file called robots.txt to determine which sections or pages of the website they are allowed to crawl or not. Crawler traffic to the website is maintained with the help of robots.txt.

Q2. What is the difference between organic and paid results?

Paid results are ads that businesses pay for, while organic results are the organically occurring listings that pop up as an answer to a user’s query. To gain the most exposure and return on investment (ROI) SEO executives are required to combine organic and paid methods.

Q3. What are anchor texts?

The clickable texts inside a hyperlink are referred to as anchor texts. They offer the linked content context, which alters how search engines interpret it. To generate the maximum SEO effect, SEO executives should encourage their employees to generate relevant and captivating anchor texts.

Q4. What is an HTML sitemap?

HTML sitemap is a website that enables one to view the page list which is structured to traverse and understand the website immediately. HTML sitemap is useful for businesses that have a large number of subpages. You can find the HTML sitemaps in the footer area of a website.

Q5. What is an XML sitemap?

Extensible Markup Language (XML) sitemap is the list of the URLs on the website. Its goal is to make search engines function more easily. In order to effectively index a website, search engines require to know how many pages are on it, how frequently they are updated, and when the most recent changes happened. A good XML sitemap offers this information.

Q6. What are some major SEO tools for regular use and success?

There are a few major SEO tools that have been used by SEO professionals to get success. Those SEO tools are Google Analytics, Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and BuzzSumo.

Q7. What is link building?

The intentional practice of generating links to your website from other websites is referred to as link building. These links, similar to digital advertising, enhance the reliability and authority of your website in search engines, leading to higher ranks and greater online visibility in the broad digital domain.

Q8. What are the types of SEO practices?

There are three main types of SEO practices those are White hat practices, Black hat practices, and grey hat practices.

Q9. What is the difference between a no-follow and a do-follow link?

The difference between do-follow and no-follow links remains in their influence on SEO. Search engine rankings are influenced by do-follow links, which pass the authority from the linking site to the linked site. On the other hand, a no-follow link directs search engines to view the link as only a reference and not to pass authority. Do-follow links increase the reliability of a website; however, no-follow links are often used for user-generated content or to avoid promoting specific content. A healthy link profile is maintained by a balanced combination of both link types.

Q10. Which SEO practice is highly advised to avoid and why?

Black hat SEO practice must be avoided. Search engines will penalize websites for utilizing unethical practices such as keyword stuffing, buying low-quality backlinks, or cloaking. Taking the decision to use ethical, white hat SEO practices ensures long-term success, keeping a positive online reputation as well as a strong search engine presence.

Q11. What you do mean by rich snippets?

Rich snippets offer enhanced search results that contain more details than a standard snippet. They offer users an increased overview of a webpage’s content and can feature star ratings, images, prices, and other vital information. Rich snippets increase user experience and click-through rates (CTR) in search engine results.

Q12. What is AMP?

AMP or accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source action designed to fasten the loading page speed. As per Google, AMPs can load in less than seconds and consume ten times less data than standard mobile websites. In 2015, a group of businesses such as Google, WordPress, Adobe, and others introduced this project.

Q13. What are meta tags?

The meta tags are the fragmented pieces of HTML code of a webpage that tell search engines about it. They consist of information, that helps search engines understand the content and context of a webpage. Some common instances of this metadata contain page titles, relevant keywords, and descriptions. Well-optimized meta tags help sites enhance their CTR and rankings in search engines, as meta tags act as a brief description that users view on SERPs.

Q14. How to check a website’s organic traffic?

In order to check a website’s organic traffic, one needs to go through some major steps. The Steps one should take are stated below.

Step 1: You need to sign in to your Google Analytics or Google Search Console account.

Step 2: Then you need to click on the “Overview” section to view the sources of traffic.

Step 3: Now select “Organic Search” to view the specifics of organic traffic.

Q15. What is Crawling?

In search engine engines, crawling is the process by which internet bots crawl and index web pages in a sequential and systematic manner. These computerized programs, often known as Spiders, spiderbots, or crawlers click on links, browse webpages, and evaluate the quality of web content. Users can search the Internet quickly and efficiently by clicking on the hyperlinks to visit webpages, which are later copied for the search engine to index and scan. Therefore, users can receive precise and accurate search results from search engine ranking pages (SERPs) that are ready to index and understand the content on websites.

Q16. What is Anchor text?

Anchor text operates similarly to a clickable link. When you come over a link, you click on the visibly highlighted text. Imagine it as an indicator highlighting the destination of the link. Clicking on an anchor text that shows ‘best shoes’ for example, can take one to a website about really cool and latest shoes.

Anchor text is one important way that search engines utilize information about a website to determine its context. When it comes to search engines finding out what the website is about, this has some SEO benefits. Using relevant and concise anchor text in SEO enhances the website visibility for those key results and makes the internet easily accessible for users to navigate.

Q17. What are search engine Bots?

Search engines use bots, also termed crawlers, spiderbots, or spiders, as digital people to search the vast internet. By clicking links and analyzing information, these automated bots or crawlers systematically browse web pages. Indexing webpages, data classification, and understanding the content of every page are their major purpose. Search engine bots ensure that users receive accurate and latest results when they type search queries or relevant keywords in the search bar by continuously browsing the web.

