About the SEO Manager role
An SEO Manager owns a company's organic search performance. They set the SEO strategy, run keyword and competitor research, guide content teams on what to create, fix technical issues that hold rankings back, and report on how organic traffic converts into pipeline or revenue. The role sits at the intersection of content, engineering, and analytics.
The shape of the role depends on your site. E-commerce SEO leans heavily on technical work at scale: crawl budgets, faceted navigation, and product page templates. B2B SaaS SEO leans on content strategy and topical authority. Some SEO Managers are hands-on individual contributors, while others manage writers or agencies. Say which one you need.
Good candidates will want to know your starting point, so include it: current organic traffic ballpark, the CMS and tech stack, whether engineering time is available for technical fixes, and who produces content. Search evolves constantly, including how AI-generated answers reshape results pages, so look for people who show how they adapt, not just what worked in 2020.
SEO Manager job description template
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Job brief
We are hiring an SEO Manager to own how we perform in organic search. You will set the strategy, do the keyword and competitor work behind it, direct what gets written, find and fix the technical problems holding us back, and report on what it all returns.
This suits somebody comfortable arguing for engineering time with evidence, briefing writers well enough that they do not need rewriting, and honest about which gains came from the work and which came from the market.
Responsibilities
- Define and own the SEO strategy and quarterly roadmap
- Conduct keyword research and map keywords to new and existing pages
- Plan the content calendar with writers and brief each piece for search intent
- Run technical SEO audits covering crawlability, indexation, site speed, and structured data
- Prioritize technical fixes and work with engineering to ship them
- Optimize existing pages: titles, internal linking, content refreshes, and on-page structure
- Monitor rankings, traffic, and conversions in Google Search Console and Google Analytics
- Analyze competitor strategies and identify content and link gaps
- Develop white-hat link acquisition through digital PR, partnerships, and linkable assets
- Report monthly on organic performance against traffic and pipeline targets
- Track algorithm updates and search trends, including AI-driven search features, and adapt strategy
Requirements and skills
- Has owned organic search for a site, as a manager or a senior specialist
- Can walk through traffic they grew and explain what caused it
- Fluent in Search Console, analytics, and a major SEO platform
- Solid technically: crawling, indexation, redirects, structured data, page performance
- Briefs or edits content against search intent rather than keyword lists
- Knows enough HTML and enough about content platforms to spot the constraint
- Builds a report and a forecast that a non-specialist can act on
- Writes clearly, since briefs and audits are most of the output
Nice to have
- Experience with international or multilingual SEO
- Basic scripting or SQL skills for large-scale analysis
- Digital PR or link building campaign experience
- Experience adapting SEO strategy for AI-generated search results and answer engines
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