Director of SEO and AEO

Aquent is partnering with a large, nationally recognized education organization that is deeply committed to its mission of fostering education, enabling career access, and driving workforce development. This organization operates a diverse portfolio of brands, all united by the goal of making a meaningful impact on individuals' lives and futures.

We are seeking an innovative and strategic leader to shape the future of organic discovery for a portfolio of impactful brands. In this pivotal role, you will define how these brands are found across the rapidly evolving search ecosystem, from traditional search engines to cutting-edge AI-powered answer engines. You will not only set the strategic vision but also lead its execution, driving significant organic growth, enhancing brand visibility, and ensuring a strong presence in AI citations. This is a unique opportunity to act as a player-coach, balancing high-level strategy with hands-on problem-solving, all while building and mentoring a growing team. Your work will directly influence how millions discover educational and career opportunities, making a tangible difference in their lives.

What You'll Do

• Define and own the organization's enterprise search strategy across multiple brands and complex digital properties.
• Establish a clear vision for how brands appear across traditional search engines, AI Overviews, large language models, and emerging answer engines.
• Identify priority programs, services, audiences, and topic areas where the organization can increase organic market share and authority.
• Develop and maintain an integrated roadmap that balances immediate performance opportunities with long-term search innovation.
• Establish success metrics that measure traditional organic performance as well as emerging AI-driven visibility.
• Track changes in consumer discovery behavior and translate them into actionable enterprise strategies.
• Partner closely with Engineering, Product, IT, UX, Analytics, and Web teams to embed search optimization into digital platforms and development processes.
• Guide strategy related to crawlability, indexation, internal linking, site architecture, page performance, accessibility, rendering, and user experience.
• Evaluate how AI crawlers and answer engines access, retrieve, interpret, and cite organizational content.
• Lead structured data, schema markup, semantic search, taxonomy, and entity-modeling initiatives.
• Influence CMS, platform, and technology decisions to improve discoverability, scalability, governance, and speed to market.
• Personally evaluate and troubleshoot complex technical issues, identify root causes, and lead cross-functional resolution.
• Create scalable frameworks for Answer Engine Optimization and AI-search readiness.
• Improve brand visibility and citation presence across platforms such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and other emerging discovery experiences.
• Partner with editorial and content teams to develop structured, authoritative, useful content optimized for both human audiences and AI retrieval systems.
• Strengthen topical authority, entity recognition, semantic relevance, source credibility, and brand association.
• Define KPIs for LLM visibility, AI citations, share of answer, semantic authority, and brand recognition.
• Build an ongoing testing and learning program as AI-powered discovery technologies and behaviors continue to evolve.
• Connect search strategies with brand marketing, content, product, conversion optimization, UX, social media, paid media, communications, and analytics.
• Partner with Brand teams to maintain narrative consistency and strengthen authority positioning.
• Collaborate with Corporate Communications and Public Relations teams to improve earned authority, external citations, reputation, and source credibility.
• Help Social and Media teams use search intelligence and AI-supported insights to improve content distribution.
• Expand organic visibility beyond owned websites by considering the role of YouTube, Reddit, social platforms, publishers, and other trusted third-party sources.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to senior leaders across Marketing, Product, Engineering, Analytics, Communications, and Technology.
• Translate complicated search trends, technical issues, performance data, and AI developments into clear recommendations for executive audiences.
• Build alignment across a highly matrixed organization where success requires influence rather than direct authority.
• Move teams from siloed execution toward integrated, enterprise-wide growth.
• Establish practical governance models, operating processes, standards, and accountability across multiple brands and stakeholder groups.
• Lead, mentor, and scale a team of search specialists.
• Build the frameworks, capabilities, processes, and tools needed to support a growing Search Center of Excellence.
• Foster a culture of curiosity, experimentation, accountability, and continuous learning.
• Balance strategic leadership with hands-on involvement in analysis, testing, prioritization, and problem-solving.
• Manage agency partners, technology vendors, budgets, and resource planning.
• Own enterprise reporting across search and AI-driven discovery.
• Connect organic visibility and search performance to meaningful business outcomes.
• Provide senior leaders with regular reporting on KPIs, trends, tests, risks, opportunities, and competitive movement.
• Develop measurement approaches for areas where industry standards are still emerging.
• Use performance insights to prioritize resources and guide future investment.

Must-Have Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Advertising, Information Technology, Business, or a related discipline.
• Eight to ten or more years of progressive experience leading search, organic growth, or digital discovery strategies for large, complex websites or digital ecosystems.
• Deep expertise in technical search optimization, content optimization, semantic search, structured data, analytics, and enterprise methodologies.
• Experience developing strategy across large websites, multiple brands, regulated environments, or complex organizational structures.
• Strong understanding of AI-driven search, generative search experiences, answer engines, and the changing role of large language models in consumer discovery.
• Demonstrated curiosity and practical experience building new capabilities in rapidly evolving areas such as answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, or LLM visibility.
• Experience expanding search strategy beyond owned websites and understanding how platforms such as YouTube and Reddit influence authority, discovery, and AI-generated responses.
• Proficiency with platforms such as Google Search Console, GA4, Semrush, BrightEdge, or comparable enterprise search and analytics tools.
• Familiarity with emerging AI-search visibility platforms such as Profound, Peec AI, or similar technologies used to evaluate AI citations and brand presence.
• Experience partnering with Engineering, Product, Web Development, UX, Content, Analytics, Brand, Social Media, and Communications teams.
• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and drive results within a highly matrixed organization.
• Strong executive communication skills and the ability to make highly technical or complicated subjects understandable and actionable.
• Experience managing teams, agencies, budgets, vendors, roadmaps, and enterprise-level programs.

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Master's degree preferred.
• Background in higher education, healthcare, financial services, or another highly regulated industry is advantageous.

Who You Are

You are a builder who thrives on creating teams, frameworks, measurement systems, and processes from the ground up. While you possess a deep understanding of enterprise search, you recognize that the future of organic discovery extends far beyond traditional rankings. Naturally collaborative, you excel at uniting teams with diverse priorities, confidently engaging with executive leaders while also diving into technical details with engineers, analysts, content strategists, and specialists. You are data-driven yet pragmatic, unafraid to experiment, learn quickly, and communicate clearly, remaining energized by constant change. Above all, you have the remarkable ability to transform complexity into clarity, empowering a large organization to act decisively in an emerging discipline.

About Skill:

Skill connects the best professional, IT, engineering, financial and administrative talent with the world's biggest brands. Our eligible talent get access to benefits such as health benefit contributions, retirement plans with match and flexible spending accounts.

Skill is an equal-opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics. We're about creating an inclusive environment-one where different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are valued, and everyone can contribute, grow their careers, and thrive.