Senior Manager, Search & Digital Marketing

About the role

The Office of Corporate Communications and Marketing (OCCM) at Singapore Management University is seeking a senior leader to own and evolve the university’s Search Everywhere strategy. This role combines technical SEO expertise with emerging AI‑driven search optimisation to enhance SMU’s visibility across traditional, answer, generative and voice search platforms.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and own SMU’s comprehensive Search Everywhere strategy, covering SEO, AEO, GEO and emerging multimodal discovery surfaces.
• Establish governance frameworks and standards for search discoverability across web, campaign, social and research content.
• Monitor algorithmic and AI model updates, translating changes into actionable recommendations.
• Define, track and report unified search performance indicators to senior leadership.
• Lead technical SEO functions, ensuring crawlability, indexability, site health and Core Web Vitals compliance.
• Implement AEO tactics to secure featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes and knowledge panels.
• Build and manage SMU’s GEO framework for accurate representation in generative AI responses.
• 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, setting strategy, reviewing deliverables and ensuring brand alignment.
• Advise content and social teams on headline strategy, metadata, internal linking, schema markup and topic‑cluster architecture.

Required profile

• Proven senior‑level experience in search strategy, SEO and digital marketing within a large, content‑rich organization.
• Strong analytical mindset with ability to interpret algorithmic shifts and AI trends.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills, including experience overseeing external agencies.
• Demonstrated ability to translate technical recommendations into editorial guidelines.

Required skills

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