SEO Team Lead

This is a remote position.
This company looks for people who show up as their whole selves, take ownership without being asked twice, and want more responsibility than their current title gives them. If that sounds like you, keep reading. They provide marketing services exclusively to independent professionals and brands in the automotive detailing, paint protection film, ceramic coating, and window tint industries. They are not a general agency. They understand this market's customers, how they search, and what turns a Google search into a booked job. They currently manage roughly 100 SEO accounts through outside white label vendors, and they are on pace to launch around 225 new client websites a year. That volume is outgrowing what a packaged vendor relationship can give them in quality control, scope flexibility, and client communication. This role exists to change that.
Why This Role Exists Now SEO, and local SEO specifically, is one of the highest value services they sell and deliver for their clients. Right now, most of that work is executed through outside white label vendors. This hire changes that relationship. They need someone who can run those vendors, evaluate whether their contracts and scopes of work still make sense for the company, and start building the internal team and processes that let them bring the highest value work in house over time.
- They need more control over quality, scope flexibility, and client communication than a packaged white label model can provide.

- They need someone who can evaluate their current vendors on their merits: cost, scope, turnaround, and quality, and make a clear recommendation on each.

- They want an internal SEO leader who can document how the work should be done, train others to do it, and build a department that integrates tightly with web development & support.

About The Role They are hiring a Director of SEO to own their SEO strategy end to end: local SEO delivery for their small business clients, their growing use of AI in search, and the relationships they currently hold with white label SEO vendors. You will start executing and advising from week one. In the first 45 to 60 days, you will audit their current white label vendor contracts and performance, and begin identifying and building out a handful of scopes of work they can bring in house, work that either mirrors or improves on what those vendors deliver today, along with the standard operating procedures that make that work repeatable. As you prove out results and judgment, this role is built to grow into leadership over an internal SEO team. You will also serve as the company’s internal SEO consultant on website development builds, working with their web team early in the build process so new sites launch search ready rather than getting audited and fixed after the fact. This is an advisory role on the web side. They are not asking you to manage web development vendors, only SEO vendors.
You'll Love This Job If...
- You'd rather own outcomes than tickets; you want to be the person a shop owner's rankings live or die by, and you take that seriously.

- You're already thinking about how AI search (AI Overviews, LLM citations, zero-click behavior) changes local SEO, and you want a place to actually test that thinking.

- You can look at content someone else wrote and make it meaningfully better; structurally, not just line edits, without needing to write every word yourself.

- You want a leadership track, not just a bigger workload. You're motivated by eventually building and running a team, not just doing more of the same work solo.

You'll Dislike This Job If...
- You want a fully built department, existing SOPs, and someone checking your work daily; none of that exists yet. You're building a chunk of it.

- You see vendor management or contract review as beneath your role. Evaluating what they are paying for and deciding what to bring in house is core to this job, not a side task.

- You need ce