Director of SEO and AEO

Aquent is partnering with a nationally recognized organization at the forefront of education. This organization is dedicated to shaping the future of learning and discovery, impacting countless individuals as they explore educational opportunities and career paths. Join a team that is pioneering innovative strategies to enhance brand visibility and engagement in an evolving digital landscape.

Are you a visionary leader ready to redefine how an organization connects with its audience in the age of AI? We are seeking a dynamic and forward-thinking individual to spearhead our enterprise search and AI-discovery strategy. This isn't just a role; it's an opportunity to be at the epicenter of a critical strategic priority, influencing how our diverse brands are perceived and cited across cutting-edge AI platforms. You will be instrumental in shaping the digital footprint of multiple esteemed brands, ensuring their authoritative presence and accurate representation in the rapidly evolving world of AI-powered discovery. This highly visible player-coach role requires someone who can craft the strategy, lead the organization, develop the team, present results to senior executives, and personally engage in the work when necessary, driving tangible results from day one.

What You'll Own

• Strategic Leadership in AEO & Organic Discovery: Define and lead the enterprise strategy for Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), AI-search visibility, technical SEO, organic discovery, and brand authority. You will enhance the visibility and citation presence of multiple institutional brands across leading AI-powered search experiences. Establish consistent AEO operations across diverse brands, programs, and audiences, identifying key opportunities for AI visibility and organic growth. Develop an integrated roadmap that connects owned and earned content, social channels, video platforms, review platforms, technical infrastructure, and external authority signals, balancing immediate gains with long-term capability development.
• Driving AEO Execution & Performance: Lead strategies to increase brand citations, visibility, accuracy, authority, and share of answer within large language models. Directly evaluate brand appearance in AI-generated answers, identifying and implementing improvements. Develop and operationalize frameworks for content retrieval, entity authority, semantic relevance, structured content, and AI-search readiness. Translate AEO insights into prioritized actions across content, video, social, digital products, review platforms, and public relations. Establish repeatable processes for topic discovery, content development, testing, optimization, measurement, and reporting, taking personal accountability for results and presenting findings directly to executive leadership.
• Building Enterprise Governance & Centers of Excellence: Establish an enterprise AEO Center of Excellence to ensure consistency across institutional and functional teams. Create governance, standards, processes, templates, measurement frameworks, and operating practices that can scale across the organization. Coordinate initiatives across multiple institutions and functional teams, preventing fragmentation and duplication. Drive the organization from institution-specific SEO execution toward an integrated enterprise discovery model.
• Technical Foundation & Platform Enablement: Partner with Product, Engineering, IT, Web, UX, Content, and Analytics teams to embed SEO and AEO requirements into digital platforms and workflows. Lead initiatives related to crawlability, indexation, site architecture, internal linking, structured data, schema, page performance, accessibility, and content retrieval. Evaluate how AI crawlers and answer engines access, interpret, and use organizational content. Guide semantic SEO, entity modeling, taxonomy, structured content, and knowledge-graph strategies, identifying and resolving technical barriers. Influence technology decisions affecting discoverability, scalability, and speed to market, remaining hands-on to troubleshoot and guide content production.
• Content & Ecosystem Influence: Collaborate with institutional marketing, editorial, faculty, product, social, communications, and brand teams to strengthen topical authority and AI visibility. Guide the creation of useful, structured, authoritative content optimized for both traditional search and AI-generated answers. Help teams determine content creation, update, distribution, reformatting, and external authority support. Incorporate faculty expertise, institutional knowledge, trusted claims, and authoritative sources into content strategies. Expand discovery beyond owned websites by understanding the influence of video platforms, social media, review platforms, and earned media on AI-generated results.
• Executive Engagement & Influence: Serve as the senior enterprise authority on AEO, AI-search visibility, and organic discovery. Communicate directly with senior executives, presenting results personally and clearly explaining outcomes, implications, and next steps. Translate complex and rapidly changing technical concepts into concise business recommendations. Build consensus across diverse teams, evaluate competing ideas, and maintain focus on high-impact initiatives.
• Team Development & Capability Building: Lead a high-performing full-time SEO/AEO team member, with the opportunity to expand the team based on business needs. Provide strategic direction to specialist contractors and cross-functional contributors. Assess future capability needs and determine appropriate organizational structure, roles, agency support, tools, and resources. Develop team members while fostering an environment where their work directly contributes to enterprise outcomes.
• Measurement, Reporting & Accountability: Own enterprise reporting for AEO, AI-search visibility, and organic performance. Define and track key metrics such as citation presence, share of answer, brand mentions, answer accuracy, semantic authority, competitive visibility, and referral impact. Utilize industry-leading platforms for measurement, content discovery, topic analysis, and program insights. Connect AEO and SEO performance to meaningful organizational and business outcomes, presenting results directly to executive stakeholders and maintaining accountability for both strategy and measurable outcomes.

