Your company is rebuilding its website in a JavaScript framework like React or Next.js. What SEO requirements would you give the developers?
What the interviewer wants to hear
- Server-side rendering or static generation for key content
- Real <a href> links and clean, unique URLs
- Correct status codes, titles, meta robots and canonicals in initial HTML
- Performance budget for Core Web Vitals, especially INP and LCP
- Structured data, sitemaps and robots.txt
- Test with URL Inspection and crawls before launch
Model answer
I would ask for server-side rendering or static generation for all important pages, so the main content, links and metadata are in the initial HTML instead of depending on client-side rendering. Navigation must use real anchor links with href attributes and clean, unique URLs, not hash fragments. Each page must return the correct status code, including real 404s instead of soft 404s, and the title, meta description, meta robots and canonical must be set in the server response. I would agree a performance budget for Core Web Vitals, paying special attention to INP, because heavy JavaScript and hydration often cause slow interactions. We need structured data, XML sitemaps that update automatically and a correct robots.txt that does not block scripts. Finally, I would test on a staging site with a crawler and Google's URL Inspection, and plan redirects if URLs change.
Can you answer it under time pressure?
Take a timed hard round and get scored on every answer.
More hard SEO Specialist questions
- Organic traffic dropped 40% in one week. Walk me through how you would find the cause.
- You are leading SEO for a site migration with new URLs, new CMS and a redesign. How do you manage the risk?
- With AI Overviews and AI assistants answering questions directly, how should a company change its SEO strategy?
- Developers keep pushing your SEO tickets to the bottom of the backlog. How do you handle this?
- A new client says: "We want to rank number one for the keyword CRM in three months." How do you respond?
- A client has received a manual action for unnatural links to their site. Walk me through how you handle it.
- Leadership wants to use generative AI to publish hundreds of SEO articles a month. How do you advise them?
- How would you build a forecast to convince leadership to invest in an SEO project?
- Describe how you would use log file analysis on a large ecommerce site with millions of URLs.