SEO Lead

The SEO Lead is a senior individual contributor and team leader responsible for driving organic growth across client and internal projects at Rivulet IQ. You will own SEO strategy and execution across your own project portfolio while simultaneously leading, mentoring, and quality-assuring the work of the broader SEO team.

This is a hands-on leadership role — you are not stepping away from execution to manage. You are expected to remain deeply embedded in your own projects, set the technical and strategic standard for the team, and ensure every engagement we deliver is consistent, high-quality, and results-driven.

The ideal candidate is equally comfortable diving into a technical audit, building a content strategy, reviewing a team member’s deliverable, and representing SEO in a cross-functional planning discussion.

Key Responsibilities

1. Own Your Projects — End to End

• Independently manage a portfolio of client SEO accounts — from onboarding and audit through strategy, execution, and reporting.
• Develop customized SEO strategies aligned to each client’s business objectives, competitive landscape, and content capacity.
• Conduct comprehensive audits covering technical SEO, on-page, content, and off-page factors — and translate findings into clear, prioritized action plans.
• Lead SEO planning for website launches, redesigns, and migrations — ensuring rankings and indexing are protected throughout.
• Take full ownership of outcomes on your accounts: traffic growth, ranking improvements, and organic conversion performance.

2. Lead and Elevate the SEO Team

• Lead, mentor, and develop junior and mid-level SEO team members — building capability, not dependency.
• Review team deliverables (audits, briefs, reports, strategy documents) before they go to clients — ensuring accuracy, quality, and consistency with our standards.
• Assign work across team members based on capacity and skill, and step in on complex or high-stakes tasks where additional expertise is needed.
• Run structured team check-ins to track progress, unblock issues, and share learnings across accounts.
• Support team members in developing their own client communication and strategic thinking skills over time.

3. Technical SEO — Execution and Oversight

• Identify and resolve crawlability, indexation, redirect, schema, and site architecture issues across your own and team-managed accounts.
• Optimize Core Web Vitals, page speed, and mobile performance — and guide team members through similar technical work on their accounts.
• Collaborate with the development team to implement SEO recommendations correctly and on schedule.
• Maintain a high standard of technical SEO health monitoring across all active engagements using tools like Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs.
• Serve as the internal technical escalation point — when team members hit a complex technical problem, you are the person they come to.

4. Content & On-Page Strategy

• Build keyword-focused content strategies and detailed content briefs for your own accounts and review those produced by team members.
• Conduct keyword research, intent mapping, topic clustering, and competitor gap analysis — and ensure your team applies the same rigour on their accounts.
• Optimize meta tags, heading structure, internal linking, and page architecture across client sites.
• Work closely with content writers and designers to ensure SEO requirements are embedded from the brief stage — not patched in after.
• Conduct content gap analyses and proactively identify opportunities to improve organic visibility and topical authority.

5. Analytics, Reporting & Client Communication

• Track and report on organic traffic, keyword rankings, conversions, and engagement metrics across your portfolio.
• Produce structured, insight-driven performance reports — not just data exports, but clear narratives that connect SEO activity to business outcomes.
• Review and quality-check reports produced by team members before they are shared with clients or internal stakeholders.
• Participate in client calls and strategic planning discussions, representing the SEO function with clarity and confidence.
• Proactively flag risks, opportunities, and algorithm-related impacts to clients before they are asked.

6. AI-Driven SEO & Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

• Lead AI-powered SEO initiatives — including optimization for AI search surfaces such as Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT-referenced content.
• Develop and implement AEO strategies: structured data, entity optimization, FAQ and schema markup, and content structured for featured snippets and direct answers.
• Use AI tools for keyword clustering, content optimization, gap analysis, and reporting efficiency — and introduce the team to effective, responsible use of these tools.
• Stay ahead of algorithm updates, AI search developments, and emerging SEO practices — and bring relevant insights back to the team in a usable format.

7. Cross-Team Collaboration

• Work with the development team on technical implementation — communicating SEO requirements clearly in developer-friendly language.
• Collaborate with designers to ensure UX decisions do not compromise SEO — especially on site architecture, pagination, and content hierarchy.
• Coordinate with Project Managers to ensure SEO tasks are properly scoped, scheduled, and tracked within project timelines.
• Partner with Account Managers and the US team on client strategy discussions, scope conversations, and escalations.

8. Process Standards & Documentation

• Develop and maintain SEO SOPs, checklists, and workflow documentation — covering audits, reporting, content briefs, and technical implementation handoffs.
• Identify process inefficiencies and introduce improvements or automation opportunities that increase team output without compromising quality.
• Drive knowledge sharing within the team — ensuring learnings from one account benefit the work across all accounts.
• Build and maintain an internal library of templates, frameworks, and best practice guides that the wider team can draw on.

Desired Skills & Experience

• 6+ years of hands-on SEO experience with a track record of measurable organic growth across multiple client accounts.
• 2+ years in a lead or senior role, reviewing others’ work, setting standards, and mentoring junior team members.
• Agency background preferred — managing clients across different industries, business sizes, and CMS platforms simultaneously.
• Strong technical SEO fundamentals: crawl budget, indexation control, canonical handling, redirect mapping, hreflang, schema, and site architecture.
• Proficient with Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Looker Studio.
• Ability to read HTML source and structured data outputs to identify implementation errors and communicate precise fixes to developers.
• JavaScript SEO awareness — understanding how rendering affects crawlability and indexation on JS-heavy sites.
• WordPress SEO experience — Yoast / RankMath configuration, plugin conflicts, and CMS-level technical issues.
• Shopify SEO experience — collection and product page structure, canonical issues, and platform constraints.
• Familiarity with at least one additional CMS (Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, or custom builds).
• Experience working with international clients, particularly US-based accounts.

Nice to Have

• International and multi-language SEO — hreflang, regional targeting, and market-specific keyword strategies.
• Large-scale site migration experience (100,000+ pages) — pre-migration audits, redirect mapping, and post-launch monitoring.
• Understanding of CRO and UX principles as they relate to organic landing page performance.
• Log file analysis for advanced crawl behaviour diagnosis.
• SEO certifications (Ahrefs Academy, SEMrush, Google Analytics, or similar).