100 Updated Search Engine Marketing Specailist Interview Questions Part -2

100 Updated Search Engine Marketing Specailist Interview Questions Part -2

Q – 1 What is Actual CPC?

Ans- The actual cost of a click for an advertiser in an auction. The actual CPC is calculated in realtime and we cannot know the Actual CPC, but we can see Avg. CPC.
Actual CPC = (AdRank to Beat/QS)+$0.01

Q – 2 Explain me what do you know about Google’s algorithm updates?

Ans- Google is always trying to work on their algorithm so that “more deserving” websites with better content rank higher than others. The three main algorithm updates of the last two years are Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird.

Q – 3 Do you know what is Quality Score in Google AdWords?

Ans- Google’s quality score determines the value and relevancy of your ad to the user on the basis of keyword relevancy, quality of your landing, and your ad’s CTR. Higher quality score keywords will save your money and get better ad ranking.

Q – 4 Tell me how can you Improve Conversion Rates?

Ans- By creating ads which match perfectly with keywords and creating tightly themed ad groups so we can get targeted users to best landing page. Also by improving the Landing Page quality we can improve the conversions.

Q – 5 Tell me what’s your methodology in creating ad copies?

Ans- This question wants to find out how you would come up with ad copies. Are they compelling and paint an accurate picture of the intended message? You may answer it based on the following guidelines:

☛ Find out why your ad copy should be more effective than others
☛ Your ad’s ability to answer basic questions
☛ Testing the ad copy; we’ll never know how effective it is until we put it to the test

Q – 6 Tell me who are our competitors? What PPC strategies are adopted by them?

Ans- You have to be prepared for this question. Do your homework. Before you appear for your interview, learn about the company you are applying to. You should research about the company’s background, their rivals, the strategies of the company and their competitors’ strategies.

Q – 7 How to reduce costs of our paid search campaigns?

Ans- Don’t immediately answer open-ended questions that lead to answers based on multiple assumptions. Costs of acquisition? Cost per click? You can’t answer accurately a question that isn’t accurate itself. When in doubt, you should also have the freedom to ask question before you release your thoughts.

Q – 8 Tell us are you a part of the SEO community online?

Ans- There are many different forums and such out there, being active and up to date is essential to staying on top in the constantly changing world of SEO. A few blogs and forums I recommend are SearchEngineLand, SERoundtable and WebmasterWorld.

Q – 9 Tell me do you have a Google Authorship?

Ans- Having Google Authorship is a plus and not a necessity. By them attaching their name and face to your content, you’re providing readers with a higher level of trust and confidence in your work. Adding this human element also promotes more personal interactions between your potential SEO expert and your audience.

Q – 10 Do you know the working of AdWords?

Ans- Google AdWords work on the basis of a bidding system. For instance, if the bidding price is higher, your ad will appear on top of the Google page. Working on the ‘pay per click’ model, you only pay the amount you have bid if someone taps on your ad that appears on Google SERPs.

Q – 11 What gets entered into a Google Account?

Ans- Once the advertisers determine the keywords that they want to bid on, Google will enter a keyword from your account which is most related into the auction with the maximum bid specified as well as the associated ad.

Q – 12 Can you tell me limit of character used for PPC Ads?

Ans- Different Search Engines have different Limit on ads character as for Google you can put maximum 25 for headline and 70 for description 1 and 2 combined.

Q – 13 What do understand by Quality Score?

Ans- Quality Score is a metric which is calculated for each keyword between 1 to 10. The QS defines the quality of keyword compared with Ads and Landing Page. This metric is used to calculate the AdRank, which is used to calculate the ad position.

Q – 14 Explain me what is the technical part of SEO?

Ans- If they don’t understand simple HTML then they aren’t the person you want to be working with, it’s as simple as that. SEO experts also need to understand server side lingo like 301, 404, robots.txt, etc.

Q – 15 Explain how you can improve conversion rates?

Ans- By creating ads that match properly with keywords and create tightly themed ad groups, you can target users to the campaign that helps in conversions.

Q – 16 Is PPC Advertisement effect ranking of websites on search engines?

Ans- Never, Search Engine don’t mix them. Google and other search engines rank both organic and ppc results separately

Q – 17 Tell me other than CPC, what are the other two options for bidding?

Ans- The two options for bidding are:

☛ CPM – Cost per Thousand
☛ CPA – Cost per Action

Q – 18 Do you know what is a Google “Penalty”?

Ans- Manual actions can be taken within Google webmaster tools if you’ve been penalized.

Q – 19 Explain me what is an ad group in Google Adwords?

