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.
What are the five most important off-page optimization factors?
Just as in the previous question, you want to know what the candidate sees as important for off-page optimization. These answers don’t need to be specific to SEO, and in fact, a good SEO should know a few non-SEO factors that are important.
Here’s how I would answer:
Links and RankBrain are the most important off-page factors, but linking is the only one we can do anything about. So for off-page, I would focus first on getting high quality links.
For the rest of the off page factors, I would summarize everything into a single category called promotion. This might be in the form of social media marketing (important), off-site content publishing, paid ads, and good old fashioned customer service.
Not all of these will factor directly into the ranking algorithms, however all of them build trust and credibility, which the search engines do try to weigh in some form.