How to interview a freelance search engine marketing specialist

Hiring a freelance search engine marketing is both cost effective and efficient. You don't need to pay for benefits and you can contract them and a project by project basis. 

To hire the right SEM expert you need to ask them 

Asking the right questions will help you filter all the candidates down to the expert few, then it's just a matter of choosing the one that best aligns with your core company values.

Here are 17 questions that'll help you gather invaluable insights about the capabilities of each SEM candidate.

1. Explain in your own terms, what Search Engine Marketing is.

2. What is the difference between search engine marketing and SEO? What are the key traits of each discipline and which one is suitable for which business model?

3. What is the importance of lead generation in Search Engine Marketing? How do you improve the quality of lead generation for a fresh and ongoing campaign?

3. What is PPC analysis? What tools do you use as a PPC analyst?

4. How do you decide on the final cost of a  PPC campaign?

5. Do you know about keywords? How do you conduct your keyword research? And how do you decide which keywords to target?

6. Are you familiar with A/B test? Have you ever run an A/B test on a campaign before? 

7. Describe your process for running an A/B test

8. Let’s say you observed an average position dropping week over week, what do you do?

9. What can you do to make our website more search engine friendly? How much of that has to do with Search Engine Marketing?

10. When do you think is the right time for a website to transition from Search Engine Marketing to SEO? 

11. Discuss some strategies commonly applied in Search Engine Marketing. How many of them have you used and what was your experience with each one? In your own experience, which one did you find most effective?

12. Describe some campaigns you have previously managed. What niche did each campaign belong to? How did you conduct your research for each campaign and how did it benefit those organizations?

13. You have observed how we operate; now how would you choose to change our operation to deliver our desired results? (Have them conduct research on your website and campaigns beforehand).

14. Describe a micro-moment in your own words. Also, what are the three most important components of a good search ad? What are some good PPC landing-page hallmarks?

15. Describe the importance of mobile and smartphones in the advertising domain of PPC?

16. Do you know CRO and have you implemented it before? Give us an example of a time you successfully implemented a CRO tactic.

17. What are your working hours and how often do you respond to messages? Are we ever going to have trouble with you being unavailable at our time of need?