The Role

The SEO Manager is responsible for growing organic website revenue for Choice Hotels and our franchised hotel owners. They will lead an experienced team of SEO analysts in monitoring organic performance, ensuring technical SEO best practices, and providing strategic leadership on search-related projects across the Choice Hotels organization.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities

Team Management

• Manage the day-to-day efforts and individual development of SEO team members.
• Hosting team meetings with documented follow-ups, maintain project status lists, assign tasks based on bandwidth and skills of individual team members, and coach team members on assignments.
• Provide formal and informal training and learning opportunities for the team
• as part of their overall development plans.

SEO Strategy

• Plan and implement a multifaceted SEO strategy that includes ongoing measurement, ad hoc analysis, and major projects.
• Work in conjunction with eCommerce, Technology, Analytics, Paid Media, Content Management, and external consultants/agencies to achieve organic revenue goals.
• Required tasks include: validate website crawlability on an ongoing basis, maintain and update list of tracked keywords, report on keyword ranking trends, conduct competitive ranking analysis, optimize website content/HTML for search engines, and identify other opportunities to improve ranking and click-through of organic search results.
• Leverage existing SEO and analytics tools to achieve these ongoing tasks.
• Advocate for additional tools or resources, when needed, to achieve SEO goals.
• Use reporting and visualization tools to create ongoing reports and dashboards that provide insights into organic search performance and opportunities.

Support for Local Hotel Properties

• Manage local listings for 6,500+ hotel properties.
• Manage relationship with local listings software provider and ensure hotel catalog data is accurate across the major local listing sites.
• Build an ongoing educational program for hotel franchisees that reinforces hotel-level actions they should take to enhance their digital presence.
• This education program will include intranet documents, interactive videos or webinars, and training for Choice regional area directors.

Project & Process Management

• Write business cases and presentations to support investment recommendations across tools, content, and website enhancements that are needed to reach organic revenue goals.
• Generate support for key priorities.
• Establish and execute test and learn plans for measuring the impact of website changes on search engine optimization.
• Stay on top of changes in the search environment.
• Leverage agency experts, industry contacts, and other research to monitor updates to search engine algorithms and key ranking factors, translating those trends into a prioritized roadmap for Choice.

Skills, Educational Background, and Experience

• Bachelor’s Degree required, with a focus on Marketing, Communications, Technology, or similar field of study.
• 5 or more years of Search Engine Optimization experience, with 2+ years supervisory experience.
• Hospitality/travel experience is a plus.
• Proven expertise in technical and qualitative aspects of SEO, including crawlability, keyword research, rankings, competitive benchmarking, content audits, and a general understanding of website development and usability.
• Able to generate actionable insights from SEO and analytics tools such as Adobe Analytics, BrightEdge, Conductor, SEMRush, Search Console, Webmaster Tools, Screaming Frog, and others.
• Experienced in developing effective strategies, building business cases, gaining internal/external support, and driving implementation.
• Have excellent written and verbal communication skills, interpersonal skills, professionalism, strong presentation, leadership and influencing skills. Able to translate technical information into simple terms for non-technical audiences.
• Integrate data from multiple sources to tell a compelling story. Ideally experience with visualization tools such as Domo, Tableau and Data Studio for building dashboards.
• Model Choice’s Cultural Values: Welcome and Respect Everyone, Be Bold, Be Quick, Listen, Be Curious and Show Integrity.