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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Head of SEO

💰 $ - $

MarketingSEOLeadershipDigital

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an experienced, data-driven Head of SEO to define and lead our global organic search strategy. The Head of SEO will own search growth across channels and markets — combining technical SEO, content strategy, link acquisition, analytics, and cross-functional execution to drive sustainable organic traffic and revenue. This role requires strong leadership, stakeholder management, and hands-on expertise with SEO tools, site architecture, and search engine best practices.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior SEO Manager / SEO Lead
  • Head of Organic Growth / Organic Growth Manager
  • Technical SEO Manager or SEO Consultant with P&L/strategy experience

Advancement To:

  • VP of Marketing / VP of Organic Growth
  • Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)
  • Head of Growth / Director of Digital

Lateral Moves:

  • Director of Content Strategy
  • Head of Product Marketing
  • Head of Growth Marketing

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Develop and own the multi-year enterprise SEO strategy, prioritizing initiatives that improve organic visibility, increase qualified traffic, and directly contribute to revenue and retention goals across global markets.
  • Lead, mentor, and scale a multidisciplinary SEO team (technical SEOs, content strategists, outreach specialists, and analysts), including hiring plans, career development, performance reviews, and capacity planning.
  • Conduct comprehensive SEO audits and roadmaps across large-scale sites and platforms, diagnosing crawlability, indexing, site architecture, redirect chains, pagination, canonicalization, and internal linking issues and delivering prioritized technical remediation plans.
  • Define and execute content strategy in partnership with editorial, product, and growth teams: topical authority mapping, content gap analysis, content briefs optimized for search intent, and lifecycle content optimization to improve rankings and conversion.
  • Own on-page optimization standards and governance (meta tags, H1/H2 structure, schema markup, localized landing pages, multilingual hreflang implementation) and enforce SEO best practices across CMS and development teams.
  • Create and manage SEO measurement frameworks and dashboards using tools like Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, BigQuery, and internal BI systems to measure organic traffic, engagement, conversions, revenue attribution, and opportunity forecasting.
  • Lead technical projects such as site migrations, platform re-platforms, internationalization, large-scale URL changes, and progressive web app launches, ensuring no loss of organic visibility and that redirects, sitemaps, and canonicalization are handled correctly.
  • Implement and optimize crawl budget, indexation rules, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and server-side settings to ensure efficient search engine crawling and indexing of priority content.
  • Build and scale an effective link acquisition strategy focused on high-quality editorial backlinks, partnerships, PR-driven link opportunities, and outreach programs while monitoring backlink profile health and disavows when necessary.
  • Drive cross-functional SEO governance with engineering, product, UX, content, legal, and paid teams; introduce processes (SEO tickets, launch checklists, pre-launch QA) to ensure SEO considerations are embedded into product and marketing roadmaps.
  • Prioritize and manage the SEO backlog — balancing quick wins, technical debt, platform changes, and long-term strategic work — and provide transparent prioritization rationale to senior leadership.
  • Lead experimentation and CRO initiatives in partnership with product and analytics teams (A/B testing, funnel optimization, SERP feature optimization) to validate SEO hypotheses and improve organic conversion rates.
  • Monitor search landscape, algorithm updates, competitor activity, and market trends; translate insights into tactical changes and risk mitigation plans to protect and grow organic performance.
  • Define and manage the SEO budget and vendor relationships (SEO platforms, agencies, outreach tools), evaluating ROI and selecting partners that scale with the organization’s needs.
  • Establish and track OKRs/KPIs for organic search performance, including impressions, clicks, ranking distribution, click-through rate (CTR), traffic-to-conversion, revenue attributable to organic, and improvements in Core Web Vitals.
  • Own reporting cadence for executive leadership and stakeholders: monthly performance reviews, quarterly business reviews, and ad-hoc analysis that tie SEO activities to top-line business metrics.
  • Lead international and local SEO strategies including geotargeting, hreflang, localized content approach, local business listings, and citations to maximize visibility in target markets.
  • Ensure technical SEO compliance with privacy and data regulations (e.g., cookie consent, crawl-safe analytics) and collaborate with legal/compliance on search-related policy implications.
  • Evangelize SEO best practices across the organization through training programs, playbooks, and cross-functional workshops so teams understand how SEO impacts product and marketing decisions.
  • Identify opportunities to integrate SEO with paid search, social, email, and affiliate channels to maximize cross-channel ROI and improve overall acquisition efficiency.