Ans- Ad group is a container of your keywords, advertisements, and landing pages. Google rewards advertisers who prepare Adword campaigns with tightly structured ad groups. Its not advisable to include all your keywords into the single ad group, but to organize keywords into themes.

Q – 20 How do we determine if search engine marketing is right for our company?

Ans- Since the whole world is on the internet nowadays, it is very unlikely that you don’t need search engine marketing to survive and grow in the market. Regardless of whether you are interested in generating leads, sales, investors, strategic partners, new recruits, and awareness, SEM offers an opportunity to improve your bottom line.

A quick assessment by professionals will help clarify the need and fit.

Q – 21 What is Google Quality Score?

Ans- Google’s quality score determines how beneficial and relevant your ad is to the user, based primarily on your ad’s CTR, quality of your landing page and keyword relevance. Higher quality score keywords will save your money and earn better ad ranking.

Q – 22 What online communities have you managed in the past?

Ans- Creating profiles and pages and then posting content to them isn’t the job – anyone can do that. The ability to build and engage with the community is the qualifying test of whether someone is a social media manager or a social media user.

Q – 23 Explain what is conversion optimizer in Adwords?

Ans- Conversion Optimizer is a tool used by Google Adwords for bid manipulation and decides which clicks on the ad will be valuable. It can help you to return maximum on your investment.

Q – 24 What is the impact of Quality score on CPC and Ad Position?

Ans- Quality Score is inversely proportional to CPC and Directly proportional to Ad Position. That means higher QS means lower cost and higher position.

Q – 25 Tell me what factors affect Quality Score?

Ans- Here are some factors affecting the Quality Score or QS:

☛ Historic Account data
☛ Landing page quality
☛ Relevance of keywords and ads
☛ CTR of the keyword

Q – 26 How does Ad rank impact Cost-Per-Click?

Ans- Ad rank plays a huge role in defining the actual cost-per-click that your opponents pay, when someone clicks on their ads. Your CPC can be calculated by following way

Your Price = The ad rank of the person below you/ your quality score + $0.01

Q – 27 Tell me what is the meaning of Ad Rank?

Ans- Ad Rank decides the ad position on Google page. This is determined by your bid for that quality score and keyword.

Q – 28 Explain me how do you go about building your links?

Ans- Learning how the candidate actually implement backlinks will help you rate their service accordingly. If they don’t build links efficiently with quality, then you will probably want to pass. There are many wrong ways to build links that can penalize your site and possible get deindexed from Google.

Q – 29 What strategies would you use to generate leads?

Ans- This question moves from the more general and abstract into the meat of the matter. They should be able to outline 2 or 3 specific strategies that will feed leads into your sales funnel via social engagement.

Q – 30 Explain what gets entered into a Google Account?

Q – 31 Explain me what is PPC?

Ans- As we’ve established, PPC advertising offers a unique opportunity to:

☛ Grow Your Customer Base – Connect with searchers actively looking for products and services like yours, and respond to that need by providing them with an offer relevant to their search query.
☛ Generate Leads at Low Costs – Because pay-per-click marketing allows you to reach leads and prospects when they’re researching and looking to buy, it’s a highly effective way to bring interested visitors to your site. Plus, you can enjoy an algorithmically generated discount from the search engines in exchange for making their users happy.

Q – 32 Tell me how to track conversions in Google AdWords?

Ans- In Google AdWords, conversion tracking can be done by:

☛ Enabling your ad rotation setting to optimize for clicks which means AdWords will serve the ads it feels are likely to be clicked.
☛ View-through conversions window option tracks when a person sees your ad but doesn’t click it. This is called impression.
☛ Tracking purchases by involving basic tracking code provided by AdWords and modifying it with an additional code unique to your particular e-commerce platform.
☛ A person can know when customers click on their ad for the first time and how frequently they saw your ad before converting by accessing search funnels inside tools and analysis.

Q – 33 Explain me why are we using Google AdWords?

Ans- The traffic that comes via Google AdWords or ‘Pay per Click’ is dealt differently. The organic traffic often visits the website for information, whereas the traffic through PPC ads knows what they are clicking on and what they want to buy. Therefore, few visitors coming via AdWords might be more valuable than the organic traffic.

Q – 34 Which social media tools do you use?

Ans- Leave this question open-ended, just as it is phrased above. Your company may already have social media management software in place or you may be looking for a recommendation.

If they’re only familiar with free software that does nothing more than allow them to schedule posts to Facebook and Twitter, it’s not a good sign. Ask them why they like or don’t like different tools and which features they use most.

Q – 35 Please explain how do you optimize with social media?

