8 SEO Job Interview Questions That Pass Through BS

At a recent conference, I was talking to some other SEO professionals about hiring for some open positions on my team when the conversation turned from “do you know someone who is looking?” to “how do you find good SEOs?”

As a profession, we’re pretty good at bullshitting and marketing pitches and sales pitches – so there’s no question we can all apply these skills to sell ourselves.

So how do you see through it? How to find a good SEO specialist?

The secret is in the interview questions you ask.

Here are eight interview questions I always ask SEO job candidates.

Doing an SEO interview

When I do SEO interviews, I don’t ask standard questions that you would get in your regular interview. Most standard interview questions bore me.

I’ve found that most technical SEO questions tend to be an attempt by the interviewer to show how smart they are, rather than to gauge the candidate’s SEO knowledge.

Too many SEO interviews go by simply letting the interviewer talk about themselves the entire time. I’m not that interviewer (I’m just that guy at the bar).

In general, however, most SEO knowledge can be learned fairly quickly. If a candidate doesn’t know how to use Screaming Frog, I can show them in an hour, so it’s not worth asking questions like that in an interview.

Instead, I’d rather look at their approach to problem solving, thought process, customer interaction skills, and overall SEO perspective.

Basically, if I can find someone who thinks rationally, critically and logically, who knows the basics and has some technical skills, then I can train them in the other things.

The best interview questions to ask SEO candidates

1. Tell me about yourself.

This is the first question I ask. It’s something you’ve heard in every interview.

What do I pay most attention to with this question? What the candidate considers important:

• Are they talking about themselves personally? Professionally?
• Do they go straight into their work history?
• Do they read me things like a checklist?

There’s no real wrong answer here – unless they’re reciting qualifications like a checklist.

2. Tell me about your greatest accomplishment at your last job.

This simple question is my favorite. This answer will most likely immediately decide the rest of the interview.

You’d be shocked how many people can’t answer this question.

Look at your average resume. Most people list what they were tasked to do or do, but they don’t tell you what they actually did in that role.

This is the candidate’s chance to brag – to tell me about their results:

• What ideas did you come up with?
• What impact did you make on the customer? (If you’re coming from an agency, I’ll paraphrase that as “tell me about the biggest impact you’ve made for a client.”)

I’ll ask a few follow-up questions about whatever the candidate list is, but it’s just a conversation about the job to make sure he or she was actually involved in doing it and to understand what role the person played.

3. Why SEO?

I will only ask this question when hiring for entry-level positions or if the applicant has less than two years of experience.

I wonder why they chose this profession. What motivates them?

If you tell me “I need a job” or “it pays well” you don’t get the job or you don’t get paid well.

4. Tell me about your personal projects, websites, blogs, side activities, conferences, etc.

There are two reasons for this question:

• I want to make sure there is no conflict of interest. I interviewed several people who wanted to keep their full-time consulting with competing clients in addition to our full-time jobs.
• I’m trying to find someone who doesn’t turn off their SEO thinking at 5pm (That’s the main reason I’m asking this question.)

I want someone with a passion for prospecting, marketing and technology.

I do not care how that passion manifests itself. You don’t need to have a blog or a side job or a personal website or speak at conferences.

Just have the passion and show it to me.

5. Tell me something that most SEO professionals think is true that you think is BS (Or something that you think is true that most SEO professionals think is BS).

This is my second favorite question to ask and one I usually save for the end. This is a modified version of a great interview question by Peter Thiel (who I personally am not a huge fan of).

I had to limit this to SEO or marketing though, as people tended to get really political about it (flat earth, vaccines, abortion, etc.). While these are fun answers, they really aren’t work-appropriate and I don’t want to discuss them in this setting.

This question helps a lot in assessing the candidate’s critical thinking skills. I’m looking to see how they react when put in place. (I guarantee no one anticipated this question and it will take time to answer.)

I want to see the candidate flustered – without a prepared answer – because that’s how a lot of customer interactions go.

I also want to see how candidates defend their answer because I will ask for a few follow-ups asking them to do just that.

6. Given any URL, tell me how you diagnose it for SEO issues. What is your first step?

For SEO-specific skill sets, I like to keep an open mind.

To this question, I will continue to ask, “So what? Then what?”

I want to see how their thought process works.

Not all are the same. Some will start by exploring or crawling; others will begin by understanding the business objectives; others will pull out their checklist. (You can earn bonus points if you mention any of my SEO tools.)

I’m not a fan of checklists.

Also, I don’t want to hear, “I’d drop that tool.” I want you to tell me what you use the tool for.

For senior-level roles, I’ve often asked candidates to make a few slides about how they would improve a random site.

This is never a client site (we really don’t want free work). It’s usually a brand site for any branded clothing I notice the person is wearing, or if they tell me they play hockey, it could be a hockey equipment manufacturer, etc.

If I want to be an ass, I’ll ask them to rate wtfseo.com or something. It’s always random.

7. Suppose the customer wants to do this thing. You think it’s a terrible idea and recommend something else instead. The meeting is tomorrow to discuss. What is your plan for the date?

This is my favorite hypothetical question.

There is correct answer to this. I’m looking for a data driven and actionable plan.

Unfortunately, many candidates instead give what I call an “ego response,” where they say something like, “I’m going to tell the client that I’m the expert and they should trust me,” or something similar.

This is not the person I want to hire.

8. What did you hate most about your last job?

This question comes from my days as a Wendy’s manager in college. It was required to be asked about all candidates and I liked it so much that I settled on it.

Again, there is no right answer here, but there are plenty of wrong ones.

At Wendy’s I would get responses like “my manager was always yelling at us for talking on our phones” and I knew the employee had motivational issues or was not a hard worker.

In the SEO industry it is different.

An interviewee recently told me that he hates doing keyword research and reporting and looking for work where he doesn’t have to. (Hint: This job doesn’t exist in SEO.)

Let’s summarize

I ask a few more questions, but I won’t reveal all my secrets here. There’s a good chance my next interview candidate will read this, so I’ll have to save a few.

However, if you treat me to a beer at an upcoming conference, I’d be happy to share them with you.

Overall, the goal is to assess the candidate’s thought process and critical thinking skills and whether they would be a good attitude/culture fit for the team.

I’m super confident in my team’s training abilities, but that doesn’t mean you guys don’t know what you’re talking about either.

I’m just not going to try to show you that I know more than you or trick you with some crazy technical problem that in real life you’d probably just google.

Actually, that’s how I feel about all those crazy Google-style interview questions like “how would you weigh a Boeing 737?”

Sure, you could build an amazing water displacement device and pull the plane on it, or put all the individual parts together – but I’d rather hire the engineer who calls Boeing for an answer than waste all that time.

I wish you the best of luck whether you are interviewing or hiring.

I also highly recommend reading this great article on interviewing by Mike King.

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