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Title: SEO Interview Questions

Intro:

Hi and thank you listening to SEOFightClub.org. I’m Ted Kubaitis and I have 22 years of web development and SEO experience. I have patented web technologies and started online businesses. I am both an engineer and a marketer. My goal is to help you win your SEO fights.

This episode’s FREEBIE

With every episode I love to give something away of high value. This episode’s SEO freebie is a list of SEO interview questions that will help you screen and understand you SEO candidates. Most SEO interview questions online would barely make sense for for screening an unpaid intern. My list provides interview questions that would be appropriate for screening seasoned professionals. With each question I also give the reason why you would want to ask the question and I give examples of both good and concerning answers. In this episode I will walk through how SEO philosophies can differ and where that may be important to your business when selecting an SEO. This free download will save you hours on figuring out your SEO screening strategy. If you are an SEO then this download will help make sure you are prepared for the interview.

You can download the freebie at: http://seofightclub.org/episode7

SEO Interview Questions

So in today’s episode I have created 8 questions you can use in addition to the ones I provide in the free download. I hand picked these 8 questions because I feel they really reveal the heart of someone’s SEO strategy. To give you a feel for how the philosophies can vary I have prepared my own answers as well as interview another expert SEO Josh Bachynski about his answers to the same questions. We can compare how our answers differ. When hiring an SEO it is important to interview several candidates and compare their strategies. It is all too common that I find businesses just hire the first person they talk to. I like to tell people that they make better decisions when they actually have a choice.

Just for the record. This isn’t a contest. Different businesses need different things from their SEO. Everyone is the right person for some jobs and not so much for others. Its how you differentiate yourself that ultimately gets you to where you want to be. Hopefully this exercise well help you embrace the differences that make your skills uniquely qualified.

Ted: Let me give you a chance to introduce yourself.

Josh Bachynski: Sure. I’m Josh Bachynski. I’ve been doing SEO for over 16 years, digital marketing, branding. I have a master’s degree. I’m in my second year of a PhD in ethics and decision theory. I have been in the second year for many years. I’m technically on sabbatical because I realize I can make much more money doing SEO and it’s a lot more fun than teaching university courses. That’s what I do and I have also got a documentary coming out about Google and I recently did a TED talk in [inaudible 00:00:37 ] about Google.

Ted: If people wanted to reach you or look into you where could they find you?

Josh Bachynski: They could always email me at my email address at joshbachynski@gmail.com. They can also check out my YouTube channel at youtube.com/jbachyns .

Ted: If they like your interview answers, can people reach you about your services?

Josh Bachynski: Yes, only if they are very, very rich clients.

1. What are the top 2 or 3 KPIs you use to know if your SEO strategy is working or not?

Josh: I think I just answered that one. The top two or three obviously rankings. You can’t ignore rankings, but also quite often in my social campaigns and SEO campaigns, I find that direct traffic will also go up as well. I think this could be from the chrome auto complete in the URL bar, which I’m not sure if it’s relying on Google data there or not. I suspect it most probably is. Anyway, you have to rely on rankings, of course, but I would also look at direct traffic to the site and just making sure that traffic to the site is increasing as well. Then finally conversions. It doesn’t matter if we got page one rankings or even spot number one rankings. It doesn’t matter if we increase traffic to the site if the conversions aren’t there. Those would be the top three. The fourth, I think, would be clock through rate on the Google search results page as well. Again, as I’ve often said, if someone is getting 100 impressions a month, but they have a five percent click through rate, then they’re missing 95 chances to make sale. If you can improve your click through rate, you’re going to get traffic right away. I also believe that click through rate is a ranking signal as well.

Ted: SEO revenue is my #1. Rankings are my #2. Revenue is first because it tells you so much about the health of the whole ecosystem. The health of crawlability, indexing, click through rate, conversions, and more all appear in the revenue signal. Conversions are good too but the needle doesn’t move as much. Rankings are second because they let you quickly triage whether the issues are likely to be on the technical SEO or SEO marketing side of the equation.

2. How long does your SEO typically take to start showing results and what are the milestones to achieving those results?

Josh: That’s a great question. I like that question quite a bit. The answer is, unfortunately, quite variable. For example, like I said, for improving the click through rate, or changing your title tag and things like that, you would see those results right away. If we improve the click through rate and start getting more people to the site, you would see those improvements right away. In terms of the general SEO … To tell you the truth, most of my SEO is more on the strategic level. I find myself, other than tweaking title tags and editing html or building back links or ye oldie back links and stuff like that, other than this ye oldie SEO stuff, which of course I do to the degree that that stuff is still useful or helpful, which I’ll call tactical SEO.

More and more I find myself doing strategic SEO where I’m working with a design team and I’m working with their marketing team and their writing team to improve sales, to improve conversions, to improve the user interface, to the improve the design and things like this. I think Google, or they were indirectly tracking, I think increasingly with the advent of RankBrain and the advent of the Zombie update, release-at least that’s what it’s called by Barry Schwartz. I think it’s becoming increasingly directly measured in terms of the design and where people are clicking and where they’re going. That’s being used as a ranking signal as well.

To answer in a long round about way, it can be both immediate results, but also the results can take a long time because I’m always waiting for the design team to finish their design, the writing team to finish writing. Then, for users to appreciate those changes and for Google to appreciate the fact that the users appreciate the changes. It can take anywhere from six to eighteen months. Also, it depends if whether or not the client is starting off when they start with me from a deficit. Most of my work is actually with clients who are not ranking well either because they just started a website and/or they had a website for years and it was hit by some kind of algorithm demotion, like Panda or a Penguin or some kind of manual penalty or things like that, a natural link notice, things like that.

First off, we have to clean off those problems first and then Google has to notice that. That can take months. It could take over a year for Google to notice something like that. Google being the lovely people they are, moving so fast as they do. That was sarcasm by the way. We have to clear that off first. Then, we have to make any positive improvements. It can take quite some time. Without fail, anyone who bothers who make all the changes I suggest … I usually suggest a lot of changes. Without fail, they all do see improvements over time.

Ted: When I make a change to a webpage I typically expect to see the change reflected in the search results in under 22 days.It could happen in 2 days or it could take 22. 22 days is the longest I’ve seen and that happened when I changed the page the morning after Google updated that page’s cache entry. It was literally a worst case scenario. If the changes have the desired results then additional cycles are needed to role out more pages. Those cycles typically take under 22 days too. The thing to remember is that we have to work on Google’s timeline so even though we want to move faster sometimes Google won’t let us do that. It can be frustrating but it is what it is.

3. How do you generally respond to clients who specifically ask you about ranking for keyword X?

Josh: That’s a great question too. That happens all the time, of course. I have two answers. The shorter answer is, of course, yeah, we’ll get [your ranking 00:10 ] for that, right? That’s the answer for a number of reasons, one because you’re a consultant so that’s what’s supposed to be the answer. In general, depending on what it is.

The longer answer is, again, I take more of holistic strategic approach. I’m not just going to try to get you ranking for one main keyword. We can’t ignore your major search