Eric Siu walks through five questions to ask when hiring an SEO person: how they approach link building, which tools they use, their biggest SEO win, what blogs they follow, and how they promote content. These reveal whether a candidate actually does SEO work or just talks about it.
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Today's episode of Growth Everywhere is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a digital marketing agency ran by yours truly that has helped venture-backed startups to Fortune 500 companies grow their revenues online. Single Grain covers services such as search engine optimization, Facebook advertising, Google advertising, YouTube advertising, content marketing, and conversion rate optimization. To learn more about Single Grain, go to www.singlegrain.com/eric.
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/grow to learn about 8 marketing campaigns that we've used in the past to help clients grow, including the one that helped generate over 1,500% return on investment. Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Growth Bytes. And today we're going to be talking about 5 SEO interview questions that you can be asking. So these are questions that you ideally would be asking someone that you're hiring in-house for SEO. I would always say, you know, even though I run an agency and this is kind of counterintuitive to my interests, I'm always going to say that you should probably be hiring someone in-house to do the work, especially if you're doing a lot of work on the content side and you need SEO to come in and help. So always recommend hiring someone in-house, especially when it comes to SEO. So 5 SEO interview questions to ask. So the first one is, what is your link building process? And this is a really interesting question because link building has changed a lot in the last few years. You ask this question to see how they would go about acquiring links. Are they going to be talking about buying Web 2.0 links or buying from PBN networks and doing a lot of spammy things? Or are they going to talk about the really, really super, super white hat stuff where it's all about building great content? Whatever it is exactly, you can get a glimpse into what their mindset looks like. Are they a little more practical or are they just regurgitating what's being read online? This question can dive into the heart of it. So talk about their link building process, ask them to explain a little more, and you just keep going into more details. The second question is, what are your favorite SEO tools? So a lot of people will mention Moz, you know, people will talk about Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which I think is good, which shows they know how to, you know, at least figure out how to use Screaming Frog Spider for technical purposes in terms of auditing a website. You might want to hear Webmaster Tools. You're looking for answers like Ahrefs or Majestic SEO, a lot of different tools out there. So you don't want them to give you a cookie-cutter answer like, oh, you know, I like using Google Analytics. Even though Google Analytics does help in terms of SEO insight, it's not exactly one of the core tools that's going to help you dive into a lot of the key SEO metrics. So that's a question to, you know, see where they stand on that front. And, you know, shows, really shows where their experience is as well. Ask them about their, the third question is asking about them, asking about their biggest SEO win. So, you know, this is where you're looking for them to give you a little more insight as to, you know, what type of metrics do they consider successful? You know, is their biggest SEO win really impressive? Is it what you're looking for? And, you know, Why do they consider that their biggest win? You know, how did they affect that campaign? What did they do step by step? Really helps you, you know, get deeper as well. 4th question is, what is your favorite SEO blog? And a lot of people, you know, when I ask them what their favorite blogs are, a lot of people will say, oh, you know, I don't have the time to read. But when it comes to something like SEO, you know, you're doing a lot of different tests and a lot of people are sharing different information online. You probably should be reading, especially considering that there's so many updates going on all the time with Google. There's new features being added to the search engine result pages. So you're looking for an answer here, whether it's the Moz blog or some other type of blog. When people say they read blogs like Fast Company or Business Insider for SEO blog, that is an automatic disqualification for me. The 5th question is, what is their content promotion process? So if people are talking about content marketing, producing great content, If you go to a good SEO, they would know how to promote the great piece of content. A really good content promotion process takes a lot of time to execute. It's very thorough, and I would even venture to say that sometimes it takes longer than the actual piece of content to promote that piece. You're really looking for their step-by-step on how they would actually do it. You can even give them a homework assignment to see how they would really execute on execute on this. And today, I mean 2015, for content promotion, that's a huge, huge part of link building and everything's all tying together now. You talk about SEO ties in with social, you talk about remarketing ties in with content marketing as well. A lot of different things all tying together, email automation, everything's just kind of colluding now or I shouldn't say colluding, it's not colluding, it's colliding now. So everything before, I mean, it used to be more segmented, but now there's a more holistic approach to online marketing. So these are 5 SEO interview questions to ask. A lot more to come. And if you need more questions for, in terms of SEO questions, you can also check out my hiring product as well. There's a lot of detail, not just on the SEO front, but just hiring in general. Today's episode of Growth Everywhere is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a digital marketing agency ran by yours truly. That has helped venture-backed startups to Fortune 500 companies grow their revenues online. Single Grain covers services such as search engine optimization, Facebook advertising, Google advertising, YouTube advertising, content marketing, and conversion rate optimization. To learn more about Single Grain, go to www.singlegrain.com/grow to learn about 8 marketing campaigns that we've used in the past to help clients grow. Including the one that helped generate over 1,500% return on investment.
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