Technical SEO Interview Questions Flashcards
Which SEO factors are not in your control?
The algorithm changes are obviously out of our control, we don’t know how google is going to make major changes until they announce them and how they will affect our seo strategy or current optimizations that we have. Also ranking factors are kind of out of our control as well, we can’t say for certain factors are helping us to rank.
Explain spiders, robots & crawlers
To me they all really mean the same thing, so googlebot is google’s crawler which is their program they use to automatically discover and scan websites by following links from one webpage to another.
What is a soft 404?
A soft 404 error is when a URL that returns a page telling the user that the page does not exist and also a 200 (success) status code. In some cases, it might be a page with no main content or empty page.
Can you explain AMPs
AMP stands for accelerated mobile pages and this is a framework that you can use to create user first websites with fast speed, Google has retired this in a way, it’s not as important as it used to be
Can you explain what schema is?
Schema is structured data that is added to a site there’s different types of schema such as article schema, review, video schema etc. And this gives more information on what the webpage content is about. This helps search engines understand the content better.
What should you do with a 404 error?
404s should only be redirected to a category or parent page if that’s the most relevant user experience available. They don’t always have to be redirected somewhere.
What is the difference between crawling, indexing and rendering?
Crawling is when Google discovers and webpages by going from link to link. Indexing is the process of storing and analyzing those crawled pages in a “index database” and Google pulls from that index whenever there is a search query. And rendering I believe is what happens when a browser requests a pages so taking that html and css and javascript and building a visual representation of those webpages.
How would you go about doing an SEO audit?
So based on audits I have done I usually do it using SEMrush and screaming frog. So i’m looking at any errors in semrush in terms of duplicate content, missing metadata, duplicate metadata, 404s, any broken internal links etc. And I’ll use screaming frog for the same thing I find that I get slightly different results with both.
Can you explain what a regex is and what is your experience with Regex?
where regular expressions can be used to set up filters so that you only see the data you want to see. I believe this can be done in Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
What are some recent Google algorithm updates?
Well product review update, we had a couple core updates they do every year, the helpful content update is one of the most recent ones and that focuses on having good high quality content, there was also the spam update in December. I think theses updates want to really give a good overall user experience.
What is the difference between no-follow, no-index and disallow?
Noindex: tells search engines not to include your page(s) in search results. Noindex: tells search engines not to include your page(s) in search results. Disallow: tells search engines not to crawl your page in the robots.txt, this is good for pages you don’t really have a use for for users.
What is your process of developing an seo strategy?
Start of with what the client goals are then i’ll do an audit of the site or the site section that i’m working on. From there I’ll do keyword research, competitor analysis, create an on-page optimization recommendations for the H1 and subtopics, and SEO elements, internal linking etc. Track and measure KPIs for my content and update where necessary.
How do you measure performance?
I look at organic sessions YoY and MoM, as well as new users, clicks and impressions, I also look at non branded search queries, local listing performance so so website clicks, direction clicks and phone calls, keyword performance.
What data can you get from SEMrush/GSC/Analytics?
For GSC I look at pages that are indexed, any 404s that might need redirecting, clicks, impressions and overall CTR. For Google Analytics I focus on organic sessions, new visitors, page view entrances, events, and the bounce rate. SEMrush I look at similar things, traffic, domain rating, any technical seo.
What is mobile first indexing?
Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking.
How Do You Check Whether A URL Is Indexed By Google?
I use GSC to check indexing for the client accounts I worked on. Outside of that I also use GSC for my own blog. After I complete an article I go to submit it for indexing in GSC to give it priority.
