Organic growth doesn’t happen by accident — it happens because someone owns the strategy, sets the technical standard, and makes sure the whole team executes to that bar. At Rivulet IQ, the SEO Strategy Lead is that person: a senior individual contributor and team leader who drives results on their own client portfolio while raising the quality of everyone else’s work around them.
This is a hands-on leadership role, not a step away from execution into pure management. You’re expected to stay embedded in your own accounts — running audits, building strategy, writing briefs — while also mentoring the team, reviewing their deliverables, and representing SEO directly and confidently in front of US-based clients and stakeholders, without a translator or intermediary.
This role is not a good fit if:
- You’re looking for a purely execution-based, backend SEO position with no client interaction
- You’re not comfortable leading a client call in English, pushing back on a client’s idea, or explaining a technical issue in plain language to a non-technical stakeholder
- You haven’t previously mentored or reviewed the work of junior team members
This role is for someone who enjoys:
- Owning client outcomes directly, not just overseeing them
- Setting the technical and strategic bar for a team, not just following it
- Moving fluidly between a technical audit, a content strategy, and a live client call
- Staying ahead of how search itself is evolving — including AI-driven search
If you’re someone who wants both the depth of hands-on SEO work and the responsibility of shaping how a team delivers it — and the confidence to lead client conversations solo — this role gives you all of it.
What you’ll really be doing
1. Own Your Projects — End to End
- Independently manage a portfolio of client SEO accounts — from onboarding and audit through strategy, execution, and reporting
- Develop customized SEO strategies aligned to each client’s business objectives, competitive landscape, and content capacity
- Conduct comprehensive audits covering technical SEO, on-page, content, and off-page factors, and translate findings into clear, prioritized action plans
- Lead SEO planning for website launches, redesigns, and migrations — ensuring rankings and indexing are protected throughout
- Take full ownership of outcomes on your accounts: traffic growth, ranking improvements, and organic conversion performance
2. Lead and Elevate the SEO Team
- Lead, mentor, and develop junior and mid-level SEO team members — building capability, not dependency
- Review team deliverables (audits, briefs, reports, strategy documents) before they go to clients, ensuring accuracy, quality, and consistency
- Assign work based on capacity and skill, and step in on complex or high-stakes tasks where extra expertise is needed
- Run structured team check-ins to track progress, unblock issues, and share learnings across accounts
- Support team members in developing their own client communication and strategic thinking skills over time
3. Technical SEO — Execution and Oversight
- Identify and resolve crawlability, indexation, redirect, schema, and site architecture issues across your own and team-managed accounts
- Optimize Core Web Vitals, page speed, and mobile performance, and guide team members through similar work
- Collaborate with the development team to implement SEO recommendations correctly and on schedule
- Maintain high technical SEO health monitoring across active engagements using tools like Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs
- Serve as the internal technical escalation point for complex problems
4. Content & On-Page Strategy
- Build keyword-focused content strategies and detailed content briefs, and review those produced by team members
- Conduct keyword research, intent mapping, topic clustering, and competitor gap analysis, and ensure the team applies the same rigour
- Optimize meta tags, heading structure, internal linking, and page architecture across client sites
- Work closely with content writers and designers to embed SEO requirements from the brief stage, not patch them in after
- Conduct content gap analyses and proactively identify opportunities to improve organic visibility and topical authority
5. Client Communication & Reporting
- Lead client calls and strategic planning discussions independently, representing the SEO function with clarity and confidence in English
- Track and report on organic traffic, keyword rankings, conversions, and engagement metrics across your portfolio
- Produce structured, insight-driven performance reports that connect SEO activity to business outcomes, not just data exports
- Review and quality-check reports produced by team members before they reach clients or internal stakeholders
- Proactively flag risks, opportunities, and algorithm-related impacts before clients ask, and push back constructively when a client’s request works against their own SEO goals
6. AI-Driven SEO & Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
- Lead AI-powered SEO initiatives — including optimization for AI search surfaces such as Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT-referenced content
- Develop and implement AEO strategies: structured data, entity optimization, FAQ and schema markup, content structured for featured snippets and direct answers
- Use AI tools for keyword clustering, content optimization, gap analysis, and reporting efficiency, and introduce the team to responsible use of these tools
- Stay ahead of algorithm updates, AI search developments, and emerging SEO practices, and bring relevant insights back to the team
7. Cross-Team Collaboration
- Work with the development team on technical implementation, communicating SEO requirements in developer-friendly language
- Collaborate with designers to ensure UX decisions don’t compromise SEO — especially on site architecture, pagination, and content hierarchy
- Coordinate with Project Managers to ensure SEO tasks are properly scoped, scheduled, and tracked within project timelines
- Partner with Account Managers and the US team on client strategy discussions, scope conversations, and escalations
8. Process Standards & Documentation
- Develop and maintain SEO SOPs, checklists, and workflow documentation covering audits, reporting, content briefs, and technical handoffs
- Identify process inefficiencies and introduce improvements or automation opportunities that increase output without compromising quality
- Drive knowledge sharing within the team, ensuring learnings from one account benefit work across all accounts
- Build and maintain an internal library of templates, frameworks, and best practice guides
Who will thrive in this role
- You want to stay hands-on with your own accounts while also raising the bar for a team
- You can lead a client call in English independently — no translator, no intermediary — and hold your ground on a technical point
- You take full ownership of outcomes — traffic, rankings, and conversions — not just deliverables
- You mentor by building capability in others, not by creating dependency on you
- You stay genuinely curious about how AI is reshaping search and bring that thinking back to the team
- You document and systemize what you learn so it benefits the whole team, not just your own accounts
Qualifications & Skills
Experience
- 6+ years of hands-on SEO experience with measurable organic growth across multiple client accounts
- 2+ years in a lead or senior role — reviewing others’ work, setting standards, and mentoring junior team members
- Agency background preferred — managing clients across different industries, business sizes, and CMS platforms simultaneously
Must Have Skills
- Excellent written and verbal English communication — able to independently lead client calls, present strategy, and represent Rivulet IQ directly to US-based stakeholders
- Strong technical SEO fundamentals: crawl budget, indexation control, canonical handling, redirect mapping, hreflang, schema, and site architecture
- Ability to read HTML source and structured data outputs to identify implementation errors and communicate precise fixes to developers
- JavaScript SEO awareness — understanding how rendering affects crawlability and indexation on JS-heavy sites
- WordPress SEO experience — Yoast/RankMath configuration, plugin conflicts, and CMS-level technical issues
- Shopify SEO experience — collection and product page structure, canonical issues, and platform constraints
- Familiarity with at least one additional CMS (Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, or custom builds)
- Experience working with international clients, particularly US-based accounts
Tools & Platforms
- Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Looker Studio
- AI tools for keyword clustering, content optimization, and reporting
Nice to Have
- International and multi-language SEO — hreflang, regional targeting, and market-specific keyword strategies
- Large-scale site migration experience (100,000+ pages) — pre-migration audits, redirect mapping, and post-launch monitoring
- Understanding of CRO and UX principles as they relate to organic landing page performance
- Log file analysis for advanced crawl behaviour diagnosis
- SEO certifications (Ahrefs Academy, SEMrush, Google Analytics, or similar)
What this role offers
- Ownership of a client portfolio alongside real influence over team standards and direction
- Direct, unmediated client-facing responsibility with US-based stakeholders
- Exposure to cutting-edge AI search and AEO work, not just traditional SEO
- A hands-on leadership path — depth in execution plus scope in mentorship