We've all been in difficult interview situations - you get a hard question and go on and on and on without giving a solid answer. In our realm, though, there are some SEO best practices that are so well established that everyone should know and be able to describe them to other people. If you're a business looking to hire an SEO (in-house, contractor, or otherwise), there's no better way to gauge an SEO's abilities than to ask them about basic SEO definitions and strategies. Similarly, SEOs looking for work should be prepared for a comprehensive interview that tests both their knowledge and their creative abilities. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about some of the questions that might come up in interviews for SEO positions and how to answer them (as well as discussing why interviewees should ask these questions). Have a good question for interviewers? Let us know in the comments!
Video Transcription
Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about SEO interview questions, how there are a lot of times in your professional life when you're going to be either interviewing someone who might be working with you on an SEO team inside your company, who might be contracting for you, perhaps a consultant, you're interview someone, you're the CMO or the VP of marketing and you want to know who all these SEO people know their stuff. It can actually be kind of tough to know what questions to ask unless you've got some background experience. Likewise if you are someone who might be interviewing for an SEO position, if you're someone who is a consultant and might be talking to some clients and you want to be prepared for the questions that they're going to throw at you, this Whiteboard Friday is for you.
So in the SEO interview process, the questions that I would ask, these are very SEO specific ones. So in every interview, particularly when you're bringing someone on to your team, you're going to asking questions about cultural fit and background and their biography, like what have they done in their past. Are they going to be a good fit for your team? Are they going to be able to handle the responsibilities? Does their work/life balance work with sort of organization you've got? I'm not going to talk about that stuff. I am going to talk about the very specific knowledge kinds of things that you want to use with an SEO or that you want to be prepared for as an SEO when you're going into these types of discussions.
So the first general section, the section that I start with is general knowledge. This is a great way to feel out whether someone is comfortable and capable. I would use these, honestly if we were doing this, I would be using these on phone screens or maybe even in the interview process, like right in the form field just to get a sense, like, "Does this person have a good sense of SEO? Do they know things like, what's a rel=canonical? What does it do? How does it work? How do search engines treat the meta refresh? What's an image title versus an alt attribute?" So you've got different properties of a particular graphic or an image, and you want to know that the SEO person understands. "Yeah, I know that image title describes the image, but it isn't necessarily being used by search engines to the same degree that the alt attribute is. It doesn't show up when you hover in Firefox. It's not going to become the image label in Google image search, those kinds of things, versus the alt attribute that gets used as anchor text when the image links off to somewhere. So those kinds of things.
You might even have a question like, "How do you remove personalization from search results?" What you want to see is somebody goes, "Oh, yeah, yeah, it's google.com/search?Q=whatever the search term is &pws=0." You find someone who can write off search strings and tell you, "How do I change the country language code?" "Well, you just add in &gl=uk. To get the UK or 'us' to get the US." You want to see that sort of knowledge that indicates that they're really deep into the process of doing SEO. They live and breathe this stuff. They know it like the back of their hand. That's what you want to see from an SEO, and this general knowledge section is a great way to get a sense of that.
Now next up, I like to get a little deeper and understand a person's thought process and be able to explain your thought process to somebody else. That's why we have a section on strategy and tactics. So this is asking questions that will elicit a response that indicates to you how well this person can really do the functions of SEO. A lot of this general knowledge stuff they should have a good background, but if they miss a few of these questions, it's fine. They can always go learn them. They can go look them up. They'll figure it out, it's okay. But you really want to know things like, "Do they understand how to run a keyword research campaign? Do they understand how to run link building? Do they understand what's involved in a content strategy? What does that mean? It doesn't just mean a blog, does it?" It's all sorts of different things.
So I like asking broad questions like, "How would you create a site to rank for give them a keyword or a set of keywords?" Like, "I am getting into the men's fashion industry. Just imagine for me, brainstorm with me a site that's going to perform really well in men's fashion." And if you hear things like, "Well, I would like to build a site that naturally incents lots of creators, lots of designers of clothing, and lots of brands to put their stuff on our site. So it will be a big important site where lots of people will come to. They'll put their stuff up and they'll essentially promote it for us, but we have a lot of unique form fields and unique content that they have to fill out so that the content itself is unique and it doesn't just look like the manufacturer's suggested description across everything else, because we don't want to have duplicate content problems." That's shows some level of depth in terms of thinking. It gives you a sense of how they'll tackle problems.
