Marketing & Content Topics
Marketing strategy, content marketing, campaign management, and digital marketing. Covers content strategy, campaign execution, and marketing analytics.
Content Audit and Optimization
Covers systematic approaches to auditing and optimizing content libraries and information assets. Candidates should be able to inventory content at scale, categorize items by performance relevance and strategic alignment, identify outdated or underperforming content, prioritize actions for updating repurposing or removing content, and link audit outcomes to measurable outcomes such as user engagement cost to maintain and conversion. This topic includes governance approaches tagging and taxonomy considerations and how audits inform broader content strategy and efficiency gains.
Balancing SEO Goals with Broader Marketing Objectives
Discuss situations where SEO priorities conflict with other marketing initiatives (performance marketing, social, brand campaigns). How do you navigate trade-offs? Share examples of creative solutions that served multiple goals.
Quantifiable SEO Business Results and Metrics
Specific, measurable outcomes from your SEO projects with business relevance. Examples: 'increased organic traffic by 250%', 'improved page 1 rankings for 150+ target keywords', 'grew organic-attributed revenue by $2M annually', 'reduced bounce rate by 35% through UX optimization', 'achieved 40% increase in organic conversions'. Have at least 2-3 solid examples with concrete numbers ready to share.
Competitive Positioning Through SEO
Using search optimization deliberately to create and defend competitive advantage in target markets. Candidates should describe approaches to competitive analysis such as share of voice rank gap and backlink gap studies how to identify high value and defensible keyword sets and content formats and how to craft differentiated content and product experiences that satisfy unmet user intent. The topic includes tactics to capture search features and branded queries through structured data content and earned media coordination ways to align SEO with product marketing localization and public relations and how to measure strategic impact using share of organic traffic conversion metrics and revenue attribution.
Competitive Analysis and Benchmarking
Covers frameworks and hands on techniques for researching, measuring, and benchmarking competitors using quantitative data and tools. Topics include identifying direct and indirect competitors, mapping channels and acquisition strategies, comparing product positioning and value propositions, and inferring growth and monetization metrics such as user counts, growth rates, ranking trends, retention signals, and revenue models. Practical skills include using SEO and market intelligence platforms and data sources such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SimilarWeb, Sensor Tower, and app store research; extracting competitor keyword and backlink strategies; analyzing content performance and search ranking features; triangulating multiple data sources; recognizing tool limitations and data quality issues; and translating analytical insights into prioritized strategic recommendations, experiments, and tracking metrics for growth and product decisions.
Website Audit & Technical SEO Assessment
Conduct a technical audit of a website to identify issues with crawlability, indexation, mobile optimization, site speed, structure, and canonicalization. Prioritize findings by impact and create actionable recommendations with implementation steps.
Structured Data and Schema Markup
Understanding and implementing structured data so search engines and external systems can better interpret page content. Covers common schema types such as Organization, Article, Product and LocalBusiness; implementation approaches including JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, microdata and Resource Description Framework in Attributes; practical details for embedding required and recommended properties, linking to canonical entities and avoiding misleading markup; tools and techniques for validating schema and testing rich result eligibility; and the distinction between semantic HTML for accessibility and structured data for machine readable content and search engine features.
Microsoft Search and Digital Presence
Knowledge of how Microsoft properties and products influence discoverability, traffic patterns, and the competitive landscape. Candidates should be able to describe the Microsoft search ecosystem including Bing and related surfaces, key differences in ranking signals and webmaster tooling versus other providers, how cloud services and collaboration platforms affect content distribution, privacy and user intent nuances on Microsoft owned channels, advertising and monetization considerations, and practical tactics to capture visibility and measure impact within the Microsoft ecosystem.
Search Engine Optimization
Covers organic search strategies and the technical and content practices that influence search engine rankings. Core topics include on page optimization such as keyword targeting, title tags, meta descriptions, structured content and content quality; off page optimization including backlink building, domain authority considerations, and outreach strategies; technical search fundamentals such as crawlability, indexability, site architecture, internal linking, canonicalization, sitemaps, page speed, and structured data; measurement and tooling including Google Search Console, log analysis, and organic traffic and ranking monitoring; and content strategy approaches that align user intent with search demand. Candidates may be evaluated on audit methodology, prioritization of fixes, how to measure impact, and how SEO and content teams collaborate with engineering and product.