Interview Questions
10 questions you are likely to be asked about SEO, from beginner to experienced level — each with a spoken-style answer, a common follow-up and a link to the lesson behind it.
Beginner questions (3)
01What is SEO and what are its main areas?
Search engine optimization improves a site’s visibility in organic search results. Main areas: technical SEO (crawling, indexing, speed), on-page SEO (content, titles, headings, links) and off-page SEO (links and mentions from other sites), plus local SEO for physical businesses.
02How do search engines work?
They crawl the web by following links and sitemaps, render and analyse pages, index the content, and rank indexed pages for each query using many signals such as relevance, quality, links and page experience.
03What is search intent?
The goal behind a query: informational (learn), navigational (find a site), commercial (compare) or transactional (buy). Pages rank best when their format and content match the dominant intent.
Intermediate questions (4)
01What makes a good title tag and meta description?
A unique, descriptive title of roughly 50–60 characters with the main topic near the start, and a meta description of about 150–160 characters that summarises the page and invites the click. Google may rewrite either.
02What is a canonical URL?
The preferred URL for a page that is reachable at several addresses. rel="canonical" tells search engines which version to index and consolidates signals, preventing duplicate-content dilution.
03What is the difference between robots.txt and noindex?
robots.txt controls crawling — it asks bots not to fetch URLs. noindex (meta robots or X-Robots-Tag header) controls indexing — the page can be crawled but will not appear in results. A page blocked in robots.txt cannot be seen to have noindex.
04What are Core Web Vitals?
Google’s user-experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (loading, good ≤ 2.5 s), Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness, good ≤ 200 ms) and Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability, good ≤ 0.1), measured from real users.
Experienced questions (3)
01How should a JavaScript single-page app be made SEO-friendly?
Serve meaningful HTML via server-side rendering or prerendering, use real links with unique URLs, set unique titles and meta per route, avoid content hidden behind interactions, and test with the URL Inspection tool.
02What is structured data and when should you use it?
Machine-readable markup (usually JSON-LD with schema.org types) that describes page content such as articles, products, FAQs or breadcrumbs. Use it only when it accurately reflects visible content; misleading markup can lead to manual actions.
03How do you run an SEO audit?
Crawl the site, check indexing in Search Console, fix errors (4xx/5xx, redirect chains, broken links), review titles, headings, duplicates and canonicals, measure Core Web Vitals, check structured data and internal linking, then prioritise by impact.