You can ask questions like, "What are some of your favorite scalable link building tactics?" And if they say something like, "Well, I really like contacting webmasters." No, like, "Nope, you're clearly missing this word scalable and also probably favorite, because nobody really likes contacting webmasters." That's the least fun part the SEO's link building job. But if they say things like, "Well, I really like building up popular social accounts," or, "I like running a blog and building up content to attract a community," those are pretty good answers. If they say things like, "I really think that content syndication or image licensing or badges and embeddable widgets is a great link building strategy that's scalable," those are great answers. You want to hear that kind of stuff.
"How would you get video content into Google?" More of a tactical question, but it gives you a sense of some of the knowledge and then how they do it. So if you hear a question like that and the person gives you a response and they say, "Well, Google has this video protocol." All right, they do, Google does have a video protocol. But what you really want to hear is, "Oh, it's great! What I like to do is make content using YouTube or Wistia or Vimeo," or whatever it is, whatever their preferred video hosting service of choice is and let them tell you why that is, "and then embed it on our pages and we use the video XML sitemaps feed to send to Google so that appears as rich snippets in the search results." Perfect, this person clearly understands the tactical knowledge, and maybe they don't even know how to craft it. I don't know how to write a video XML sitemap. I couldn't start writing you the protocols from scratch, but I can go find it online and copy what Google suggests it needs to be. I just need to have the knowledge of how to do that.
So that strategy and tactics section, also really important.
Last up. I do like to ask about some tools and metrics because this can give you a great sense of both an SEO's depth as well as they way they think about a lot of problems. Because the field of SEO, granted, is some art, some science, and a lot of research and learning and trying new things, the tools and metrics, the statistics that we use, the correlation data kinds of things, the link data that comes out of Yahoo Site Explorer, or Bing Webmaster tools, or the Google link command, or Exalead, or Majestic SEO, or SEOmoz, you want to know that they've got a good grasp on, "Oh, here's all the ways that I could potentially get that data and here's why I like this one and I don't like this one. I like the Bing or the MSN Ad Center or the keyword tool. I don't like the Google keyword tool. I really don't like some keyword tool here, but I think Keyword Spy's great or SpyFu is awesome," or whatever it is. And you want to know, not just what those tools are, but how do they evaluate them.
That gives you a really good sense for how that person thinks about problems, how they're going to attack things, whether they're a critical thinker or whether they just take things on face value, which in the SEO world is not a great idea. Like even the things that I might be telling you on Whiteboard Fridays, you probably want to verify for yourself. So things like, "What data would you use to use to judge the value of a link?" And you want to hear things like, "Well, I'd try and gets some metrics around how important the domain is, how important that specific page is. I'd try and get some metrics about where is that link going to be placed, what sort anchor text will it use, how many other links are on that page, where do they point to, or they spammy or manipulative, or are they good and authentic?" Those kinds of things. "What tools do you use to measure competitors' keywords and traffic?" And if they tell you, "Well, I really like this SpyFu or KeyCompete, or some of these other ones, Compete.com has a competitive intelligence tool. Hitwise has one, very enterprise level." Hey, yeah, those are good ways to measure keywords.
On the traffic question, if they say, "Well, I really like, Alexa." I'd be like, "You do? Why do you like Alexa? What do you find useful about it?" There are good answers, which is, "Well, for the top 1,000 or 5,000 sites on the Web, Alexa's pretty good at saying what the relative difference is between them." Which is relatively true, most of the time at least. But for those sites in the tail, sites in the midrange, Alexa's terrible. You kind of want to hear, "Well, none of the data sources are particularly excellent, but I like to look at Google Trends for websites, or Compete.com, or I like to look at Quantcast. I like to compare across the set. But I really like to look at maybe how many people are subscribing to their blog through Google Reader. That's a great signal." It's let's you know that person is thinking more deeply about these questions.