Ans- See if they incorporate social media tools and tricks in their SEO endeavours, you want to get your name out there as much as possible and social media is the way to do it. Social signals to your pages are almost as good as backlinks. “Social shares – retweets, +1s and likes – are the SEO currency of the common internet user,“

Q – 36 Explain what are the type of Keywords?

Ans- There are no specific types for Keywords however they are classified on the basis of how likely is going to be clicked by visitors
☛ Research Keywords: It tends to contain one or two words – Tea
☛ Consideration: It tends to contain two or three words – Green Tea
☛ Purchase: It must have more than three words – buy loose green tea
☛ Loyalty: This must be shorter- Starbucks

Q – 37 What Kind of Quality Score you can achieve for keywords?

Ans- In my past campaigns I achieved the QS of 7 – 10. I can improve the quality score by using optimization techniques in campaign.

Q – 38 Tell me how do you differentiate paid search programs of Google, MSN and Yahoo?

Ans- One way to differentiate these three are through presentation of strengths and weaknesses of each.

Google AdWords
Advantage: Most robust and corners majority of all paid search traffic
Disadvantage: Due to its big number of advertisers, cost per click is generally more expensive

Yahoo! Search Marketing
Advantage: Lower pay per click cost compared to Google AdWords
Disadvantage: Way behind Google AdWords in terms of reporting features

MSN adCenter
Advantage: Studies show that users of adCenter are more likely result to conversions
Disadvantage: Weakest PPC interface compared to Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing

Q – 39 Explain me about a recent test or optimization win you’ve had?

Ans- You are looking for enthusiasm for the success of the candidate’s managed accounts. You want to hear that your candidate has something right at the tip of their tongue. It doesn’t have to be terribly ground-breaking, but you want to see that they care about the account and discovering improvements.

You also want to see an intimate knowledge of the numbers. You don’t need to hear them quote statistics down to tenths of a percent, but you want to hear that they have a general sense of what actually makes a big win and they can quantify that in more specificity than just saying “it was better” – you want to hear things like “we got a 20% lift in conversion rate,” or “our mobile CTR increased around 30% while maintaining the some conversion rate.”

In addition, you’ll want this answer to show a solid understanding of testing methodologies. If they talk about an A/B test that had 5 variations, you may want to investigate their understanding of testing in more depth. That said, remember that methodology and process can be trained. Enthusiasm and dedication cannot.

Q – 40 Explain some of Google AdWord Ad Extensions?

Ans- There are different ad extensions to boost the traffic. Some of the common ad extensions are:

☛ Social Annotations
☛ Local Extensions
☛ Call Extensions
☛ Offer ads
☛ Mobile app extensions
☛ Seller ratings
☛ Image and drop down navigation Ad extension
☛ Review extension
☛ Communication Ad

Q – 41 Explain me what are the type of Keywords?

Ans- There are no specific types for Keywords however they are classified on the basis of how likely is going to be clicked by visitors

☛ Research Keywords: It tends to contain one or two words – Tea
☛ Consideration: It tends to contain two or three words – Green Tea
☛ Purchase: It must have more than three words – buy loose green tea
☛ Loyalty: This must be shorter- Starbucks

Q – 42 What is the difference between search engine marketing and Internet marketing?

Ans- Search Engine Marketing is specific to marketing your brand/service/products through search engines. It can be in the form of organic search results where landing pages are aimed for higher ranking, or in paid search results, where ads are aimed to display at maximum exposure for targeted keywords at minimal cost possible.

Q – 43 Explain me what’s your take on bidding for competitor’s trademark keywords?

Ans- This is a tricky question that should be addressed properly. PPC Hero has good guidance on this: citing the issue of legality and best-practice because it’s either you can or you can’t bid on a competitor’s trademark terms. Recent development in Google AdWords paid search has paved way for non-trademark owners to bid for previously exclusive trademark keywords.

By being active on what’s going on in the industry, this means you’ll always be on top of things as they happen. And that’s a good thing for prospect employers.

Q – 44 Do you know what is the difference between search engine marketing and Internet marketing?

Internet marketing covers a broader range of channels. It includes search engine marketing, email marketing / EDM, social media, and so on.

Q – 45 Explain me what is Quality Score and how does it affect your work as paid search specialist?

Ans- State the definition of Quality Score without being too bookish. It’s important to understand what it is, rather than remembering what it literally means.

Quality Score’s a part of Google’s way of determining ranking of AdWords ads. This can be achieved by, among others, improving relevance between ad copies and keywords, improving quality of landing pages. By obtaining high quality score for my keywords, I can reduce expenses for my PPC campaigns.

