Hiring for SEO
-
so sorry if i offend anyone here ...but dang SEO Experts are the used car sale guy of 1999!
we have a small eCommerce company in Jacksonville, FL - and we are always looking for improve our SEO - we have been members of moz for almost 10 years now! We have learned alot with all the tools they offer,
We have tried at least 5 local and national SEO consultants, agencies and consultants - NONE HAVE WORKED.
The time has come for us to hire an in house SEO do you have any advise on how a small business that wants to grow our SEO can weed thru the thousands of SEO "GURU's" out there today - Everyone is an expert.
On a side not if you want to move to Florida and help us grow - www.HolmesStamp.com/team
-
The Local SEO test is at https://moz.com/blog/local-search-expert-quiz-2016. I would use it as a jumping off point for making your own test (and randomizing the questions), rather than simply having potential candidates take the Moz one.
-
awesoem answer .. thanks for the feedback and tips! - I will 100% incorporate this basic question " what are you looking for from this role?" as we dont have it in our stock questions, and its important!
And we will go Mortal Combat as well!
Cheers!
Bryan
-
The two round interview idea is great but in my personal opinion, it will work better for an agency. I have worked for years in different In-house companies and from the experience, I am telling you that success of in-house is depends upon multiple factors.
If you are hiring a single person to handle your complete SEO, than you are looking for a guy who can understand the ins and out of your business, can write about it, do competitor analysis, outreach, build links and build reports and present it to the CEO.
Unlike agency where they have a set culture relevant for SEO and digital marketing, In-house culture is more business orientated where the guy will be sitting around non-SEO people.
What I mean to say here is that when you search for in-house guy you should look for a person who know their game well plus they understand your business and have management skills unlike agency where all they need is a good writer and they give them on-the-job training.
Just a thought!
-
Hi Bryan,
No offence taken by any of us, I'm sure. It's an unfortunate fact that our industry has a number of... dodgy providers.
In any case, our process is quite similar to Danny in that we use a 2 stage interview process and a test.
Ours is broken into 2 parts. A very short phone interview to cover the boring old cliche questions like "why did you leave your last job?" and " what are you looking for from this role?" I'll also throw in a bit of a qualifying question that could raise some obvious red flags so I can filter out the ones that just aren't going to work out. This saves my time and, more importantly, saves their time and travel costs. If they're out of work, the last thing they need is to be travelling to an interview they just aren't right for.
For those that make it past this step, they're invited in for a face to face interview. This one is about getting to know who they are; no technical questions. This gives me a solid indication of whether or not they'll be a good cultural fit for our team (very important to us here!) and if this seems fine, they're asked to complete a 10-question test which should take about 5 - 10 minutes.
It asks basic questions that anyone with the experience required for the role will almost roll their eyes at because it's so easy - "what is the purpose of a page title and where is the average user likely to see it most?" - that type of thing.
All of this lets me know what sort of technical ability they have, how well they can communicate, what sort of person they are, what they're looking to achieve and whether or not they can articulate answers to basic questions under a bit of pressure.
Then, if we end up with 2 candidates who seem evenly matched in every way, we arrange a Mortal Kombat style fight to the death.
Seriously though, being ecommerce, if you do go this route make sure you include specific questions about SEO for ecommerce. They can fall under a few different rules as far as how they should be set out, how to deal with potential content duplication etc.
-
Local MOZ online test? Good idea. Where is it?
-
thanks for the reply - yes i need to get them to take some tests on moz ... that is something we have done in the past to screen out a few.
i hate assuming ... so just to triple check - this is the test your referring to ? right?
https://moz.com/seo-expert-quiz
are there others ?
the link is here www.HolmesStamp.com/team
-
Hi Bryan,
I run my own agency that is growing quite fast and we need skilfull and knowledgable SEOs on board quite often. We post job offerings on our site, on social media such as LinkedIn, Ineed, local HR magazine, Craigslist. We asked them to provide is with links of recent work along with resume. Once they come to the interview and we feel good about them. We have second sets of interviews which is longer interview with a test, last time I used local SEO moz online test and it worked well, also no hard feelings from applicants.
Thanks for invitation to move to Florida, I guess link is missing with employment opportunity, so potential seos experts can apply.
Good luck Bryan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Viral Marketing SEO Question: If you build a truly great piece of content, what are the best ways to seed it?
There are a few techniques you can use to spread out and get your content out there.
