If you been employed within the SEO industry for some time, at one point or another you may have moved to new company. And if you have risen up the career ladder, you would have found yourself in a position where interviewing new candidates is part of your duties. However, when it comes time to recruit for more senior position, what kind of questions do you ask? Conducting these kinds of interviews is somewhat different from recruiting for an entry or executive SEO post.
For example, in most cases link builders are trained or begin with little experience. So therefore, during an interview you might want to know about the candidate’s knowledge of social properties, how well they can identify website types, their number crunching abilities and how well they work as a team.
Recruiting for an executive post is a bit different too. As you would expect the applicant to have more experience, your questions would have to be tailored accordingly. Your session might last a little bit longer and the type of questions you ask would require more specific answers. At this stage, your potential team mate should already be versed in on-page and off-page SEO. They should also know things like what kind of links are worth getting, how to conduct a technical SEO audit, and they should also be able to find their way around Google Analytics. You would also expect certain questions from the interviewee pertaining to his or her role within the company.
Depending on the size of the company at which you’re employed, the most senior SEO position might require both managerial and technical skills. Recently, I conducted a few interviews for my replacement and here are some of the technical questions I asked, in no particular order.
On Link building – Describe your Link Building Process
I asked this to simply know the candidates understanding of the link building process. This question allowed me to get beyond the typical ‘a link must be from relevant site’. You would expect this kind of answers interviewing an exec. What I was looking for was more to do with work load split, data recording, site evaluation and overall time management skills. Link building is a tedious task and it’s important that as a senior SEO specialist you are aware that people in charge of this can easily become overwhelmed.
Even though not explicitly asked, a question like this also gives me key insight into how the candidate views link building. If all I’m hearing are directory submissions, blog commenting, page rank and exact matching anchors you’re less likely to be called in for a second interview. I’m more interested in hearing about outreach campaigns, what you did to attract links in the past and content partnerships. I’m also interested in creative ideas used to build links.
I’m also big on strategy. Each campaign is different and for me, a one size fits all approach cannot give the best result. Therefore it is crucial that candidate put across that link building for an educational site is not the same for say, travel insurance.
On Optimising a Site – Briefly Tell us what a Search-friendly Site Looks Like
Pretty basic I know, but I’m looking to find out whether or not the applicant has updated what he or she knows about on-site optimisation. Keyword research, title tags, urls, content, alt tags, site structure, navigation, internal linking, site maps, subdomains are all part of what I’m expecting to hear. However, what I don’t what to hear is:
Google can’t crawl javaScript
Google can’t follow JavaScript links
Keyword density must be X percent
Google can’t read Ajax
Meta keywords are very important and should spend time including them
Meta descriptions are not so important
If I’m still hearing this kind of things in 2012 it is most likely they may not be right for the top job.
On Google – Tell me about the Latest Changes at Google
In my opinion, a good candidate would have their ears to the ground in terms of what is going on at Google. Not every single update carries the same importance, so I definitely do not need a running commentary of everything that is written on Google webmaster blog.
However, whenever a major algo changes is announced, its effect on the web and your site should be taken notice of. Like I’ve mentioned before, I honestly don’t expect to hear every tweak since Florida, but I want a detail idea of the current state of play. Recently it has been Penguin, Panda and EMDs and any good SEO should know these like they know their alphabet.
Panda – What does it do, what cause you to get hit by it, how do you mitigate against its effect, how do you recover?
Penguin – Why was it rolled out, what do you need to do, how do you recover?
EMDs downgrade – What is the history behind it, how would you future proof your client’s site?
Personally, I expect details answers to such questions as the candidate will be in charge of handing down instructions to their team and also making recommendations to clients.
On Coding – Do you Code in any Programming Language?
Whilst not a deal breaker, I think it is important that you understand how things are built on the web. Especially knowing how to fully code in html. The more web programming you know the better, and working closely with the dev team has constantly reminded me why this is important. There will be plenty of cases where being able to understand a web development language will be very advantageous. When for instance, the dev team says there is no space for particular piece of content , recommending a work around using a CSS overlay and calling it using an onClick event maybe accepted. Or telling them that how best to code in Google’s language alternative tag across an already existing international site.
Knowing how to code also gives you the power to create your own non-blog sites, test out your own theories and observe the breaking points. It is also possible to build your own in-house tools to automate some of the mundane tasks. This helps to achieve better efficiency and billability.
On Reporting – What Kind of Reports do you Give to your Clients?
I like numbers. So maybe I might be biased towards this question but for me, measuring things is very important. In SEO we are always having to justify our ROI and one of the ways you can prove it is through reporting. Generally speaking, once a candidate comes from an agency background I would expect reporting to be almost inbred as clients always want to justify their SEO spend. However, I’m interested in what metrics the applicant think are important across both search and social. I’m also keen on hearing how they usually present this data and the frequency at which is delivered.
On Social Media – What Kind of Things have you Done on the Social Side?
A pretty broad question as there are no right or wrong answers. Its more about what works. This question is purposely open ended as I just want to know what the interviewee has worked on in the past. The answer, for me is not based on how well you know Facebook and Twitter, but simply given the opportunity, do you have enough knowledge to be able to leverage social platforms to achieve a particular goal.
On productivity – What SEO Tools do you Use?
Finally, I always ask what tools they have used in the past. Generally speaking, I would expect a combination of OSE, Majestic SEO and Ahrefs for link analysis. Either Screaming Frog or Xenu for architecture diagnostics and AWR would normally come out top for rank analysis. And of course, Google Analytics the most likely tool for traffic monitoring.
