Answering 'have you worked on SEO?' in an interview

What the question is actually testing

Nobody asks "have you worked on SEO?" expecting yes or no. They're testing three things, and none is your knowledge of ranking factors.

First, whether you can describe cause and effect. SEO attracts people who were standing nearby when something improved and aren't sure why. The interviewer wants to know if you can separate what you did from what happened around you.

Second, whether you'll overclaim. The fastest way to lose a senior interviewer is a number you can't source.

Third, whether you're pleasant to correct. Most SEO work is being wrong on Tuesday and adjusting by Thursday, so a candidate who describes a mistake calmly interviews far better than one whose every project succeeded.

The 90-second structure

Five beats. Practise it out loud twice and it stops sounding rehearsed. The timings are a guide — the ratio is the point.

Script 1 — you have no professional experience

Lead with the truth. Inflating a college assignment into client work fails on the second follow-up. The script, with your details in brackets:

• "Not professionally — I'll be straight about that. What I have done is run my own site since [month]. Twelve pages about [topic], all mine."
• "The constraint was no audience and no links, so I targeted queries where the top ten was weak — old forum threads, posts that dodged the question."
• "I set up Search Console on day one and screenshotted the empty graph, so I have a real baseline. Then a pillar page, a cluster, internal links done properly."
• "Between [month] and [month] those pages went from zero to about [N] impressions a week, and I'm on page one for [exact query]. You can check it."
• "What I got wrong was indexing. Twenty pages published, twelve indexed, for two months — a stray robots.txt rule. I found it in the Pages report and now I check indexation before publishing."

Script 2 — a side project or your own site

Stronger ground than most candidates realise. On a site you own outright you made every decision and can explain every one. Lean into the constraint, too: four hours a week is a good story, because prioritising under scarcity is the skill being hired.

1. Scope: "I run [site], a [topic] site doing roughly [N] visits a month from search. Every decision on it is mine, including the bad ones."
2. Constraint: "Four hours a week, no budget past hosting. That forced me to be selective rather than thorough."
3. What you did: "The biggest change was consolidation. I had [N] pages competing for one query, so none ranked. I merged them, redirected the rest and rewrote the survivor to answer the question."
4. What moved: "Clicks on that cluster went from [x] to [y] between [month] and [month], average position from [x] to [y]. Search Console, not an estimate."
5. What you'd change: "I'd fix the technical problems first. I spent six weeks writing on a site that couldn't index new pages."

Script 3 — you worked on a team

The failure mode here is the opposite of script 1: claiming the team's number as your own. Every interviewer listens for it. Be specific about your slice and generous about everyone else's — it reads as senior, not modest.

• "I was one of four on a [industry] account — a strategist, a technical SEO, a writer and me. I owned on-page and internal linking for [section]."
• "The constraint was engineering time. Their dev team shipped one template change a quarter, so we front-loaded everything doable inside the CMS."
• "Over two quarters that section went from [x] to [y] non-brand clicks a month. I can't claim that whole number — the technical fix in month one probably did more than my content work."
• "My part was [x]: I rebuilt internal linking across [N] pages and rewrote the [N] titles with impressions but no clicks. That's where I'd start again."
• "What I'd change: I didn't push hard enough for the second template fix. I'd make the case in rupees next time."

Numbers to cite, and numbers to avoid

One credible number beats four impressive ones. Every figure should survive "where did that come from?"

The follow-ups that come next

A good ninety-second answer buys you the rest of the interview. These follow it near-universally.

1. "How do you know it was your work and not seasonality or a core update?" Honesty wins: often you can't be certain, but here's how you'd narrow it — compare unaffected sections, check dates against known rollouts, see if competitors moved.
2. "Where exactly did that number come from?" Name the tool, the report, the date range. Hesitation undoes everything before it.
3. "What would you do with ten times the budget?" Testing prioritisation, not ambition. "More content" scores badly; naming the constraint you'd remove scores well.
4. "What didn't work?" Have a second failure ready. The one you volunteered doesn't count twice.
5. "How would you approach our site?" The question that decides it. Spend twenty minutes beforehand: a site: search to sanity-check indexation, a skim of their titles, one page through PageSpeed Insights. Arrive with one specific, non-insulting observation. Almost nobody does, and it beats any rehearsed line about what the daily job involves.