Interviewing a candidate for an SEO role can be challenging without the ability to immediately check SEO competence and expertise. Recognised qualifications, a history of high performance, good experience and evidenced knowledge will help you to build up a picture, of course, but make sure you ask these detailed SEO questions to learn more.
Basic understanding
1. Ask what the candidate’s understanding of SEO is, and its different varieties, checking that they refer to leads and conversions via natural searches in addition to on- and under-page SEO.
2. Ask about linking and check that the candidate can define in and outbound links. Also check that the candidate understands what cross-linking is and what it exists for. They should be able to explain the purpose of reference sites, related content and search engine display.
3. Move on to articles and check that they know about guest posts and article submissions. Article submissions will involve using promotional content to get a third-party blog or website publication, while guest posting will involve creating great content with a potential backlink to the business website from a guest site. You can find out more from a Dublin SEO agency such as Ryco Marketing Dublin SEO agency.
Content questions
4. Ask what the candidate knows and understands about the topic of content marketing and what their views about it are. You want to know that they understand SERP rankings and strategies to attract a target audience.
Technical
5. Ask how it is possible to set country locations by target for domains that are also country specific. They may say that they want to add a subfolder for the region, or a sub-domain for an existing domain that is then separately verified in Webmasters. Alternatively, they might suggest using language tags by country for each subdomain, again verifying it in Webmasters.
6. Keyword stemming is also an area to find out more about. As the process of discovering the root word from any search, it works by taking a popular, basic keyword that relates to a website and then adding a suffix, prefix or plural to create common varieties of the word.
7. Ask about Google Analytics and check that your candidate knows how many goal types there are. There are four: event, destination, page per session goal and duration.