Walk me through how you run a technical SEO audit for a website.
What the interviewer wants to hear
- Crawl the site and compare with sitemap and Search Console
- Check indexability, canonicals, redirects, status codes
- Site structure and internal linking
- Core Web Vitals, mobile, JavaScript rendering
- Prioritise findings by impact and effort
Model answer
I start by understanding the business goals and the most important page types. Then I crawl the site with Screaming Frog and compare the crawl with the XML sitemap and Search Console indexing data. I check status codes, redirect chains, broken links, robots.txt, noindex tags and canonicals to make sure key pages are crawlable and indexable. Next I review site structure and internal linking: are important pages within a few clicks, and are there orphan pages? I check duplicate content, hreflang if the site is international, structured data, and mobile usability. For performance I use field data from Search Console and PageSpeed Insights for LCP, INP and CLS. For JavaScript sites I compare raw and rendered HTML. Finally I prioritise issues by impact and effort and turn them into clear tickets for developers.
Can you answer it under time pressure?
Take a timed medium round and get scored on every answer.
More medium SEO Specialist questions
- How do you do keyword research for a new section of a website?
- A site fails Core Web Vitals on mobile. How would you find and fix the problems?
- What do you include in an SEO content brief for a writer?
- How do you measure and report SEO success to a manager who is not an SEO expert?
- A company wants to expand its website to five countries and three languages. How would you set up the international SEO?
- How would you optimise category pages for an online store?
- How would you build a content strategy using topic clusters?
- How do you earn high-quality backlinks without breaking Google's guidelines?
- How would you run a content audit on a site with thousands of old blog posts?