Q18. What is a URL Slug?

URL slug or website slug is the user-friendly end part of a URL address that operates as a unique identifier of the website.

URL slugs contain words that are relevant to the website content and according to Google, they act as vital ranking factors. Providing both the user’s and search engine’s context, URL slug enhances the readability of URLs and has a positive impact on SEO.

Q19. What SEO mistakes should you avoid at any cost?

There are some common SEO mistakes one should avoid in order to rank their web page in SERPs. They are:

Avoid making duplicate content: Duplicate content can result in misleading search engines and lower ranks in search engine result pages (SERPs). You should ensure that every webpage provides interesting and unique content.
Avoid keyword stuffing: The user experience (UX) and readability of your web content can also suffer from unnatural stuffing of keywords. You should focus on giving natural language and relevant keywords major priority.
Skip black hat SEO practices: Search engines can also penalize hugely for unethical practices such as cloaking and link buying. One should strictly follow white hat SEO practices and other ethical SEO techniques like grey hat SEO.
Stop avoiding mobile optimization: Building a mobile-friendly website is extremely essential for enhanced ranks in mobile search results, as more users are accessing the internet via mobile devices.
Update your content regularly: Search engines receive notification that your website is relevant and active if the major information is fresh and updated.
More focus on links: Since links are essential one should never prioritize quantity of links above quality. Enhance the website authority with high-quality links that are extremely relevant.
Appropriate usage of keywords: One should naturally include keywords or phrases in your content, highlighting their importance over stuffing. This enhances user experience (UX) as well as search engine optimization.

15+ Technical SEO questions and answers for Executives

Q1. How do you redirect a page?

Redirection is the procedure to send both crawlers and users to a different URL from the requested URL. One can use three major and popular redirections to redirect a page and those are 301, 302, and meta refresh.

301 redirect: This is the permanent redirection that sends all visitors or users from one URL to another. This 301 redirect helps in passing webpage authority.

302 redirect: This is the temporary redirection that sends visitors or users from one URL to another for some specific time. This 302 redirect doesn’t pass authority from one website to another.

Meta Refresh: This Meta Refresh redirect involves using an HTML meta component with the httpequip element set to “refresh” and a content element that specifies a time gap in seconds to instruct a website to automatically reload the latest page after a specific amount of time.

Q2. What is a canonical issue? State the ways of fixing these canonical issues.

Duplicate content offers rise to canonical issues. Cancinal issues occur when websites with several URLs have duplicate content or similar content and get a penalty from Google. The canonical issues can be fixed using two popular methods and those are using appropriate canonical tags to your website and implementing 301 redirects. In addition, one can ensure that all internal and external links refer to the authorized version of the webpage.

These processes ensure that search engines recognize the home page, avoiding confusion or issues with duplicate or similar content.

Q3. What is domain authority?

Domain Authority is similar to the website’s popularity score. It highlights how much search engines value and admire your website. The better the Domain authority (DA), the higher the score. Relevant content and high-quality backlinks are two major elements that influence it. Hence, if your website has a high Domain Authority (DA), it will likely rank well in search engine result pages.

Q4. Role of XML sitemap in SEO?

An XML sitemap signals to search engines all the prime places on your website, just like a map does. It helps search engines crawl and comprehend web content better by listing each webpage. This enhances the chances that all of the web pages will be accessed and indexed, which will improve the SEO performance and quality score as a whole.

Q5. What is a Canonical Tag?

A canola tag is a fragmented HTML code that identifies the original version of a page for duplicate, nearly duplicate, and similar web pages. It helps in avoiding duplicate and similar content issues, guaranteeing search engines concentrate on the original webpage, and improving the entire website performance.

Q6. What is the difference between 301 and 302 redict?

301 redirect is the permanent redirection that sends all visitors or users from one URL to another. Whereas, 302 redirects are the temporary redirections that send visitors or users from one URL to another for some specific time.

In addition, this 301 redirect helps in passing webpage authority, while 302 redirect doesn’t help in passing the authority from one website to another.

Q7. What is a 404 Error? When does a 404 Error occur?

The 404 error occurs when a crawler and user try to access a webpage that doesn’t exist on the domain. This is commonly known as page not found due to client error. This issue can be resolved by creating custom 404 pages to help the confused users back to the vital section of the site.

Generally, the 404 Error occurs due to a few reasons and those are:

When an incorrect URL was hit by a user or viewer.
When a webpage is removed from the website without setting a 301 redirect.
When an incorrect URL links to another website.

Q8. How will you submit a sitemap to Google?

I will first create an XML site map of my website, then I will have to sign in to the Google Search Console account. After that, I will select the “Indexing” option and go to the “Sitemaps” option. Then I will enter the URL of my sitemap and then click on the submit button on the GSC.

This SEO effort will benefit from this stage of sitemap submission since it makes it much easier for search engines to explore my website.

Q9. What is Image Alt Text?

