Head of SEO & Reputation Strategy

Head of SEO & Reputation Strategy

Summary

Owns the SEO vision across a multisite news/publishing network and reputation programs. Orchestrates technical, content, and authority workstreams to win highstakes SERPs.

Responsibilities

• Build and drive the 12month SEO roadmap (entity SEO, topical authority, news SEO, Discover, SERP features).
  
• Prioritize highimpact initiatives across 200+ properties; set standards for crawlability, indexation, and Core Web Vitals.
  
• Architect reputationsafe strategies for sensitive legal/political topics; enforce factchecking and sourcing policies.
  
• Partner with engineering on HTML/Next.js/PHP/CI releases, migrations, and experiments (A/B, structured data, internal links).
  
• Own KPI frameworks, forecasting, and postmortems; mentor the SEO team and hiring pipeline.
  

Qualifications

• 8+ years in SEO with publisher/news and reputation/enterprise experience.
  
• Proven wins in entitybased SEO, Knowledge Panels, and SERP feature acquisition.
  
• Fluent in GA4, GSC, log analysis, crawl diagnostics, and BI (Looker/BigQuery).
  
• Familiar with Next.js SSR/ISR/SSG tradeoffs and largescale internal linking.
  

KPIs

Entity coverage and depth, share of voice on target clusters, Discover/Top Stories inclusion, CWV pass rate, nonbrand growth, risk/compliance incidents

Preferred Candidate Profile

Core skills:

• Entityfirst SEO strategy, topical authority modeling, SERP feature mapping

• SSR/ISR/SSG tradeoffs in Next.js; routing, dynamic params, middleware, rewrites
  
• Core Web Vitals (LCP/INP/CLS) from lab + field data; image/video optimization
  
• Canonicals, pagination, hreflang, sitemaps, robots; URL hygiene and deduping
  
• Render parity (server vs client), JS hydration pitfalls, edge caching/CDNs
  
• Log analysis, crawl budget control, regex, HTTP headers, security basics
  
• CI/CD literacy; code review for SEO tickets; automated QA
  
• Editorial risk management for legal/political subjects; source policy design
  
• Forecasting, goal trees, experimentation frameworks; stakeholder leadership
  
• Change management for multisite networks; prioritization and roadmapping
  
• Strong analytics literacy (attribution, cohorting, funnel analysis)
  

Knowledge of these Primary Tools:

• Search/Analytics:

  Google Search Console (incl. API), GA4, Looker/Looker Studio, BigQuery

• Crawling/Diagnostics:

  Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, JetOctopus; logfile analyzers

• Experimentation:

  VWO/Optimizely; Feature flags (LaunchDarkly)

• Perf:

  Lighthouse, WebPageTest, PageSpeed Insights, CrUX/field data, RUM (SpeedCurve/New Relic/Datadog)

• Crawl/Render:

  Screaming Frog (JS rendering), Sitebulb, Puppeteer/Playwright for render checks

• Infra:

  Vercel, Cloudflare/Fastly, NGINX; GitHub Actions/Jenkins; Postman for header/HTTP tests

• Validation:

  Rich Results Test, Schema.org Validator, URL Inspection API helpers