When you are looking to hire a SEO or Online Marketing employee you need to think about the different areas the hire will be involved in for example will they fit in the the following categories –
– Agency SEO
– In-House SEO
Usually an Agency SEO will be use to working with multiple projects at once.
Whilst an In-house SEO will be good at working with internal stake holders to get a project pushed forward.
When you hire a SEO you also need to be mindful that their are multiple different specialists for example –
– Technical SEO Specialist
– Link Acquisition Specialist
– On Site Specialist
– Content Specialist
– Team Lead
ect ect ect it goes on.
Another important point when hiring a SEO is to think are they going to be doing the work in the trenches or will they more a more client facing SEO.
Here are some basic questions you can ask a new hire –
1. What is your go to SEO blog or resource – This is a great question to see if the SEO is keen on the industry and knows all the top sites such as MOZ, Search Engine Land and others.
2. How good are you at Excel – Most SEOs will need to be good at Excel to some degree, if they do not have Excel skills to boot it could mean drama.
3. Can you code – If they know basic HTML, and other coding languages this will assist with project work.
4. Are they a good TEAM player – With any SEO project the best results come from when everyone works as a TEAM.
5. Do they run a Affiliate website or WordPress Blog – This is a good question to ask because it shows if the SEO has honed in on their skills outside of work.
6. Ask Technical Questions in the interview things such as What is a Canonical Tag, What is the HreFlang tags, what is the difference between Penguin and Panda see if they can break down the basics.
7. Ask process driven questions such as what is your process for picking up on site issues, what is your link acquisition process.
After over 10 years in SEO this is just a small sample of the types of questions you can ask.
You really need to find out what works best for the role and base the questions via that.