"How do you measure social activity on a site?" That's more of a broad based question. Like, "Do you just track tweets? Do you have some sort of an analytics tracking? What do you set up for that? Are you using something simple like a shared count? Do you have a statistics dashboard? Would you be using a Twitter client to be measuring that?" Whatever they've got.
If you ask these questions or you can answer these questions, I think you're going to do a lot to cement a good relationship between things. If you're in SEO right now and you're thinking to yourself, "Boy, I'm not sure I can answer all those questions that Rand had on the board," I mean, these aren't the toughest things that'll get tossed at you at an interview. They shouldn't be definitely. So you might want to spend some time having good answers to these questions, thinking hard about these things, researching them. And likewise, if you're an employer or a contractor and you're trying to find SEO people to work for you, do consulting work, you definitely want to amass a good set of these. I would actually recommend trying to ask relatively consistently again and again with the same people because having that consistency between questions let's you really grade people on the same level. If you change up your questions every time, it can get tough to remember how well a candidate might have done against another one.
All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this addition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope you're going to find some great jobs and some great SEOs, and I look forward to seeing you again next time. Take care.
My experience with seo interviews has been quite different. Throughout my career I have been asked to come up with a seo proposal during my interviews and I have also used the same tactic while conducting interviews. Over the years i have found this method to be so useful that i can't think of hiring someone without it. The kind of professional insight you get about a candidate is outstanding when you actually ask him to do a task. This strategy seperates a paper SEO (good in theory but dumb in implementation) from a real SEO. The SEO proposal is actually a mini site audit and the candidate has to come up with top 5 or top 10 recommendations which will have greatest impact on the traffic and conversions. Then he has to sell this proposal to the interviewer(s). Through this proposal you can assess following skills of a candidate pretty accurately:
1. Pitching for business and selling recommendations to clients. If the candidate can't convince you he will most likely wont be able to convince the clients either.
2. Communication Skills (both written and verbal)
3. Business acumen and analytical mindset- You will learn how he does market research and competitive analysis.
4. Prioritisation skills- No one has time and resources to fix all the issues of a website. So it becomes very important that you know what needs to be fixed first and which will have greatest impact on the traffic and conversions.
5. SEO techniques - You can quickly assess the knowldege of the candidate in the areas of on-page, on-site and off-site ranking factors.
IMO you can't assess these skills anywhere as accurately through SEO questions no matter how many you ask, how long you ask or how hard they sound. I think it is a very good way to assess a candiate's skills and I highly recommend it.
This is an excellent approach seo-himanshu, thanks for sharing it.
My favorite part is that it allows you to gauge how well they're able to translate what they know about SEO into the realities of business (focus on conversions, prioritiztizing high impact approaches and minding budgets, client management). Most industries are moving past the point where simply being there is enough.
I also think this approach will be especially handy next time we hire someone for content, social media and outreach, as that's another area where a business mindset is a huge asset.
I absolutely agree and as a strategy for clients (* that were hiring for an in-house SEO/SEM) I have done a basic site audit of their website properties, a 5-10 keyword analysis/ranking report of where the bulk of their traffic comes from and then I included my 3-6 month action plan.
But I have had two BAD experiences with clients using this method!
The last interview I went on for a big hotel booking company (* I don’t want to say their name publicly) in Irving, Texas resulted in them just keeping my work and then having their IT developer make my onsite recommendations.
** The company was interviewing for an in house SEO/SEM position and was expecting the usual interview format ..."tell me about you, blah blah," so they were completely caught off guard that I knew just about everything about their website, company, and brought samples of how they can increase their revenue using an affiliate network.
To be blunt I killed the interview, it was supposed to just the SVP & their main programmer and 15 minutes into it he brought in the president of the company and one of their marketing staff to listen in.
When I was leaving they were talking about how I was going to make them so much money and how they couldn’t wait to get started.
{**** I accidently left my analysis papers and the on page recommendations in the board room!! L}
That was 4 weeks ago and they’ve been stringing me along “we are definitely interested…we want you do start on 4 SEO/SEM projects for their hotels “ .
