For the marketing director or manager in hiring mode, we've compiled a list of high-level interview questions for paid search, organic search, social media and content specialists. We hope you find them helpful in identifying qualified candidates in each digital marketing specialty.

• 25 PPC Interview Questions
• 30 SEO Interview Questions
• 15 Social Media Manager Interview Questions
• 15 Content Writer Interview Questions

When you search, do you find exactly what you’re looking for the first time?

Have you ever used advanced search filters to find everything the engine knows about a specific subject or website, efficiently?

If not, it’s time to raise your search skills. Advanced search engine operators for Google, Bing and Yahoo let you filter results from the search engine results in order to do SEO research or to shortcut to the result you're looking for.

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Verizon has emerged victorious after months of behind-closed-doors negotiations.

The telecommunications company has acquired Yahoo’s operating business for $4.83 billion in cash. Expected to close in early 2017, after shareholder and regulatory approval, the deal means Verizon will have both Yahoo and previously acquired AOL in its hands.

The joined forces of Verizon + AOL + Yahoo may be a boon for marketers. Verizon will control one of the largest digital media portfolios in the world, accounting for approximately 5 percent of digital ad revenues globally. And then there’s the consumer reach. With Yahoo, Verizon’s reach will exceed a billion monthly active users, with “a 2020 goal to get to two billion users overall,” according to a statement this week by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.

The assets are in place, then, for Verizon-AOL-Yahoo to take on Google and Facebook and give more competitive options for marketers. But as Adam Berke, president and CMO of AdRoll, observed, the new conglomerate’s success largely depends on execution.

In 1999, the year after Google's launch, Bruce started an SEO training course. Since then, more than 5,000 individuals have attended BCI's courses internationally.

The course is designed to lay the foundations of search engine optimization ━ how search engines determine relevance and rank, and what businesses should do to improve their site for greater visibility in search results.

Those who attend the course range in job roles including:

• Small and mid-sized business owners
• Marketing managers overseeing SEO
• IT professionals and web designers working to enhance search engine accessibility
• Novice online marketers requiring best practices
• Advanced search engine optimization specialists seeking updates

There are two training opportunities with Bruce Clay in September:

• One-day SEO workshop at SMX East on Sept. 26
• SEOToolSet Training in Southern California Sept. 12⎼16

Build your SEO foundation with face-to-face training from industry's most prolific educator.

Sign up today for the SEO training workshop in New York or the three or five day courses in California!

Google has acquired Anvato, a platform for encoding, editing, publishing and distributing video. Anvato will join Google's Cloud Platform team.

Matt Cutts has signed on to help the U.S. Defense Digital Service department at the Pentagon for the "next few months." Per his blog announcement, Cutts will be moving temporarily to the Washington, D.C. area. Cutts has been on leave since July 2014 from Google, where he served for many years as head of the webspam team and popular spokesman to the marketing community.

Now Hiring

We're hiring in Southern California and New Delhi! In our Simi Valley, CA, headquarters, we're looking for a stellar SEM Manager to join our team. Bruce Clay India is hiring for an experienced SEO Manager, Senior Sales Executive and Account Manager. Get in touch if this is you!

Beyond the shindigs we highlight below, you can find hundreds of SEO, content marketing, paid search and social media marketing events happening around the world in our updated Digital Marketing Conference Calendar.

Blogher comes ​to Los Angeles Aug. 4–6. This niche conference focuses on women working online.

Want to take over the world? The World Domination Summit takes place in Portland Aug. 11–15.

Calling all social media marketers: Social Fresh is happening in Orlando Aug. 18​ and 19. Dive into hashtags, influencer marketing, and social media metrics!

Take your lead generation to the next level at LeadsCon in New York on Aug. 22.

SMX East is happening Sept. 27–29 in New York, New York. You can register with a 10 percent discount on all passes and workshops, including Bruce Clay's one-day SEO ​Workshop on Sept. 26, using code SMXE16BRUCECLAY.

