10 Questions That SEOs Heard The Most

It doesn’t matter if you have been doing SEO as an in-house or a consultant, as long as you were engaged into conversations about your profession or your work, you must have heard of some, if not all of the following questions at one time during your SEO career.

10. Do you have to pay Google for listing?

Common mis-perception. “Those sites at the top must have paid Google and Yahoo! a lot of money…”. My typical answer: “Hmmm… nope, unless you are talking about paid search,” and then continue to spend another 10 minutes to explain difference between organic and paid search.

9. How do I get to the top of [Insert search engine name]?

The topic will quickly change from “get to the top” to “how search engine works” and “SEO best practice”.

8. What’s the difference between 301 and 302?

This one usually comes from the developers right after you make a series of requests to change the redirects from one to the other. You should be grateful if the developers you work with understand the implication of using each redirect, including the other awful ones like meta refresh and Javascript.

7. Why is Flash/Javascript/Ajax bad for SEO?

Trust me, this is just the beginning of a long series of discussions and debates. The designers and developers understandably want to provide the best experience and the most gorgeous design to the user, but you definitely want them to create the most search engine optimized site with as much HTML text content as possible. How you find a common ground is just another separate topic.

6. How do I know which keywords to use?

This is mostly a writer or editor question, and it tends to happen after you subtly convey to them that a clever, creative page title is often not the best option for SEOs.

5. How do you optimize a site for search engine?

When answering this question, make sure you strip out all the SEO lingoes and acronyms unless you want to confuse the inquiry minds even further. So no SERP, TLD, IBL, KW, etc.

4. Where did you learn about SEO?

This is one of the most popular questions for the SEOs. Despite the fact that this industry has continued to grow and become more important for businesses, there is still a lack of recognized or certified SEO programs offered by reputable college and university.

3. How did you get into SEO?

Well, this is basically another way of asking where did you learn your stuff.

2. What exactly do you do?

You are basically an enigma to them. It is not an easy question to answer, and it is almost impossible to explain in details of the process. You could actually confuse them even more if you throw too many SEO lingos at them.

1. What is SEO? What is search engine optimization?

Ta-Daaa! There you go. The uncontested number one question that SEOs have heard the most. This question is so common, almost anyone you talk to about your profession will probably ask this same question. This question is similar to “What exactly do you do?” and is often followed up with the other questions in this list. Expect to be overwhelmed with this question during the first week at a new company, it will feel like a broken record after a while.

Got other questions in mind? Post it in the comment section now!