SO Tuesday, July 5th I sent the SVP who interviewed me another email and I haven’t gotten a response and just by chance I went to their main corporate website and low and behold every one of my recommendations has been implemented.
I’ve wanted to ask Rand this question for a few weeks now because he preaches about transparency with clients and I don’t know how to balance demonstrating value and not showing to much information that they can or just use your audit as DIY guide for their site.
Very usefull WBF! A guess lot of people will and should grab those questions to their interview.
I guess there are several questions missing - but the most important ones are:
- Show me some great examples of your previous work.- How do you measure your success?
Case studys can be very powerful I agree, that is if you have Sign off to use them by the client =)
Wow...I have a long way to go. Here's to a long weekend of research and learning.
Very nice sum up..another good point algogmbh_petra, which I use to follow, when I recruit a SEO guy, in addition you can set a machine test, with a basic page..to see the on page skills!
Suggest add to interview questions: "Who is Rand Fishkin?" Happy Holiday :)
Great topic,
I have been interviewing alot of candidates recently for roles in Management, Junior and Intern in SEO also have done some social media interviews in the past.
It is good to just start asking some standard questions talk about their past, general SEO, then you can break it into some more questions.
It is also a good idea to try and bring some practice areas into the interview to see what the presentations skills and creativity level of the candidate is, this is more for management level. For example throw a question up on the LCD TV and show them to solve it on the spot.
A good lil question is "What does QDF stand for?" I have heard alot of people trying to use that as a question recently hehe =)
I have about 40 standard questions which I try to mix it up with also some little technical questions, to use for all interviews which has worked well =)
Yeah, I got the same question: "What does QDF stand for?" It seems to be a popular test question. :-)
Personally, I find even the simplest of questions can trip candidates up, let alone the above.
I ask simply what are the top 5 factors you see as being most effective/important for on page optimisation... you'd be amazed how many answers I get including 'meta keywords' and rarely hear even 'content'. *next!*
taximedia....no disrespect intended, having been interviewed and conducted interviews across many industries, these are wise in-person suggestions for SEO. Response and style convey not only proficiency to perform the work, but also interpersonal communication skills for positions which are often tasked with mentoring and training.
Thanks for the excellent comments gang. I really like the suggestions to ask candidates during in-person interviews to describe/create an actual SEO strategy/analysis/audit (at least the first stages). Please don't get the wrong idea and think this video is meant to be comprehensive of all the areas one should probe (or prepare for) in an SEO interview.
Look forward to lots more suggestions, too!
Hey Rand,
When you get a chance I would love to know how you address balancing being transparent, demonstrating value to clients but not showing them so much information that they just use your audit/ analysis as a DIY guide for their sites.
** Just to give some context every time I interview for in-house SEO/SEM positions or consulting I always bring a basic on page analysis (site url structure, if their utilizing the page title, current link profile) a 5-10 keyword/ranking report showing where the majority of their traffic comes from now and where they rank, recommendations on improving their rankings and then my 3-6 month plan of what I’ll do as soon as I’m hired.** I bring multiple compies so they have something to look over while we're talking about how to move their company forward with SEO.
It always changes the dynamic of the interview for me because 1) they're caught of guard how prepared I am and 2) it moves it from the "traditional employemnt history, backround series of questions" which to me is a waste of both of our times to an actionable discussion on improving their bottom line .
I also do this because the majority of the time, in my experience, the people even senior level staff have no clue about SEO. I hate/ have a personal grudge against online marketing companies that promise the moon “guaranteed #1 rankings in Google etc” and I have been going out of my way to try an educate the client and prove my value by showing them a tangible plan of action.
But, the last interview I went on for SEO consulting for a hotel reservations software company ended up in them just using my audit (I accidently left it in the board room) to implement every one of my recommendations.
I didn’t mean for this to be so long winded. I hope my question is clear.
