As hard as it is to assess ANY job candidate’s knowledge, it’s even harder with SEO candidates because there’s so much gray area in the industry. This blog series presents questions you can pose to help you determine a candidate’s level of knowledge.
Name some of the regular features of SERPs.
Search engine results pages are much more than a list of paid and organic links. The candidate should demonstrate a knowledge of many of the SERP enhancements and how those factor into their optimization efforts.
Here’s how I would answer:
Different searches produce different types of results. For example, a search with a local intent will produce the local box of results. Question-based searches are likely to produce direct answer boxes. Some searches result in carousels, knowledge graph boxes, and links to more questions or in-depth articles.
The key to using any of these to your advantage is to first know what results are appearing for any particular keyword search. I would perform a number of various keyword searches based on a particular topic and make note of the different result options that I would have to work with.
Next I would analyze the results to see how relevant they are to the content that I want to rank for or the type of visitor that I want to drive to my site. If the results being displayed are not relevant to either of those two things, I’d take a pass at trying to rank there. If they are relevant, I’d definitely look deeper to see what kind of changes or additions can be made to the content.