What You Bring

• Bachelor's degree in Marketing, Advertising, Information Technology, Business, Communications, or a related field.
• Approximately 8-10 or more years of progressive SEO, organic growth, digital discovery, or related experience.
• Meaningful, hands-on experience developing and implementing AEO, generative search, AI-search visibility, or large language model (LLM) discovery strategies.
• Demonstrated results improving how brands appear, are cited, or are represented across AI-powered search experiences.
• Experience presenting AEO, SEO, digital visibility, or organic-growth performance directly to senior executives or C-suite stakeholders.
• Proven accountability for performance-not simply participation in projects or support of another leader's strategy.
• Experience leading enterprise-scale initiatives across a large organization, complex brand portfolio, or multiple business units.
• Deep knowledge of technical SEO, content optimization, structured data, semantic search, entity authority, analytics, and digital-platform fundamentals.
• Experience working across owned content, earned content, video, social platforms, review sites, and other channels that influence AI-generated discovery.
• Proficiency with AEO and SEO measurement tools, including comparable AI-visibility platforms.
• Ability to operate effectively within established brand standards, content guidelines, and organizational constraints.
• Experience creating governance models, processes, standards, and scalable Centers of Excellence.
• Proven ability to influence teams across Product, Engineering, Content, Web, Analytics, Social, Brand, Communications, and institutional marketing.
• Experience leading employees, contractors, agencies, vendors, and cross-functional contributors.
• Strong executive presence and the ability to communicate complicated information with clarity, confidence, and sound judgment.

The Ideal Candidate Profile

The strongest candidate will be more than a traditional SEO leader who has recently become interested in AEO. You have already been working directly in AI-powered discovery and can describe substantive initiatives, measurable results, lessons learned, and changes you made based on those results. You understand that although AEO is evolving, businesses have already been affected by it, and organizations must act now rather than wait for perfect standards or certainty.

You are comfortable being held personally accountable for performance. You have presented results directly to senior executives, defended your recommendations, responded to scrutiny, and educated leaders who may have varying levels of technical knowledge.

You are level-headed, balanced, flexible, and highly credible. You can manage a large number of active workstreams without becoming reactive or losing sight of strategic priorities. You know how to build consensus, but you are also prepared to make decisions, establish direction, and respectfully challenge assumptions.

You can move easily between executive strategy and hands-on execution. One moment, you may be presenting enterprise visibility results to a Chief Digital Officer; the next, you may be reviewing topic opportunities, helping troubleshoot a technical issue, or working with a team to move content through the production process.

You are a builder and a pioneer. You can take over work already in motion, create structure where it is needed, and determine what the organization should pursue after the known opportunities have been addressed.

What Success Looks Like

Within the first 30 days, you will have developed a strong understanding of the existing AEO program, active workstreams, internal stakeholders, institutional priorities, available data, tools, and team capabilities.

Within the first several months, you will begin taking ownership of the enterprise roadmap, establishing clearer prioritization and governance, strengthening executive reporting, and coordinating execution across institutions and channels.

Over time, success will be reflected in:

• Increased visibility and citation presence across AI-powered search platforms
• More accurate and authoritative representation of the organization's brands in AI-generated answers
• Clear enterprise standards and repeatable AEO processes
• Stronger coordination across multiple institutions and functional teams
• Improved ability to connect AEO activity with meaningful business outcomes
• Greater executive understanding of AI discovery performance and opportunity
• A high-performing, scalable AEO Center of Excellence
• A clear pipeline of future opportunities as the discovery ecosystem continues to evolve

Compensation

The target hiring compensation range for this role is approximately $150,000-$170,000. Compensation is based on several factors including, but not limited to education, relevant work experience, relevant certifications, and location. This leadership position is also eligible for 25% target annual Management Incentive Program and 20% long-term incentive delivered through restricted stock units.

Why This Role Matters

AI-powered discovery is changing how people research educational opportunities, evaluate institutions, understand career paths, and make significant decisions. This Director will have the opportunity to shape how a large portfolio of respected institutional brands is represented across that ecosystem. The work is already visible at the highest levels of the organization, and this leader will have meaningful authority to establish what enterprise AEO should become. This is an opportunity for a proven AEO leader to inherit meaningful momentum, build a critical enterprise capability, and directly influence the future of digital discovery at scale.

About Skill:

Skill connects the best professional, IT, engineering, financial and administrative talent with the world's biggest brands. Our eligible talent get access to benefits such as health benefit contributions, retirement plans with match and flexible spending accounts.

Skill is an equal-opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to age, race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics. We're about creating an inclusive environment-one where different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are valued, and everyone can contribute, grow their careers, and thrive.