- David
Hey Rand !! ...As I have no time to spend on your article...so please try to write in short so that anyone can take advantage....thanx
After what i listened I think that unfortunately none of the candidates I interviewed were good enough, maybe I am not good enough to interviewd them in the first place ;-) ... But then I tried once to ask a candidate instead of aswering to my questions to analyze a website and write down all the possible improvements and he did great. What do you make out of that ? That Seo is not so easy to explain, that maybe practise is better than words ? I dont know ..still thinking
I agree sometimes it's a bit hard to explain how things work.
Yeah, SEO is a very particular sort of responsibility. Because you have to combine web technologies and development with marketing and presentation dealing with different fields, it can't always be straightforward. I think your approach was probably the best way to test out a potential employee because you can see how that candidate would handle a particular site rather than asking about more general questions. It's the difference between knowing the specs of a new car and giving it a test run.
Strong managers cannot always perform the tactical task sequences of those they manage, yet they still need to understand the higher level strategic implications.
Great WBF!
I would add some questions about communication skills and what happens when things don't work:
"When the development team says 'We'll add that to the book of work or that's a low priority' how do you respond?"
(Alternatively, the marketing manager you're working with tells you their content writer is booked into 2012. What do you do?)
Or a question I've been asked (in what was, without question, the most difficult interview I've ever had) "You find yourself with the CMO in an elevator. She asks you "So what are we doing for SEO?" Answer in 30 seconds."
Excellent WBF. Illustrates what a broad topic SEO really is. A few questions there that certainly got me thinking I should brush up on stuff... Thanks for challenging me!
I haven't read something this nice which made me think and am sure will help me grow my skills on seo.. Cheeers dude. Realy you added something that's countable as an seo. I will be around here, as you guys are awesome in producing quality knowledge stuff.
I agree with algogmbh_petra because these questions help to identify the right candidate.
Great stuff. I guess another good thing that would be nice ( at least this is one I would loved to answer on the spot.. ) is grabbing a competitors website and asking to pin point some actions that could be taking on the site to improve the seo. And go on from there. Like asking question "live" on the spot with a live website as a test.
Ok well now am off learning what the heck is a rel canonical.... :)
I can just see that successful interview now:
Interviewer: "Here's our competitor's site. How would you optimize it for success?"
Interviewee: "Destroy it."
Interviewer: "Excellent. Welcome aboard!"
:P
Great WBF Rand! I feel better about my SEO skills since I could answer your interview questions. Guess it's time for me to drop my application in at SEOmoz. :) lol
Wow this was best wbf I read so far. There is lot info here thank you. You have to sharpen your skills and keep learning.
Thanks Rand as it is very helpful for upcoming SEO Gurus. and also junior SEO Executives who want learn this beautiful seo startegy.
Great WBF. Apologies if it's already been commented about but I'd also recommend giving someone a laptop and saying "show us what you've done."
We recently had an instance where we had 2 rounds of interviews for 2 candidates: 1st one was all questions/discussion, 2nd was more practical. Candidate #1 (C1) was confident with talking, but froze up when we asked them to show us their stuff. C2 was shy and nervous when talking about SEO, but an absolute whizz when we put a computer in front of them. Based on this, we hired C2, but we could've easily hired C1 instead, who in this instance I think was more confident talking about it than actually doing it, but in other instances, it could be the case that it's an absolute blagger, who knows what to discuss but can't actually put it any of it into practice.
I enjoy giving people scenarios to brain storm. So, I would mention a scenario like Rand's example of a men's fashion site and then I spend time talking to the person, brainstorming with them and seeing how together we'd put something together, this nails a number of things:
Really excellent way to analyze someone :)
Thanks Rand,
Again a great stuff for SEO guys to test themselfs as well as others SEO Candidates
Excellent Topic,
I am also an Canadian SEO interviewer. The SEO questions stated here are vey standard and rational.
The answers are just perfect.
very good recommendations. Thanks for the tips. Can I add a question. If Google "accidentally" index a page that your client does not want and your client ask you to delete the content from the search without removing the page , what are the key steps or tools to fix the problem? Best ...
Another great post Rand. How about asking what they know about the PageRank algorithm (i.e. the formula not TBPR). - Jim
I've been talking with a handful of the top Search firms out there in SEOLand and I can honestly say that only a few ask these type of indepth SEO questions. Usually it goes tell me about yourself, how big are your clients, tell me about a time you tried to get a page to rank for a particular keyword. These certainly aren't bad questions but the definitely aren't all that challenging either.
