Senior Manager, Search & Digital Marketing

About the role

The Office of Corporate Communications and Marketing (OCCM) is seeking a senior leader to own and evolve SMU’s Search Everywhere strategy. This role combines technical SEO expertise with strategic digital marketing to ensure the university’s content is discoverable across traditional search, answer engines, generative AI, social platforms and emerging voice interfaces.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and execute SMU’s comprehensive Search Everywhere strategy covering SEO, AEO, GEO and AI‑driven discoverability.
• Establish governance frameworks and standards for search across web, campaign, social and research assets.
• Monitor algorithmic and AI model updates, translate insights into actionable recommendations.
• Define, track and report unified search performance indicators to senior leadership.
• Lead technical SEO, ensuring crawlability, indexability, site health and Core Web Vitals compliance.
• Implement AEO tactics to capture featured snippets, People Also Ask and knowledge panels.
• Build and maintain a GEO framework for accurate AI‑generated responses on platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
• Oversee entity and knowledge‑graph optimisation, including structured data and semantic markup.
• Manage keyword strategy and search‑intent mapping across the prospective‑student journey.
• Serve as primary liaison with the external SEO agency, set strategic agenda, review deliverables and ensure brand alignment.
• Advise content and social teams on headline strategy, metadata, internal linking, schema and topic‑cluster architecture.

Required profile

• Proven senior‑level experience in SEO and digital marketing within a complex, content‑rich organization.
• Strong analytical mindset with ability to interpret algorithmic changes and translate them into business actions.
• Excellent communication skills to influence cross‑functional teams and external partners.
• Track record of managing agency relationships and delivering measurable results.

Required skills

• SEO
• Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
• Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
• Core Web Vitals
• Structured data implementation
• Schema markup
• Knowledge‑graph optimisation
• Keyword strategy
• Search intent mapping