Director, SEO

Responsibilities

• - Develop and implement a comprehensive search strategy that spans traditional SEO, generative engine optimization (GEO), and answer engine optimization (AEO), aligned with overall business objectives.
• - Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including Editorial, Marketplace, Product, and Revenue Operations, to ensure SEO and AI-visibility best practices are integrated into all digital initiatives.
• - Lead, mentor, and grow a team of SEO specialists, providing guidance and support in day-to-day operations, including upskilling the team on AI search fundamentals and new tooling.
• - Foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation within the SEO team, particularly as search engine and AI platform algorithms evolve.
• - Conduct regular audits of page and website performance, identifying areas for improvement and implementing data-driven strategies to enhance search visibility.
• - Oversee keyword research, on-page optimization, technical SEO, structured data/schema, content architecture, and link-building efforts to drive organic traffic growth and improve machine readability of content for both search engines and large language models.
• - Present SEO and AI-visibility performance reports to partners and executive leadership, highlighting successes, challenges, and opportunities for growth across both traditional and generative search.
• - Stay updated on industry trends, search and AI algorithm updates, and emerging technologies to ensure the company remains at the forefront of search practices.
• - Build and own the portfolio's AI visibility strategy: track and improve how content is surfaced, cited, and summarized within AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other generative/answer engines.
• - Define a measurement framework that extends beyond traditional rankings and click-based traffic to include AI-era KPIs such as citation share and share of voice in AI answers, prompt/query coverage across priority topics, brand mention sentiment and accuracy in AI-generated responses, and referral traffic and downstream engagement/conversion from AI platforms.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Marketing, Business, Data Science, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in SEO, with at least 3 years in a leadership role.
• Proven track record of driving organic traffic growth and improving search engine rankings for content-rich websites.
• Demonstrated experience with, or strong working knowledge of, generative/answer engine optimization (GEO/AEO) and AI-visibility measurement, including familiarity with how large language models source, cite, and summarize web content.
• Experience building or applying opportunity-sizing or market-modeling frameworks to prioritize content investment, ideally including new category or vertical expansion.
• Strong analytical skills, with experience using SEO and AI-visibility tools (e.g., Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and AI-tracking platforms such as Profound, Peec.ai or equivalent) and the ability to build or partner on custom measurement dashboards.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to translate complex data – including new, still-evolving AI search metrics – into actionable insights and clear recommendations for stakeholders and executive leadership.
• Experience with content marketing, digital marketing, and user experience principles.

Preferred

• Openness to feedback and collaboration : You'll be working closely with folks across different teams, so you'll need to be open to the process and accept feedback and critique.
• Strong communication skills : You'll have the ability to build relationships with external stakeholders, report up to internal stakeholders, and foster strong alignment with your team.
• Alignment with Pillar4's culture : We live by our values and expect our team to buy in.
• -
• Act with focus
• Get after it
• Grow without limits
• Build the team
• Obsess Over Customers
• Commit to Service

Benefits

• Base salary and performance-based bonus commensurate with experience. At Pillar4, you'll have access to competitive benefits, including health insurance, 401k, a monthly wellness stipend for house cleaning, gym membership, grocery delivery or massages, and cell phone reimbursement.