I like the idea of giving someone a chance to tackle hypotheticals and see how they strategize differnent solutions. It provides insight into their thought process, depth of knowledge and communication style.
Loved this, about two weeks late for me as we just hired another SEO/SEM analyst. I think we did a pretty good job with the applicants that came in for interviews and made a good decision based on relevant knowledge that you covered.
Well, some questions are very advanced and for sure not suitable for candidates on a starter-level.
Terrific! This post will really get me somewhere... I love the information you are sharing and it was in the right time... Thanks for sharing the post...
In my humble opinion, the middle questions in green probably tell you the most about a potential SEO. You can use those to tell where an SEO has been and also how much potential she has to grow in the future.
Great WBF - some good questions to be answering well. Some things I reckon we know how to go about them, but when put in the interview situation or... in a client meeting, say ... it can be harder to explain, so definitely some food for thought and action :-)
Wow!
That was kinda validating!
Great Topic.
Thanks
Hey,
Nice WBF, but where is the WBF from the director of Bing?
...
I love whiteboard friday!
Great topic, really useful. We've all been in that situation and unfortunately a few times I've been stumped.
Great summary. I thing i would like to ask is about removing personalization. Is it pws=0 @pws=0 or "pws=0" ?
It's &pws=0
More Information here https://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-personalized-search
I disagree. I would rather ask, "How can you remove personalization on SERPs?"
If they come up an answer close to &pws=0 I would give them credit because I know they know how to use it, I don't care if they know the syntax or not.
"Oh, yeah, yeah, it's google.com/search?Q=whatever the search term is @pws=0."
Although the transcript does say @pws=0, it should be an ampersand i.e &pws=0
Example URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+plus&pws=0
The ampersand allows you add an additional URL parameter to the end of the URL.
If you want to get really specific with the geo-location, I'd recommend Google Global (as I can't remember all those International City Codes), and it makes changing language in the same country simpler.
Thanks for pointing out the transcription typos! Consider them fixed. =)
You can have detailed look at Google query parameters here:
https://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/07/meaning-of-parameters-in-google-query.html
As someone very new to this field, this WBF has been by far the most helpful at this level for me. I try to follow the rest of them, but I am still learning so occasionally they are a bit over my head. But this video really provided me some insight as to things that will brought up in future interviews.
Thanks guys!!
I think one of the hardest things for business owners who don't know SEO is to figure out what questions they need to be asking and what answers they should be hearing during the interview. This WBF is a good outline to help take some of that guess work out of the process. Obiviously it's much easier when you are already well versed in SEO and are looking to grow your team.
Good talk, Rand.
I like to start with questions about general internet facts. What are some of the most visited website on the Internet? Need to show that they understand the sites they personally visit are not necessarily the sites other people visit. I also ask stuff like: How does eHow make money? How does espn.go.com make money?
Another question I like is what I call the “decathlon scoring” question: If you are in charge of a track meet that includes a decathlon (consisting of 10 different events), how do you know who wins? Of course, there is an answer on how decathlons are actually scored (you can look it up), but the point it to see if the interviewees can sketch out a plausible method of ranking decathlon competitors. I'm looking to see if they understand the trade-off between excellence in one or a few events vs competitors who do well, but not outstanding, in many events. Google's scoring of sites to determine SERPs is somewhat analogous (200+ factors) so I want them to show that they understand these tensions and that excelling at one factor isn't necessarily going to get you top rankings.
Wish more interviewers would do their homework from credible sources. One person on an interview loop at Expedia stated creating unique Title and Description tags was not a scalable solution and that using duplicate tags was preferable. When explained a few simple tweaks to the CMS could create unique meta data her response was those elements were not important to SEO. She said she read that on some blog. :)
When I told her respectfully she was wrong and explained why that portion of the interview was ended. It is a challenge when the interviewer has zero SEO knowledge but rely on Wikipedia or random blogs to become an SEO expert five minutes before an interview.
