How to assess · For hiring teams
How to Assess SEO Skills When Hiring
The test formats that actually work for SEO, what a strong answer looks like, sample questions and a scoring rubric you can use as-is.
The short answer
Assess SEO with a task, not a conversation: search console diagnosis, page review and brief, ai-scored assessment (e.g. cohesyve) or technical audit excerpt. Score it against written criteria you fix before you see any submissions, and weight the criteria that the role actually depends on.
- Diagnoses from data: crawl, index coverage, Search Console queries and pages, not from a checklist
- Judges search intent and knows which queries a page can realistically win
- Prioritises fixes and content by expected traffic and effort, not by tool severity
- Understands technical fundamentals — crawlability, rendering, canonicals, internal links — and their limits
Paste a job description; Cohesyve generates a role-specific assessment and rubric. Ten candidates free, no card.
SEO is a field where confident claims outnumber verifiable ones, and where a candidate's past results may owe more to the brand they worked on than to anything they did. The skill worth testing is judgement: which pages to build, what to fix first, how to tell a real ranking problem from noise, and how to prioritise when everything could be improved. This page covers how to assess SEO for SEO specialist, content and growth roles: technical diagnosis, keyword and intent judgement, content strategy, and measurement that separates cause from coincidence.
Why SEO is worth testing
Bad SEO is slow and expensive to detect: months of content that never ranks, technical fixes that changed nothing, and reports of impressions with no traffic. Testing with real data — a site's Search Console export, a crawl, a page — shows whether a candidate diagnoses correctly and prioritises by impact, and that predicts organic growth far better than a list of past employers.
What strong SEO looks like
- Diagnoses from data: crawl, index coverage, Search Console queries and pages, not from a checklist
- Judges search intent and knows which queries a page can realistically win
- Prioritises fixes and content by expected traffic and effort, not by tool severity
- Understands technical fundamentals — crawlability, rendering, canonicals, internal links — and their limits
- Writes briefs that produce content able to rank and satisfy the query
- Measures with rankings, clicks and conversions, and separates seasonality and algorithm shifts from their own work
- Is honest about what SEO cannot do quickly
Ways to assess SEO
Search Console diagnosis
Provide an anonymised export: pages with high impressions and near-zero clicks, a page-one ranking with no traffic, a cluster of near-duplicate queries across several thin pages. Ask what is happening and what they would do first. Sixty minutes.
Pros
Cons
Best for Any SEO role.
Page review and brief
Give a target query and an underperforming page. Ask for the diagnosis and a rewrite brief.
Pros
Cons
Best for Content-focused roles.
AI-scored assessment (e.g. Cohesyve)
Generate a SEO task from the job description — a Search Console diagnosis, a page-and-query brief, a prioritisation exercise — with a rubric. Each candidate receives a different variant; the work and the reasoning behind it are scored together.
Pros
Cons
Best for Screening an applicant pool fairly before interview time is spent.
Technical audit excerpt
Provide crawl output with planted issues — canonical loops, blocked resources, orphaned pages, a client-rendered section — and ask what matters.
Pros
Cons
Best for Technical SEO roles.
Cohesyve
Run a SEO assessment on your next opening
Cohesyve generates a unique SEO task per candidate from your job description, with the scoring rubric attached. Questions are different for every applicant, so they cannot be shared or looked up.
What to test
Diagnosis
Whether they find the real cause.
Intent and keyword judgement
Whether they pick winnable, valuable queries.
Technical fundamentals
Whether the site can be crawled and understood.
Strategy and measurement
Whether effort produces traffic.
Sample SEO questions
A page ranks third for its target query and gets almost no clicks. What are the likely causes?
EntryLook for Title and snippet not matching intent, competing SERP features, the query being navigational; checks the SERP before touching the page.
What is search intent, and why does it matter more than volume?
EntryLook for What the searcher wants to do; a page that does not match will not rank or convert regardless of volume.
Forty near-duplicate queries land on five thin pages, all on page two. What do you do?
MidLook for Consolidate into one strong page, canonicalise or redirect the others, strengthen internal links.
Organic traffic dropped 25% last month. How do you find out why?
MidLook for Check for algorithm updates, seasonality, tracking changes, index coverage, specific page losses; do not assume a penalty.
You have budget for ten pieces of content. How do you choose them?
SeniorLook for Intent aligned with the business, winnable difficulty, gaps in existing coverage, expected value; not volume alone.
Red flags
- Reports impressions as success
- Prioritises by tool severity scores
- Cannot explain why a page ranks or does not
- Chases volume without intent
- Promises quick results
Scoring rubric
| Criterion | Weight | What strong looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Diagnosis | 30% | Finds real causes from data. |
| Intent judgement | 25% | Picks winnable, valuable queries. |
| Technical understanding | 20% | Fundamentals understood with limits. |
| Prioritisation and measurement | 25% | Effort goes where traffic follows; results are measured honestly. |
Mistakes hiring teams make
- Hiring on past traffic numbers without knowing the cause
- Testing tool knowledge instead of diagnosis
- Not using real-shaped Search Console data
- Rewarding volume-chasing
- Skipping the "traffic dropped" question
Roles that need SEO
Common questions
Should I give candidates our real Search Console data?
An anonymised export with the interesting patterns preserved works well and is the most realistic test available. Remove anything commercially sensitive.
What is the best single SEO question?
Show a page-one ranking with no clicks and ask why. Diagnosis instinct and SERP awareness show at once.
How long should an SEO assessment take?
Sixty minutes for a diagnosis exercise; forty-five for a page review and brief.
How do I verify a candidate's past results?
Ask what they did, why it worked, and what else changed at the time. Honest candidates can separate their contribution from the brand and the market.
Cohesyve · Skill assessments for hiring
Test SEO before the first interview
Generate a role-specific SEO assessment from your job description and see who can do the work before you spend interview time on them.
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90%
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