Like ​our newsletter? Enjoy the weekly digital marketing podcast SEM Synergy with host Bruce Clay. Here are the latest episodes available to stream online or download to your podcast app. Subscribe on iTunes to get new episodes sent straight to your mobile.

Search + Social = Love

Major traffic ahead! When you combine your SEO and social media efforts, you strengthen both. Bruce Clay, Inc.'s social media editor Kristi Kellogg talks search and social synergy with DragonSearch VP of SEO and SMM Jason White and The MMI Agency's head of social media, Maggie Malek. It’s a great show that dives into real-life client success stories, livestreaming video, conversion tracking and Snapchat hacks.

How SEOs Should Approach RankBrain

Bruce Clay, Duane Forrester, Virginia Nussey and Kristi Kellogg explore the implications of RankBrain. Is it possible to optimize search for RankBrain? They discuss the matter, as well as recent comments regarding RankBrain made by Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes.

Using Advanced Search Operators for SEO Research

Advanced search operators come in very handy when SEOs are researching a site, whether their own or a competitor's. With advanced search operators, you can more efficiently conduct research on your own site as well as competitors. Virginia Nussey, Kristi Kellogg, Paula Allen and John Alexander reveal their best hacks when it comes to using advanced search operators. Later in the show, you'll hear Kellogg's story on how she reduced Bruce Clay, Inc.'s Facebook Response Time to under five minutes — a feat any brand would want to accomplish for their own Facebook page.

The Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014 that raised money for ALS may have seemed like just a popular internet craze, but it has netted some real results. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School's Project MinE have discovered the gene that is responsible for ALS. The ALS Association donated $1 million to fund their research, one of many donations made with the money people around the world (including BCI!) raised by participating in that fun and icy challenge.

We're proud to announce that Bruce Clay, Inc. has earned Premier Google Partner status.

Expanded text ads are now live in the Google SERPs for Google AdWords ads. Current standard-length ads can run alongside the new double-headline, long-description ads for a while. October 26, 2016 is the last date advertisers will be able to create or upload standard text ads. Besides ETAs, two other features promised at the Google Performance Summit in May are also rolling out: the long-awaited ability to adjust bids by device type and native responsive display ads.

Google AdWords ads may appear with their headline truncated in the search results, cut off with an ellipsis at the end. While truncation is common for organic search results with too-long titles, it’s unusual for paid ads. Google recommended shortening ad headlines and using the Ad Preview tool to avoid the issue.

Local knowledge panels in Google can now include the amount of time “people typically spend” at a local business.

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes posted on Twitter that ”30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore.” Illyes’s tweet confirmed what fellow Googler John Mueller and others have said before, that Google does not reduce the PageRank value being transferred by a redirect, whether it’s a 301, 302 or other type.

There’s ”no ranking advantage to removing older content” according to John Mueller in a Google Webmaster Office Hours hangout. Mueller explained that you might consider trimming your site if you have “really terrible, old and crufty content” or so much old content that it’s affecting crawl rate. However, if the old content is quality, it’s not bad to keep it.

Bing now includes thumbnails in its autosuggest options. The autosuggest dropdown can show a small image next to an option to help the searcher identify the desired choice or disambiguate the possible meanings of the search term.

Snapchat introduced Memories, a new part of the app that lets you access photos, videos and stories you’ve saved to your camera roll and use them afresh. Going forward, Memories will let users save snaps on Snapchat’s servers, which represents a notable shift for this app known for its ephemeral content.

According to research by Merkle, AdWords advertisers are paying a significantly higher average cost-per-click (CPC) for branded keywords on phones — approximately 25 to 30 percent higher now than in early May. CPCs for tablets and desktop devices have held fairly steady by comparison.

The Obama administration is negotiating international data-sharing agreements that would enable foreign investigators to serve a warrant on a U.S. tech company in order to access data about foreign individuals, such as their stored emails or real-time messages, as long as the surveillance didn't involve U.S. citizens or residents. The agreements would also give U.S. investigators reciprocal authority to search data in other countries. The U.K. is reportedly the first country being considered for a data-sharing agreement.