This reminds me of one time where I was trying to get some work with a local restaurant site owner who was looking for some SEO help. They had shown me their site and asked me how I would optimize it. Freighteningly, most of the pages were little more than one gigantic picture each! No text or anything outside of the picture, but it looks like the site's designer drew out the layouts on Photoshop and just saved it as an image.
I pointed out that having pages like these was detrimental because visitors would have to wait for a whole image file to be downloaded before they could see the contents of the page, none of which they could highlight or do anything with. That's also not to mention that search engines wouldn't read the page or know what it's about. So I transcribed one of the pages from the image to an accurate CSS/HTML version to illustrate the differences in size, download time, and usability.
Unfortunately, they weren't interested, ultimately deciding that they didn't need SEO work; their site was perfect already, and today, remains unchanged. And I didn't even get to mention that the site used external JavaScript to put simple anchor links on the pages or that their page with tiled embedded YouTube videos was probably not the best idea either. D'oh.
Great topic Rand! This great topic. We can use this WBF immediately. Thanks!
Great video today. I was a little nervous starting wondering what questions Rand would like to see asked. But happy to say that I knew them all.
Going off of that. Rand, do you have a list of expert questions to ask? (I believe I saw a post about this last year)
Great Whiteboard. I'm thinking of hiring someone now, and will absolutely make use of the questions (after I brush up on some of the answers myself!) Along with the others, I agree that a SEO proposal of some sort, or the results from an actual previous client (minus any sensitive data) would be useful. And not only the results, but how they got there.
One final thing I'm gonig to be looking for, which I guess could fit under the "scalability" category, would be how comfortable they are managing multiple campaigns of varying sizes. This will be the second most critical item for me, behind technical skills, in the hiring practice.
Have a happy holiday weekend everyone.
Excellent blog post, however as mentioned in some of the comments above feel best way to judge would be to ask person to prepare an SEO proposal.
Hi
I would also like to share an article where you can find SEO Interview Questions and Answers based on different seo profile which includes interview questions asked from freshers, interns, seo expert, seo managers. : https://www.digitalvidya.com/blog/top-seo-interview-questions-answers-must-read-before-interview/
This Video is just awesome. I have learned a lot from SEOmoz and I am very much thankful to them. I have uploaded the same video on my blog which is https://seotrainingpune12.wordpress.com/. Thanks a lot SEO Moz.
While these questions are great to ask a candidate during interview, I however, approach slightly different. My process of asking querstion is based on real time scenario. For example, if a client has two websites and they are hosted on virtual server with same IP and almost similar content but the only difference lies in domain name, say one is ccTLD and other is TLD, what suggestions you (I ask a candidate) recommend from SEO perspectives. Many candidates I have interviewed speak starting with on-page (meta tags, alt tags, anchor text etc.) without knowing indepth technical factors. I call on-page as cosmetic changes and entertain a candidate who knows technical factors, for many errors happen due to incorrect server config on II6 and Apache.
There are lots to say but I end it now..:)
In gist. for me, assessing a candidate based on real scenario and therefore asking solutions will be a perfect way to judge his/her skills.
Regards
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I would find it disrespectful if someone was to ask me all these questions. Either you trust what someone writes on their CV and respect their work histor or you don't. I don't know any other profession where someone would get grilled this much.
"trust what someone writes on their CV and respect their work histor"
HAHAHAHAHA!
Good one!
"I don't know any other profession where someone would get grilled this much."
Any technical profession. Try getting a job as an engineer without getting grilled.
I'll be the second of likely many to disagree here, with regards to both of your statements.
I have seen resumes that claimed degrees that didn't exist, and where no evidence could be found of the person attending that university (I am an alum of that university, so used the alumni databases to verify). I was asked to look into this by my employer at that particular job, and was happy to do so. I would not want my paycheck and the company name and trust in jeopardy because we took everything at face value without any checking of anything.
I've worked in other professions and some of those interviews involved much more grilling than the interviews I have had in the SEO/SEM world. And if any of those professions involve a security clearance, you can get grilled regarding your mortgage application, your friends, your family, your vehicle, anything and everything, as well as having everyone around you grilled.