Director of SEO and Agentic Search

LawnStarter•Austin, TX

6h•$170,000 - $190,000•Remote

About The Position

LawnStarter is seeking a Director of SEO and Agentic Search to lead organic search and AI discovery across its brand portfolio. This role reports directly to the CMO and operates at the intersection of content, technical SEO, product, and AI-powered search. The primary focus is on ensuring LawnStarter's brands are the answer, not just ranking on page one, in emerging search environments like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI. This involves building brand presence across various platforms and leveraging proprietary first-party data to create original, expert content that AI systems reward. The position requires a strategic leader who can set vision, define roadmaps, and establish standards for competing in the evolving search landscape. The team is intentionally small, focusing on scaling leverage rather than headcount, and the role offers significant influence across company-wide priorities and cross-functional partnerships.

Requirements

Proven experience building for the future of search, specifically understanding and articulating the implications of AI search for a business.
Deep understanding of external visibility as foundational, recognizing that authority comes from being cited and mentioned across external networks (journalists, creators, review platforms, communities).
Experience building external earned media strategies and navigating those ecosystems as a core SEO strategy.
Business mindset, tying organic initiatives to CAC, acquisition, and revenue impact, not just impressions and clicks.
Ability to speak the language of payback periods, cohort economics, and margin contribution.
Demonstrated ability to use data to diagnose issues quickly, make decisions, and act decisively.
Experience leading teams at scale, making necessary talent calls, and building teams from a small core.
Ability to evangelize and sell the vision for SEO and AI Search across the company, influencing roadmaps and securing investment.
Technical fluency in structured data, crawl budgets, and Core Web Vitals, with the ability to step back and set direction.
Daily use of AI tools for research, content, analysis, and workflow acceleration.
Sufficient understanding of how LLMs and generative AI work to build an AI Search strategy grounded in how these systems discover and evaluate content.
Experience with no-code web publishing platforms and direct control over thousands of pages, including schema markup and meta data.

Nice To Haves

Experience in the home services industry.
Experience managing multiple brands simultaneously.
Experience with large-scale technical SEO migrations or overhauls.

Responsibilities

Own organic strategy across the brand portfolio, including vision, roadmap, and standards for competing in organic search and AI-powered discovery.
Establish AI Search visibility, ensuring brands are cited as authoritative sources in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and emerging conversational search surfaces through answer-first content architecture, entity authority, and structured data.
Manage technical SEO and architecture, including large-scale technical infrastructure, Core Web Vitals, structured data, crawl efficiency, and product architecture decisions that drive organic performance.
Direct content strategy and production, overseeing editorial work that produces ranking, cited, and converting pages, guides, studies, and resources.
Lead team leadership and hiring, assessing the current core team, making talent decisions, and building the necessary team for the new direction.
Foster cross-functional partnerships with Engineering, Analytics, and Data to build the technical and measurement foundation for operating organic search at scale.
Diagnose and address significant traffic declines, developing recovery plans for algorithm shifts, content quality issues, technical debt, or AI Search cannibalization.
Develop a structured, repeatable approach to AI Search visibility to gain a competitive advantage.
Shift from a defensive to an offensive posture in organic discovery, leading the next era of search across multiple verticals.
Build a measurement approach for AI Search that turns raw signals into actionable insights for decision-making and progress demonstration.