Senior Manager, Search & Digital Marketing

About the role

This position sits within the Office of Corporate Communications and Marketing (OCCM) at SMU and covers the university's search and digital marketing strategy. It leads the technical and strategic SEO function, the emerging AI-driven search surfaces (AEO and GEO), and the management of the SEO agency, while advising content and social teams on discoverability.

Key responsibilities

• Own the Search Everywhere strategy, covering SEO, AEO, GEO, social search and emerging voice and multimodal surfaces, and establish governance and standards for search discoverability across owned digital assets.
• Lead technical SEO, including crawlability, indexability, site health, Core Web Vitals, entity and knowledge graph optimisation, and keyword strategy across the prospective student journey.
• Build and run an AEO strategy so content appears in featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes and knowledge panels, and lead entity and knowledge graph optimisation.
• Build and execute the GEO framework so the university is accurately represented in AI-generated responses on platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini.
• Manage the SEO agency: set the strategic agenda, review deliverables against KPIs, evaluate recommendations and hold the agency accountable.
• Advise content and social teams on headlines, metadata, internal linking, schema, topic clusters and social search strategy, and build the search content taxonomy.
• Monitor social search behaviour in priority student markets (India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, China, Singapore) and adapt strategy accordingly.
• Own search performance reporting, build dashboards, run quarterly search audits and present insights to the Head, Digital Marketing.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Communications, Information Systems, Computer Science or a related field.
• Minimum 5 years of traditional SEO and technical SEO; minimum 3 to 5 years of agency management and social search.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience with generative AI platforms and their use of institutional content, and active engagement with AEO and GEO.
• Experience interpreting search and web analytics and presenting performance data to senior stakeholders.
• Proven cross-functional collaboration with content, analytics and technical teams.

Required skills

• Traditional SEO, technical SEO auditing, structured data and schema markup.
• Tools: Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, SEMrush or Ahrefs, GA4, Looker Studio.
• Professional certifications in SEO, digital analytics or content strategy are advantageous.