Principal SEO

Your Responsibilities:

• Influence the SEO strategy for the business at large and generate buy-in from executive leadership. Review strategy & corresponding tactics quarterly and update as needed. Work with cross-functional stakeholders across product, BI, engineering, design, editorial, business, and marketing teams to pursue SEO improvements with a keen eye on the user experience
• Strategically grow and defend channel performance and trajectory
• SEO Support for Stakeholders: Providing SEO guidance for content creators, web developers, and marketing teams across the org. 
• Partner with the SEM team to devise a comprehensive keyword strategy in important categories where we want to grow, and translate that into how we need to plan SEO & SEM efforts to complement each other 
• Assist in defining/socializing 12 month - 3 year plan specific to the evolution of SEO in light of AI and the evolving search landscape 
• Hands-on in executing SEO testing roadmap and plan
• Closely monitor competitors and the changing SERP landscape to help inform our roadmap, in the interest of leveraging the latest search features for improved visibility
• Manage the SEO team from both a tech SEO & Content SEO delivery perspective and drive results for our growth metric of clients who start on Upwork. 

What it takes to catch our eye:

• 8+ years of experience working in SEO, preferably with large-scale consumer sites &/ marketplaces sites 
• A track record of leveraging insights to define strategies that improve search visibility and user experience
• Experience working closely alongside product, engineering and content teams
• Cross-functional leadership skills with the ability to organize disparate stakeholders around clear objectives and key results
• Familiarity with SEO A/B testing
• Experience working with marketing teams, representing organic as a channel alongside other acquisition channels, and collaborating with paid search teams
• Experience with opportunity sizing and growth forecasting
• Expert at Google Search Console as well as SEO tools like SEO Clarity,  SEMrush, Ahrefs, or analogous keyword research tools, as well as social listening tools (Buzzsumo, etc.) and crawling tools (Screaming Frog, etc.)