Looking for the Right Person to do SEO for you? Here are questions that you should ask
Most website owners usually think that once they have decided to bring in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in their site, it’s all peaches and cream from there. What they don’t know is that the deciding to use SEO is probably the easiest step that you can undertake in SEO. After that, you have to plan out and design the whole plan so that you will reach the optimal results in the shortest amount of time possible. Once you have decided that SEO is a path that you want your website to take, the next decision that you have to make is if you will hire an SEO expert outside of your company or DIY your own SEO solutions.
Hiring an SEO professional is the recommended way to take especially if you don’t know where to start and how to go about the whole nine yards. SEO professionals are aptly trained and have the right amount of knowledge that they can custom fit the SEO solutions to what your business and website need. Now, you might ask how can you possibly find the right fit among a pool of candidates? Easy, you just have to know the right questions to ask in the interview process so that you will be able to pick the best candidate to do the job for you.
Read along and find out the different key interview questions that are very important to ask the different candidates for your SEO professional position.
Training and technical know-how
SEO, like anything that has been sprouted from the Internet is ever-changing and new, cutting-edge technologies are being introduced in a daily basis. With this in mind, different SEO practitioners have the tendency to have their favorite techniques or technologies that they want to use that might have worked wonderfully for them in the past. You must acknowledge this fact and as you go on the interview process, you can ask about the certain technical know-how of the person by asking for specific definitions of SEO terms so that you can gauge the knowledge level of the person. Sample questions that you can ask can include: What is the difference between SEO and SEM? What are the different tactics that you use when it comes to SEO analysis and management? What are the different key algorithms that are currently used in SEO?
Key SEO projects and work experiences
The knowledge of the person is only one part of the equation. Of course, you want to know whether the person that you are interviewing also has a lot of SEO experience to back up the knowledge part. You have to keep in mind that whereas knowledge helps to make an SEO professional better, his experiences will better enhance his skills and SEO style. In this part of the interview, you can ask the SEO professional to talk about the key projects that he handled in the past where he was most proud of and how he handled conflict with other parties while implementing the SEO project. In this portion, you can even ask whether or not he has a project which failed miserably, the lessons that he learned from it and what practices he should have done to prevent the project from ending the way it did.
Opinions about certain controversial SEO issues
This part of the interview wherein you will have to ask the interviewee about his views towards the more controversial issues surrounding SEO will greatly help you in determining what kind of character the person has. You have to keep in mind that there are no right and wrong answers in this part, unless of course you are completely against the specific issue and you don’t want to have it incorporated in your project implementation. Sample questions that you can ask in this portion can include: What are your views about Black Hat SEO? What is your stance when it comes to link farming? And Have you ever used tools which are considered controversial in SEO and what was the effect it had in your project?
During the interview, it is always important to assess whether or not the person that you are interviewing can possibly work in your company. How can you determine this? You can easily deduce this if you see that the answers that the person is giving is in accordance to your company or website’s policies and ethical procedures. Picking the right person which can fit best in your company is the best thing that you can do to ensure that the whole SEO project development and implementation will be a successful one.
