February 2019

As you are reading this post I hope you have written a good SEO resume and got your first interview, I am going to go through the basics of an interview before going to the technical SEO questions

• Expect more than one person to be in that interview (a technical person and an HR person), some companies do a preliminary interview (could be over the phone) to ask some question and do some personality check before bringing you to an onsite interview
• Research well what does the company (your future employer) do, see also if you can find their HR person and their marketing manager on Linkedin and read more about them
• Remember the old saying "be on time be prepared" try to arrive early, possibly an hour early where you can stop by a close coffee shop for a while then go to their office and arrive 10 minutes earlier than you interview time
• Dress professionally
• Greet respectfully with a smile and mind culture and personality differences, I live in Toronto it is a multicultural city you never know the background of the person interviewing you, to be on the safe side just stand up for them when they approach you and do no initiate a hand shake just wait for them
• Remind yourself every minute during the interview that there are interpersonal skills and personality checks going all the time, failing in the personality check may lead you to lose that opportunity no matter how technically good you are
• Breath well, do not talk with your hands too much, speak clearly and slowly

In the second part of this post I will take you through the most popular technical SEO questions that you may face in an interview (I will leave it to you to research the answers, if you have any questions leave them in the comment section):

• How deep is you keyword research experience? What is intent keyword research? what is your favorite keyword research tool?
• Crawling, rendering and indexing, what are they and who does them?
• What is your favorite website crawling technology
• How important a site map is?
• GSC (Google Search Console) experience? what are the most important sections? what do you do if you find bad links pointing back to your website in GSC? how long GSC saves data for a website?
• Have you used Majestic or Ahrefs before? How to find the best links your competitors have using those tools?
• Client move from a page A to page B (The URL was changed) what is the best practice to avoid organic traffic loss
• 301 redirect VS 302 VS meta refresh VS JavaScript redirect VS canonical can you explain the difference?
• What is AMP (Accelerated mobile pages) and progressive web apps (PWA)?
• Where are AMP pages hosted (stored) and how to track them using Google Analytics
• What tools can measure website speed and what numbers to look at? what is speed index? What is rendering path?
• What does Google recommend to use to create mobile website
• What are the best tools to test if a website mobile friendly
• Difference between Schema, structured data and Microdata (expect some trick questions)
• Google analytics, do you know how to install it using GTM? How to create a goal tracking for a thank you page that doesn’t have a dedicated thank you page URL?
• How does Google ranking work and what makes a website rank at the top?
• What makes a quality link?
• The most important on page elements to optimize for a keyword?
• How to find out how many pages of a website are indexed by Google?
• What is negative SEO?
• How to promote a client ranking in the local 3 pack?
• Traffic is down, ranking is down what do you recommend in this case to the client?
• What is Angular JS? Can goolge index JS? What is the best solution to make an Angular website crawlable by Google?
• (Quick technical questions) What is AJAX? what is Cpanel? what is visual composer? How often does WordPress get updates?  what is curl in PHP? What is DOM document object model? how does the browser render a page from reading the code to painting?
• How to get featured snippet ranking in SERP?
• How to optimize for voice search

Excerpt more advanced questions if you are interviewing for a SEO specialist role in an agency, the question will be less technical when applying to an in-house SEO role

This post will provide a SEO job listing template, I hope that listing helps employer that are hiring a SEO specialist for the first time to understand what to expect form that role, also helping SEO specialists to understand what employers are looking for.

If you are an HR professional and planning to post for a SEO role the template below is almost ready to use, with some modifications, customization and a quick chat with our technical people you should be able to produce a SEO job listing in a matter of one hour

Company introduction:

Company Inc is a digital marketing agency that provides a full stack marketing solutions to our clients across Canada. Located in Downtown Toronto, we’re a passionate group of innovators that love digital marketing, supporting the career growth of our staff is one of our highest priorities. We are always on the hunt for talented, digital marketing professionals with a strong track record.

Summary of the job (about this position):

We are seeking a SEO specialist to manage search engine optimization activities to increase rankings and improve traffic on all major search engines. This role involves a lot of research and analytics that require knowing on-site and off-site SEO techniques, technical SEO, tracking and analysis.

Key Responsibilities:

• Coordinate of all SEO efforts including link building, keyword research  and onsite and offsite optimization
• Conduct technical SEO audits that analyse crawlability, indexability and mobile friendliness, those audits must provide recommendations to achieve best practices then work with the development team to ensure SEO best practices are properly implemented
• Make recommendations to website information architecture, content, interlinking and other factors to improve SEO positions for target keywords
• Competitive analysis from an inbound links profile point of you and organic market share analysis
• Develop and produce monthly and quarterly metrics reports that track the success of SEO
• Provide detailed analysis by channel (site referral, organic, social etc) along with engagement metrics like bounce rate, time on site and conversion rate.
• Responsible for the set-up and maintenance of Google Tag Manager (GTM), Google Analytics and Google.
• Develop a consistent process for company tracking needs including UTM, GTM and other tagging
• Excellent oral, written and interpersonal skills; the ability to effectively communicate with all levels within the organization
• Independent learner – ability to learn on their own and discover new industry trends.
• Execute tests, collect and analyze data, identify trends and insights in order to achieve maximum ROI
• Optimize copy and landing pages for search engine optimization

Required Education, Experience and Technical Skills:

• University Degree or college diploma, preferably with a digital marketing major
• Minimum of 1 – 3 years of search engine optimization experience
• Proven track record of results with improving search rankings and/or developing and managing website reporting tools
• Strong knowledge of PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript;
• Basic understanding of paid advertising methods and platforms;
• Advance Google Analytics certified
• Google Ads certified (Fundamentals, Display, Mobile, search, Videos and shopping)
• Google Partners Digital Sales certification
• Google Mobile Sites certified
• SEMrush Academy certified Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, Google Search Console, Webpagetes (advanced user)

Why to work for us, What We Offer:

• Competitive compensation plan, great perks & benefits.
• An incredible opportunity for advancement within the organization.
• A leadership team that trains and mentors its staff to ensure success for new team members.
• Flexible working hours and working form home days (we understand the importance of a work / life balance, but showing deep commitment to our clients)
• A fun and casual place to work!

Please note that this position requires the candidate to work from our office in downtown Toronto