Moz Pro | | shoobi
1. Email bloggers and tell them about your content
2. Share it on bookmarking sites (like Reddit)
3. Contact influential Twitter and Facebook profiles about it
4. Make it easy for visitors to share your infographic with an embed code at the bottom
5. Share it on infographic websites (like https://www.prizebondtime.com)
6. Share it with your email subscribers (if you have an email subscriber list)
7. Post it on your blog, Facebook page, Twitter, etc. Basically everywhere. The name of the game here is to get your content out in front of as many eyeballs you can as possible. Then after that, it's up to how good your content is to begin the viral loop.0 -
How to do an SEO audit
Hi all, I am new to SEO at my company and I would like to complete a SEO audit. As a beginner, I am unsure as the depth to go in to this. A template for such an audit would be amazing! Can this be done without much technical help from the development team is the main question. They often seem stretched with current projects. I'd love to be able to show through the audit the state of our current SEO and then prioritize changes based on data. Some practical tips and suggestions on tools is greatly appreciated because through measuring the correct data, I will be able to put a case of which areas of our SEO needs work on. I really hope you can help me with this! Thanks,
Moz Pro | | Eric_S
Eric1 -
Local SEO does not rank well
Hello everybody, before 3 months i began seo in gialia.net.gr. Its an eshop based on symfony framework. We started with on-page seo optimization and after making links in directories, forums and article directories. After 2 months we saw rankings for niche keywords (γυαλια ηλιου, γυαλια ηλιου προσφορες) at 5th and 8th page of google.gr. Now, the rankings does down and i cannot unserstand the reason. I checked old backlinks with opensite explorer, and found some spam backlinks links (3/10). Is this the reason that seo not going well? I am very dissapointed and i would like to tell me you opinion about what is going wrong with that site. My customer owns one more domain, fotispapoulias.gr and i am thinking to move all the site that is running on gialia.net.gr to fotispapoulias.gr (301 redirect to all links). The fotispapoulias.gr ranks better in the same niche keywords without seo. Is it good idea? Will achieve better rankings or not? Thanks
Moz Pro | | simplewebsol0 -
Using Premium SEO Pack – Wordpress Plugin
Hello Im Using Premium SEO Pack – Wordpress Plugin and the plugin in a way tell me what i need to fix so my website get better ranking in SEO, but here in moz im getting an F when i rate my website Moz ask me to fix things that i already fix with the plugin http://imgur.com/bKdHhWL http://imgur.com/1sP0Jm0,bKdHhWL,0XvEPyY#2 what im doing wrong? 1sP0Jm0
Moz Pro | | dawgroup0 -
Will Moving Categories Affect SEO
I recently designed a new website to replace an old site. We managed to hold 90% ranking and traffic by keeping the same URS's and content. Now that we have completed that we are now updating the whole site. It is an commerce website. Some of the items we were selling we are getting from a new vendor. If I move these products from one one vendor to another will this affect SEO? Here is an example. I have a product called "Green Zipper Sweater". This product is Anchored via Manufacturer and Category. The URL and Title Tag are green-zipper-sweater. If the Sweater was made by "Nike Green Sweaters" and our new supplier is "Gap Yellow and Green Sweaters". If I change the the Manufacturer and now put it under "Gap Green and Yellow Sweaters" will this affect my ranking. We are continuing to stock products from the original supplier "Nike Green Sweaters" and we have an aggressive SEO plan and are ranking very well for "Nike Green Sweaters". We also have good product ranking so "Green Zipper Sweater" brings us a lot of traffic. I want to be sure I do not loose ranking for the product page "Green Zipper Sweater" and the Brand "Nike Green Sweaters" Any advice would be appreciated.
Moz Pro | | robbieire0 -
Can I see when SEO Moz has crawled my website?
I would like to know if it's possible to see (maybe in my Google Analytics) if SEO Moz has crawled my website. I'm also curious if and where I can see when the robot of Google visited my website. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Spotler0 -
One Follow Link from each subdomain/domain best for SEO?
Hi there, we have a lot of customers linking to our homepage from a subdomain of our domain or from an external domain. From SEO point of view is it best that they all only have one DoFollow Link and the rest of the links are NoFollow? Or does this have no matter at all? The problem is that we have like 900.000 links but only from round about 1000 different root domains. If we put like half of the links on NoFollow our ratio of links/ different root domains gets better. Thanks for answering! Sebastian
Moz Pro | | Sebastian230 -
Conflicting Data with Open Site Explorer & SEO Moz Toolbar
Hi there, Why is my SEOmoz toolbar showing me higher linking root domains than open site explorer? For example, for this site: http://thisisouryear.com/, the linking root domains in SEOMOZ show 1,015 and in open site explorer it says it has 35. I have noticed this for other sites as well. Which one is right? And why are they different?
Moz Pro | | qlkasdjfw1