Image Alt Text is your website’s secret text to describe images. Image Alt Text comes when an image cannot be shown, such as for an individual of a screen reader. It short, informative tag that explains what is displayed in the image. In addition to making your content easily readable, this also helps search engines prioritize and understand your images.

Q10. What is a Disavow tool?

Disavow tool is the major section of GSC previously known as the webmaster tool that enables a website to decrease the importance of an inbound link, helping in preventing the penalties that are link-based.

Q11. How to decrease the loading time of a website?

You can do several things to reduce the loading time of a website and those are:

Image optimization: You have to use compressed images without reducing the image quality.
Minimizing the redirect: In order to reduce the website loading time, one can restrict page redirection times.
Using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): You can reduce loading time by spreading the files for your website among various servers globally.
Enabling browser caching: You can allow browsers to save a minimal quantity of data to speed up return visits.
Code Optimization: You can initiate code optimization by keeping the code of your website effective and clean.

Q12. What is Schema Markup?

Schema Markup is like offering the content on your website a unique language that search engines can only understand. You can add this unique code to your website to offer more information about the website content. When posting about a recipe, Schema Markup can offer the information to search engines that the text of the website is a recipe rather than just any text. By doing so, you may enhance the way search engines display your content in search results, offering consumers more detailed ideas about the web content.

Q13. How many types of Meta Tags are there in SEO?

The meta tags are often referred as to information tags and some popular meta tags in SEO are title tags, meta keywords tags, meta description tags, and viewport tags. Meta description tags have the limitation of 1200 pixels, whereas, title tags have 600 pixels.

Q14. What is page speed and its importance in SEO?

Page speed is the rate at which a website loads quickly. Think of speed like a race: the fastest runner (a quick-loading website) wins the race. As users enjoy fast pages, so does Google. Users can leave your website if the loading speed is slow, which can in turn negatively impact your rankings. Thus, having a fast-loading page enhances search engine optimization while also satisfying visitors and search engines.

Q15. What is crawl budge and how it is relevant to SEO?

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine can access on your website in a specific amount of time. Guiding search engines to choose which pages to highlight is essential for larger websites.

Search engines will more successfully use the crawl budget if your website is well-ordered and structured, which will help in the accurate indexing and ranking of content.

Q16. What is GSC and its importance in SEO analysis?

GSC or Google Search Console is a free tool for any website that can measure or track the site’s performance and traffic to rank higher in the Google search results. GSC is a major tool for SEO analysis as it identifies any issues like broken links or errors, that require to be fixed on that website. It also recognizes the keywords that drive traffic to the website. One can improve the quality and appeal of their website to Google with GSC, which will enhance the chances of appearing in search results.

Mostly asked local SEO questions and answers

Q1. What is the importance of SEO in local businesses?

The importance of SEO in local businesses are:

This will boost the online visibility of local businesses through SEO optimization. Nearby people can find the businesses through this.
Targeted audiences can recognize local businesses while searching for services and products in that local area through optimized local SEO.
Positive online feedback and persistent information across various digital platforms establish the reliability of customers over search engines.
Local SEO helps businesses to remain on the top while competing with them through shinning among others in the local search results.

Q2. What is the role of GMB for local SEO?

The role of GMB in local businesses are:

GMB enhances local search experiences for your business by placing it on the local map.
Makes it easier for audiences to contact you by showcasing your location, phone number, and business hours.
Helps in maintaining an interesting profile by displaying photos and posts to highlight services and products.
Customers can impact others and build confidence by giving positive reviews on GMB.
GMB offers you information on the way people find and interact with your business, allowing you to make concrete decisions for local SEO success.

Q3. What are local citations and their role in local SEO?

Local citations are references to your address, name, and contact number on other websites; they are digital references for your business. These digital references form the authority and reliability of your business, which is essential for local SEO. Regular citations from different platforms are employed by search engines to verify your business’s information, enhancing your local search results.

Q4. What is the role of customer reviews in local SEO?

Reviews from customers operate just like digital word-of-mouth referrals. They are vital in local SEO. Positive reviews enhance the online visibility of a business in local search results by showing to search engines that it is reliable. In addition to improving a business’s reputation, encouraging consumers to share their reviews online helps potential buyers in making reasonable choices.

Q5. What is the importance of local schema markup?

Local Schema Markup is a piece of unique code that one places on your website to show extra details such as contact number, address, and reviews. Search engines can show rich snippets in search results with the additional data, offering users more understanding about your local business. By enhancing its visibility and making it stand out in local searches, local Schema Markup guides the business.

W3 Web School is providing a crash course on SEO Interview preparation to make yourself job-ready for this booming digital marketing field of today.

Conclusion

These trendy and most-asked SEO interview questions and answers for 2024 are your ideal weapons for staying the latest in the fast-paced digital industry of search engine optimization. They operate as your guide across the SEO domain, which makes you think of them as your superhero. Remember, SEO is about unfolding paths to digital success, not just about algorithms, so grasp the vital information and be ready to show your skills.

Prepare yourself for the upcoming challenges and take the lead in the rapidly evolving domain of search engine optimization by viewing yourself as the SEO winner of 2024 as you face interviews filled with these aforementioned facts and understandings.