SEO Specialist (SEO and AI Search)
The Role
Search has changed more in the past two years than in the ten before it, and our clients feel it every week. They still want to rank in Google, but they are also asking why a competitor gets named in ChatGPT when they don’t, why the traffic arriving from AI Overviews behaves nothing like the traffic from blue links, and what they should actually do about either. We’re looking for a SEO specialist who can answer both sets of questions and own the client relationships where those answers matter.
You’ll run your own portfolio of accounts across higher education, financial services, insurance, legal, nonprofit, edtech, and ecommerce, from strategy through implementation and reporting. That means leading recurring client calls, setting the roadmap, doing the technical work yourself, and standing behind the recommendations you make. You’ll also work on SEO for sites our development team is building, where redirect logic, structured data, and a pre-launch audit are the difference between a smooth launch and six months of recovery.
The right person blends real technical depth with content judgment. You should be comfortable in Screaming Frog, Search Console, and GA4, equally comfortable explaining what you found to a marketing director who does not know what a canonical tag is, and interested in how AI search systems decide what to cite. We also work with AI tooling heavily (we build our own automations and reporting workflows with Claude), so curiosity about that is a real advantage rather than a footnote.
What You’ll Own
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Client accounts. Day-to-day ownership of several SEO and AEO retainers, including monthly reporting, recurring calls, roadmap planning, and the honest conversations when performance moves the wrong way.
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Technical SEO and diagnostics. Crawl analysis in Screaming Frog, indexation investigations in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, canonical and redirect logic, JavaScript rendering, log file review, site architecture, URL structure, and Core Web Vitals.
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Launch and migration SEO. URL mapping, redirect specifications, structured data requirements, pre-launch technical audits, and post-launch validation alongside our development and design teams on new builds and replatforms.
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AEO and GEO programs. Entity and schema strategy, content structured so that models can extract and cite it, prompt-set benchmarking against competitors, llms.txt and AI crawler access, and visibility tracking across Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Claude.
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Measurement and reporting. Search Console generative AI performance data, GA4 analysis, AI visibility platforms (we use Peec AI and BrightEdge today), and the work of turning all of it into a recommendation a client can act on rather than a dashboard they ignore.
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Keyword and content strategy. Keyword and topic research built from analytics and paid search data, content briefs and outlines, on-page and metadata recommendations, and editing client-drafted copy so it holds up in both traditional and AI search.
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Local and multi-location search. Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect management, listing escalations, and location page templates for clients with many locations or franchisees.
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Cross-team collaboration. Regular coordination with our paid media, analytics, design, and development teams, with client-side developers, and with senior leadership, so that clients get one coherent answer instead of four.
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New business support. Prospect audits, technical findings for pitches, and input on scoping and hour estimates for SEO and AEO engagements.
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Practice development. Staying current on how AI search is changing, testing new tools, and bringing what works back to the team. We treat this as part of the job, not something you squeeze in after hours.
What We’re Looking For
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4 to 6 years of hands-on SEO experience, ideally at an agency running several clients at once.
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Practi