Q – 46 Basic PPC Based Job Interview Questions:

Ans-

☛ How do you improve the quality of your lead generation?
☛ How are you dealing with the removal of right-side ads?
☛ What bid optimization tools do you use as a PPC analyst?
☛ What’s your strategy for dealing with an ecommerce client?
☛ How do you handle limited budget in high CPC (cost per click) environments, such as legal and medical?
☛ What industries do you have experience managing paid campaigns for?
☛ What’s a micro-moment?
☛ What are the three most important components of a good search ad?
☛ What are the hallmarks of a good PPC landing page?
☛ What do you feel is the most valuable match-type (in Google AdWords or Bing Ads)?
☛ How do you ensure your conversion tracking is working correctly?
☛ How do you continue to drive sales when a client is in non-peak sales periods?
☛ How would you use organic data to improve PPC campaign performance?
☛ Give us examples of how you would use Google Analytics to improve your client’s performance.
☛ What do you consider when writing an ad?
☛ What’s the importance of mobile in today’s PPC advertising arena?
☛ How do you stay up on SEM news?
☛ Share an example of a time you implemented CRO tactics successfully.
☛ Share an example of how you work collaboratively with other digital marketing departments.
☛ Tell me about a time your work or guidance had a positive impact on a coworker or other internal team.
☛ What excites you about PPC?
☛ How do you deal with a client who is not receptive to your recommendations?
☛ Describe your PPC ad campaign optimization workflow.
☛ What do you know about our company?
☛ Why should we hire you?

Q – 47 Technical Search Engine Marketing Specialist Interview Questions:

Ans-

☛ How do you define SEM’s role in an integrated marketing plan?
☛ What are the advantages and disadvantages of PPC?
☛ How do you do your keyword research?
☛ What’s your methodology in creating ad copies?
☛ How do you optimize your results?
☛ Describe the structure of a Google AdWords paid search campaign.
☛ Explain how does a Google auction work.
☛ Explain what is CTR and how you can calculate it.
☛ What is remarketing?
☛ Explain how does Ad rank impact CPC.
☛ What are your favorite KPIs to track performance?
☛ What are the main factors you consider when auditing an Adwords account?
☛ Mention some of the Google Adword Ad Extensions.
☛ How would you stop your Ads from showing for not relevant searches?
☛ Our company already ranks first organically for our main brand keyword. Does it make sense to have a branded SEM strategy? If so, what would you propose?
☛ If you were given an extra budget to help increase conversions for an ecommerce site, how would you spend it?

Q – 48 Operational Search Engine Marketing Specialist Job Interview Questions:

Ans-

☛ What part of your previous company’s funnel needs work? How would you fix it?
☛ How do you decide how much you can pay for a click in a PPC campaign?
☛ How do you decide which keywords you’d like to target?
☛ Have you used AdWords before? What campaign metrics did you look at?
☛ Describe a time you ran an A/B test. Talk about your process, results, and hypothesis.
☛ If you saw your average position drop week over week, what would you do?

Q – 49 Professional Search Engine Marketing Specialist Interview Questions:

Ans-

☛ What makes a website search engine-friendly?
☛ How do you define success when it comes to SEO?
☛ How do you stay updated on industry news and algorithm changes?
☛ What programming languages do you have experience with?
☛ Regarding your previous SEO job, what did an average day look like?
☛ How do you adapt to the needs of different clients?
☛ How often do you communicate with clients?
☛ How did you learn SEO?
☛ How do you approach keyword research?
☛ What is the relationship between SEO, SEM and social media marketing?
☛ What SEO tools do you regularly use?
☛ How do you stay organized when working on an SEO project?
☛ Who are Gary Illyes and John Mueller?
☛ What is your favorite website and why?
☛ What is your opinion on proper link building?
☛ How have you dealt with link penalties?
☛ What’s the ideal speed for a site to load a web page?
☛ What method do you use to redirect a page?
☛ What are your thoughts on accelerated mobile pages (AMP)?
☛ What is your process for helping a local business become more visible in search results?
☛ Are you aware of the latest changes to Google and the latest updates to Panda and Penguin?
☛ How has Hummingbird changed the landscape of search?
☛ What is Google’s preferred method of configuring a mobile site?
☛ What do you know about content building and content marketing?
☛ What has been your experience getting content featured in answer boxes?
☛ How have you utilized structured data to earn featured snippets?
☛ What are the three possible configurations for a mobile site? Which do you prefer and why?
☛ What’s your greatest digital marketing success story?
☛ How do you stay up-to-date on the near-constant search algorithm changes?
☛ What metrics do you use to measure SEO success?