  • Oversee SEO risk management: incident response for traffic drops, rapid triage and remediation of technical faults, and post-mortem analysis with corrective action plans.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis to answer business questions and uncover organic growth opportunities.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap by specifying SEO measurement needs, tracking requirements, and event instrumentation.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements and scalable data pipelines for SEO insights.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering and product teams to prioritize SEO work and technical fixes.
  • Create and maintain SEO playbooks, SOPs, and training materials for content, dev, and product teams to standardize processes and accelerate time-to-impact.
  • Perform competitive research and keyword modeling to identify new product/content opportunities, seasonal demand trends, and untapped long-tail queries.
  • Conduct backlink audits and outreach campaigns, coordinating with PR and content teams to secure high-authority placements and mentions.
  • Assist marketing leadership with go-to-market planning for new product launches to ensure organic discoverability is baked into launch timelines.
  • Provide technical guidance and code-level reviews (HTML, JavaScript rendering, server-side vs. client-side rendering implications) in collaboration with front-end and platform engineers.
  • Support organic-focused vendor selection, pilot evaluations, and contract negotiations to scale capabilities where internal resources are constrained.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert knowledge of search engine algorithms, ranking factors, and major algorithm updates; ability to translate into actionable changes.
  • Deep technical SEO skills: site architecture, crawlability, indexation, robots.txt, XML sitemaps, hreflang, canonicalization, redirects, and pagination.
  • Experience leading large-scale site migrations, platform replatforms, and international rollouts with no or minimal organic traffic loss.
  • Hands-on with SEO and analytics tooling: Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, BigQuery, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, DeepCrawl, Moz, Botify, or similar.
  • Proficiency with structured data and schema.org implementation and testing (Rich Results, Product, FAQ, HowTo, Organization, LocalBusiness).
  • Strong data analysis skills including SQL, Excel/Sheets, and experience building dashboards with Looker, Tableau, Power BI, Data Studio, or comparable BI tools.
  • Experience with A/B testing and CRO frameworks and tools (Optimizely, VWO, Google Optimize alternatives) to validate SEO-driven UX changes.
  • Familiarity with modern web technologies that affect SEO: JavaScript frameworks (React, Vue, Next.js), SSR/SSG, lazy loading, and client-side rendering implications.
  • Knowledge of Core Web Vitals, page experience optimization, performance profiling, and front-end optimization techniques.
  • Experience with CMS platforms (WordPress, Drupal, Shopify, Magento) and the ability to implement SEO solutions within platform constraints.
  • Proven experience running link acquisition campaigns, outreach, PR partnerships, and backlink quality assessment.
  • Ability to create SEO forecasts, ROI models, and financial justification for investment in organic initiatives.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic thinking with the ability to translate long-term SEO vision into tactical roadmaps and measurable outcomes.
  • Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills to work effectively with executives, product managers, engineers, data teams, and content creators.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication; able to present complex technical SEO concepts in business-friendly language.
  • Leadership and team development skills: hiring, mentoring, motivating, and building a high-performing SEO organization.
  • Problem-solving aptitude with a data-first, experimentation mindset and ability to prioritize under ambiguity.
  • Project management skills and ability to manage multiple cross-functional initiatives concurrently.
  • Curiosity and continuous learning orientation to stay current with search trends, tools, and best practices.
  • Detail-oriented with strong organizational discipline for governance, QA, and launch checklists.
  • Negotiation and vendor management capabilities when working with external agencies and tool providers.
  • Customer and user-focus: ability to align SEO strategies to user intent, product experience, and conversion optimization.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Computer Science, Communications, Information Systems, Business, or related field.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree (MBA, MSc in Marketing Analytics, Computer Science) or equivalent technical certifications in SEO, analytics, or data science.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Marketing, Digital Marketing, or Communications
  • Computer Science, Information Systems, or Web Development
  • Data Analytics, Statistics, or Business Intelligence
  • Journalism, Content Strategy, or Linguistics (valuable for content/intent work)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 7–12+ years in SEO, with at least 3–5 years in a senior leadership role owning strategy, people, and cross-functional programs.

Preferred:

  • Demonstrable track record growing organic traffic and revenue at scale for enterprise or high-growth consumer brands.
  • Experience managing multi-market/international SEO programs and sizable technical teams.
  • Experience with e-commerce SEO, marketplace optimization, or lead-gen SaaS SEO if applicable to the business vertical.
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