Senior Manager, Search & Digital Marketing

About the role

The Office of Corporate Communications and Marketing (OCCM) is seeking a senior leader to own and advance SMU’s Search Everywhere strategy. This role will drive optimisation across traditional SEO, Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), social search and emerging voice and multimodal discovery surfaces.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and execute a unified Search Everywhere strategy, covering SEO, AEO, GEO and AI‑driven discoverability.
• Establish governance frameworks and standards for search visibility across web, campaign, social and research content.
• Monitor algorithmic changes, AI model updates and platform search behaviour, translating insights into actionable recommendations.
• Lead technical SEO, 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 a GEO framework to influence AI‑generated responses on platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity 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 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 experience leading enterprise‑level SEO, AEO and GEO initiatives.
• Deep understanding of search algorithm dynamics, AI model updates and emerging discovery surfaces.
• Track record of establishing governance frameworks for digital discoverability.
• Experience managing external SEO agencies and ensuring delivery against KPIs.
• Strong analytical mindset with ability to define and report unified search performance indicators.

Required skills

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