Q – 50 Personal Search Engine Marketing Specialist Interview Questions:

Ans-

☛ How many years of experience do you have with SEM?
☛ Explain Adwords to a 9 year old kid.
☛ What do you like about SEM marketing?
☛ Tell me about your most successful AdWords campaign
☛ Tell about an AdWords campaign that failed. What did you do wrong?
☛ Have you passed the exams to get the AdWords certification?
☛ Do you have experience with Adwords Editor?
☛ What are your favorite SEM tools?
☛ What are your favorite SEM blogs/forums?

Q – 51 Basic Search Engine Marketing Specialist Job Interview Questions:

Ans- ☛ What is the relationship between content and SEO?
☛ What are the most common issues for on-page SEO ranking?
☛ What are your favorite SEO tools? Why do you use them?
☛ Is our website search-friendly? What would you do to improve optimization?
☛ What link-building strategies have worked well for you? What didn’t work so well?
☛ Describe an SEO experiment that you set up. Talk about your process, results, and hypothesis.

Q – 52 Explain me about a time you made a big mistake and how you handled it?

Ans- You want to see that the person can first admit a mistake with ease. I had 1 candidate who said, “I’ve never made a mistake.”

Yeah, right. You want to hear that they recognized and owned their mistake, escalated it properly, apologized or “made good” on it, and most importantly (and this may require a follow-up nudge), instituted a process to prevent it from happening again.

A good answer will demonstrate the ability to recognize, admit, and escalate problems. It will also show problem-solving abilities that can identify holes in process and methodology and create logical, streamlined solutions to prevent them in the future.

Red flags here might be blaming other people. It really may have been your Junior Associate who uploaded the typo, but the more senior person should discuss this in the context of what QA process or training they failed to implement that let this happen.

A problem could have originated from a misunderstanding of the client’s request. Rather than seeing your candidate eye-rolling at the client’s poor communication, you want to hear that the candidate instituted processes, such as creating a written request process to make sure a client with sub-par communication skills can be understood correctly in the future.

Q – 53 Tell me why is Search Engine Marketing important?

Ans- You are there for the Search Engine Marketing job but if you don’t know the why of SEM then you lost it. Since, a high percentage of the developed world is online, so the company’s potential customers, shareholders, employees, and partners are online.

Search Engine Marketing is one of the fastest growing marketing channels and the most cost-effective. Therefore, the company can build an excellent avenue for cost effective and brand building at lead generation and online sales.

If the company doesn’t have a search engine marketing strategy, they are behind the curve. Undoubtedly, it is one of the basic SEM interview questions raised by the interviewer.

Q – 54 Tell me what is the possible impact of Ad Rank on Cost per Click?

Ans- Ad rank defines the actual cost per click that your opponents pay when someone clicks on their ads. The CPC can be calculated as Price by you = The ad rank of the person below you / your quality score + $0.01.

Q – 55 What is the limit set for the number or characters for Adwords ad?

Ans- Limit for Adword is

☛ Description line 1st : 25 characters
☛ Description line 2nd: 35 characters
☛ Destination URL: 1024 characters

No images are allowed in URL.

Q – 56 What are relevant metrics for tracking ROI on social media?

Ans- Engagement, brand reach, lead generation, and conversions. These are the essential measures of social media’s return on investment (ROI). They should also be able to more specific in terms of Google Analytics, metrics from software they use, or metrics from a specific platform.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that engagement on its own is success either. Without conversions that can be tracked back to that engagement, efforts have been unsuccessful.

Q – 57 Explain me how do you walk the line behind behind best practices and black hat SEO?

Ans- Black hat SEO offers short term solutions and can get your site penalized in Google. What was considered white hat SEO years ago may be black hat now. Which brings me to my next question.

Q – 58 Please explain what all things can be done using Google Ad API?

Ans- With Google Ad API, you can build an application that can do following things
☛ You can automatically generate keywords, ad text, custom reports and landing pages
☛ Develop additional applications and tools to help you manage accounts
☛ Synchronize Adwords data with your inventory system to manage campaigns based on stock

Q – 59 What is Quality Score and how does it affect your work as paid search specialist?

Ans- Quality Score’s a part of Google’s way of determining ranking of AdWords ads. This can be achieved by, among others, improving relevance between ad copies and keywords, improving quality of landing pages. By obtaining high quality score for my keywords, I can reduce expenses for my PPC campaigns.

Q – 60 What are the Factors which affect Quality Score?

Ans- Quality Score depends on the following metrics

☛ CTR of the Keyword
☛ Relevance of Keywords and Ads
☛ Landing Page Quality
☛ Historic Account Data

Related Articles