The OpportunityThe Senior Director, SEO is responsible for developing and executing a comprehensive search strategy - spanning traditional organic search and AI-driven discovery (AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other answer engines) - to enhance the portfolio's visibility, increase qualified traffic, and grow revenue across its diverse library of content. This role requires a deep understanding of SEO and generative engine optimization (GEO) best practices, the analytical rigor to build and defend new measurement frameworks as the definition of "search success" evolves, and the strategic judgment to size and prioritize new content and category opportunities. The Senior Director will lead a team of SEO professionals, partner closely with Editorial and Revenue Operations on calendar prioritization, and represent search strategy to key partners and executive leadership.
What You'll Be DoingReporting to the President, Media the Director, SEO will:
Strategy & Leadership- 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.
Search Performance & Reporting- 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.
AI Visibility & Measurement- 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.
- Evaluate and deploy AI visibility and brand-tracking tools alongside established analytics platforms (Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs) to build a unified reporting view across traditional and AI search.
- Continuously test how content structure, sourcing, and authority signals affect citation likelihood, and translate findings into editorial and technical guidance.
Opportunity Modeling & Editorial Prioritization- Develop and maintain an opportunity-sizing model to evaluate potential new content categories and verticals, incorporating traditional search demand, AI/answer-engine query volume and citation potential, competitive density and gaps, monetization/revenue potential, and editorial production cost and feasibility.
- Partner with Editorial leadership to translate opportunity models into a prioritized editorial calendar, ensuring new category investments and ongoing content refreshes are sequenced by expected traffic, AI-visibility, and revenue return.
- Present category entry recommendations and opportunity/risk trade-offs to executive leadership, including go/no-go criteria and phased rollout plans for new verticals.
- Track post-launch performance of new categories against original opportunity models, refining the model's assumptions and scoring methodology over time.
What You Bring- 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.
What We Look For- 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
- Entrepreneurial spirit: Our team members act like entrepreneurs in that we are incredibly driven, agile, goal-oriented, and are always up for a challenge.
The PackageBase 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.
