How to avoid 11 common SEO interview mistakes and land your next job 

Over the past decade, I’ve reviewed hundreds of resumes, conducted countless interviews, and led numerous technical tests for SEO candidates. 

Along the way, I’ve met many exceptional professionals — but I’ve also noticed a recurring pattern of common interview mistakes that can hold even the most talented candidates back.

Below are 11 common mistakes I’ve observed in SEO interviews — and how you can easily avoid them.

1. Projecting arrogance instead of confidence 

Confidence is great! While imposter syndrome is common in SEO, it’s important to maintain realistic confidence in your skills and experience. However, there is a fine line between projecting confidence and appearing arrogant. 

For example, talk about your successes, such as:

• Complicated projects you navigated.
• Great results you achieved.
• Buy-in you gained. 

Be clear about what you achieved and how. Show off your theoretical knowledge. Discuss ideas and theories with your interviewer. 

Don’t assume they will agree with you, though. This can be arrogance.

SEO isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” practice. You may have different experiences from your interviewer, leading to different conclusions. This is fine. It happens in SEO all the time.

Some people make the mistake of thinking it’s OK to argue and dismiss others’ opinions. This rarely works well in any workplace and can be especially harmful during an interview.

When I interview, I look for team players — confident in their knowledge yet humble and open to learning. They embrace new evidence and contribute to discussions that elevate the entire team’s understanding, including their own.

If you stray too far into arrogance during an interview, you may come across as difficult to teach or lead and not open to feedback.

2. Giving hazy details about projects and successes

Interviews are your time to shine. They let you showcase some of your best work. Another mistake I’ve seen in interviews is assuming interviewers can fill in the gaps.

Candidates talk about a project or website they have worked on, but fail to convey its significance. They mention website migrations, expecting non-SEO interviewers to understand the complexities involved. They discuss turning around a traffic slump without giving any data. Avoid this. 

Make sure to give the specifics. There’s a good acronym for constructing interview answers called STAR. It stands for:

• Situation: What was the issue or opportunity you were facing?
• Task: What was your role or responsibility in this and the goal you were working toward?
• Action: What did you do to address the situation?
• Result: What happened because of your actions? What successes, learnings, or results can you share?

Using this method, you may find it easier to hit all the salient points that give the interviewers clarity and perspective. Try to choose examples that have an outcome that you’re proud of or can at least explain what made it fall short.

Dig deeper: How to become exceptional at SEO

3. Ignoring the question

Candidates sometimes don’t have time to think of an answer to the question or feel they don’t have one. They try to talk around the question and bring it back to something they feel more comfortable discussing.

If an interviewer asks, “Talk about a time when you faced a complex website migration and what you did?” or “How would you handle a stakeholder not signing off on your recommendations?” that’s exactly what they want to know. 

Avoid going off on a tangent and ensure you address the question directly. Often, interviewers have a list of questions they ask each candidate.

They may even use these to compare candidates. If you’re not directly answering them, you put yourself at a disadvantage.

Instead, take some time to think about the answer. Explain that you want to answer well and need a minute to organize your thoughts. If you don’t have an experience relevant to a question or have not encountered something before, explain that to the interviewer. 

Tell them you haven’t “migrated a website before,” but mention what you would do in that situation. If you make something up, passing it off as a situation you faced, you risk being exposed. 

You may be asked for details you can’t provide, or you may realize that a savvy interviewer has been researching the company or website as you talk about it. 

4. Not addressing your audience well

Building rapport with interviewers is key to a successful interview. Answer their questions clearly so they can recognize your knowledge and experience.

To do that well, you need to understand your audience. You should address their questions using the language and tone they are using and gauge their level of SEO knowledge. 

It may be tempting to impress non-SEO stakeholders with industry jargon, but if they don’t know what it means, they won’t understand the impact of what you’ve done.

Similarly, if you’re being interviewed by the head of SEO, relying on jargon or complex-sounding projects without substance can risk being seen as insincere or unqualified.

5. Being disrespectful of the progress of the site(s)

If you are talking to another SEO at the company or agency, don’t assume they are negligent in not addressing that JavaScript issue you’ve noticed on their site. 

Don’t think their SEO approach is basic; there is still an obvious area for expansion. Be respectful. It’s OK to acknowledge that you noticed these issues with their sites, but assume you aren’t telling them anything they don’t already know.

Chances are, some procedural or technical blocks are stopping them from fixing it. Enquire about that instead. It will give you some insight into what challenges you may face if you do go on to work there. 

Dig deeper: What 15 years in enterprise SEO taught me about people, power, and progress

6. Being unprepared for the types of questions asked

Interviews are nerve-wracking. It’s understandable if your mind goes blank when asked to share specific examples of your work or knowledge.

One of the most frustrating mistakes I see in interviews (and have made myself!) is forgetting the details of the perfect example of a project that would have answered an interviewer’s question.

A good way to avoid this is to come prepared with projects or challenges that exemplify some core areas of SEO that you are likely to face in the role. Look at the job listing again and see what experience they hope candidates will have. 

Given the scope, seniority, and complexity of the sites, consider the situations and tasks you may face in that role. For example, if you are interviewing for a senior technical SEO role, you may want to prepare examples of projects you’ve worked on that included:

• A challenging crawling, indexing, parsing, or rendering issue.
• A large, complicated technical SEO project that you needed to gain buy-in from stakeholders for.
• A sudden drop in traffic or rankings that needed investigation.
• A website migration that you had a leading role in.

If you’re interviewing for an SEO account manager at an agency, you may want to prepare for times when:

• You had to explain to stakeholders the drop in performance and the planned remedial action.
• Present an SEO proposal to a group of people with varying SEO literacy and explain how you helped them get on board with the plan.
• You presented at a client pitch, the work you put into the pitch, and how you onboarded that client.

Come prepared with example projects you can adapt. 

• Think of a successful project and how you made it work. 
• Give an example of an unsuccessful project and what you would do differently. 

This may mean writing notes about these projects and key points, such as tasks and results, to jog your memory. Essentially, you want to have a few well-detailed and thought-out examples that you can adapt using the STAR method on the fly at the interview.

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7. All talk, no substance

Waffle. Meandering. Stalling for time out loud. Whatever you want to call it, this is possibly one of the most common mistakes I’ve seen in interviews. Starting to answer the question before knowing what you are going to say. 

Again, it’s understandable. We feel like we need to answer the question as soon as it is asked. In reality, though, it’s OK to take some time to think it through first. 

Listen to the question and address that directly. Consider it a school assignment where you get a mark for every point you hit. Structure your answers clearly to help interviewers find the information they’re looking for.

Sometimes the waffling comes from a poorly asked question. Perhaps it isn’t entirely clear what the interviewer is asking. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to answer a question you don’t fully understand.

It’s OK to ask clarifying questions. If you still don’t have an answer, you can explain that it isn’t something you have encountered or even heard of. However, this gives you something to go away and look into.

You could even ask the interviewers what they think about the topic or what they would do in the situation you mentioned. Most interviewers seek team members who are willing to learn and expand their knowledge.

In the best case, they will see your willingness to learn and grow from others around you. Worst case, you have another side of SEO or interviewing techniques to study for the next role you apply for.

8. Trying to bribe or threaten interviewers

This should go without saying, but I’ve encountered it in interviews before. 

• Don’t threaten or try to bribe your interviewers. It’s highly unlikely that if an interview is going badly, the promise of a link from your friend’s blog to their company’s website will turn it around. 
• Don’t promise them that if they hire you, they will get access to the secrets to your “guaranteed SEO approach” if you have not been able to demonstrate your competency through the questions they’ve asked. 
• Don’t threaten a negative SEO attack on them or their competitors. 
• Avoid suggesting they only wanted to interview you to steal your ideas. 
• Don’t be rude or dishonest. You won’t get the job, and you won’t be kept in the database of possible future candidates.

9. Contacting everyone in the company to get an ‘in’

Another mistake I’ve seen is a candidate getting too enthusiastic about standing out from the crowd.  In doing so, they contact anyone in the company they can to make themselves known.

It’s great to show that you are interested in the company and the role. If the interviewers have said it’s OK for you to contact them after the interview, it is absolutely fine. 

However, be considerate when contacting interviewers outside the interview process. It may come across as keen, but do it too much, and it can become difficult for people to respond, especially if they aren’t directly involved in the interviewing process.

Follow up sparingly and with the right people, but be mindful of how busy interviewers are when running hiring processes. Your keen attitude may be too much if it’s not appropriate. 

10. Being dishonest about your level of involvement in the project

Be truthful about your level of involvement in a project. Don’t claim you worked on a project just because it happened at your agency at the same time you were working there. 

As soon as interviewers start asking in-depth questions about the project, your lack of knowledge will be apparent. Instead of it sounding impressive, you’ll come across as lacking knowledge and depth in your answer.

Focus your answers on the impact that you had on a project. Talk to what others did and how it fit into the whole approach, but don’t take credit for their work. This is important because interviewers want to know where your competencies lie. 

It’s OK to talk about what you learned from others during the project and how you might use that insight in future work. It isn’t OK to claim that it was your idea when it wasn’t. 

Dig deeper: 8 tips for SEO newbies

11. Giving ‘Google lies’ as an answer to an interview question

This is an SEO-specific interview mistake. Unfortunately, it’s quite common. I see it often during technical portions of interviews. When candidates are asked to think through how they would approach a situation, or explain why an approach may not work.

They don’t necessarily know why Google ignored a canonical tag. Or why a page that is blocked in the robots.txt is still indexed. So they panic and start blaming Google for lying about its practices and bot behavior.

I’ve heard a lot of sweeping statements during interviews about how you can’t believe Google spokespeople. How they outright lie to us to disguise how the bot and algorithm mechanisms work. Whether you agree with those statements or not, they are a poor way to get around not knowing the answer to a technical question.

If you don’t know why a page has been indexed even though it is blocked in the robots.txt, the answer isn’t to claim “Google ignores the robots.txt and just says they don’t.”

Yes, the SEO world is full of conspiracy theories and genuine questions about the integrity of the industry’s larger players. It’s good to question the status quo through experiments and thought exercises. 

However, the better way to approach an interview question like that would be to think around the issue. Let’s assume Google isn’t lying — what could be the reasons the page has been indexed despite being blocked in the robots.txt? 

If you start your interview answers from a place of assuming there is a logical answer to them, you are more likely to get to the right conclusions. This is a much better way of approaching SEO in general, rather than assuming you’re being lied to!

Ace your SEO interview and leave a lasting impression

By avoiding these common mistakes, you can present yourself as a confident, prepared, and team-oriented candidate. With the right approach, you’ll be better positioned to impress interviewers and land your next SEO role.

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