Search Marketing Manager

Varsity Brands

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Manager, Search Marketing (SEO/AIO/AEO/GEO) is responsible for driving discoverability, qualified traffic, and downstream performance across a portfolio of web properties serving both B2B and DTC audiences. This role owns the organic search and AI/LLM visibility strategy across sites focused on brand awareness, product and solution discovery, and conversion, with lead generation as the primary B2B outcome and e-commerce sales as the primary DTC outcome. This role must operate fluently across diverse intent models, customer journeys, and site architectures, balancing brand-building and demand capture while ensuring technical consistency and governance at scale. The Manager will partner closely with Marketing, Innovation (UX/Development), Digital Merchandising, Content, Analytics, and external agencies to ensure that SEO and AI-driven discovery are embedded across experiences rather than treated as a downstream optimization. This role ensures that as the organization operates across multiple brands, audiences, and business models, search and AI-driven discovery remain a strategic growth lever, not a fragmented optimization exercise. It protects brand visibility, accelerates product and solution discovery, and drives measurable business outcomes, today through traditional search and tomorrow through AI-mediated experiences. Success requires deep technical SEO expertise, strong analytical judgment, and demonstrated curiosity and experimentation in the rapidly evolving AI/LLM discovery landscape, where search visibility increasingly extends beyond classic SERPs.

Requirements

Demonstrated success in balancing brand awareness, discovery, and conversion outcomes within a single search strategy
Strong technical SEO expertise and ability to partner effectively with engineering teams
Comfort working across both lead-generation and e-commerce business models
Strong analytical skills and experience in tying organic performance to downstream business outcomes
Clear interest in and experimentation with AI-driven search and LLM-based discovery
Portfolio thinker: Able to balance competing priorities across sites and audiences
Technical translator: Bridges marketing needs and engineering execution effectively
Systems-oriented: Builds governance and standards that scale
Curious and adaptive: Actively tests and learns in the evolving AI/LLM landscape.
Influential collaborator: Drives alignment without direct authority
8+ years of progressive SEO experience managing multiple web properties with differing audiences and conversion models

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with complex product catalogs, solution taxonomies, or multi-brand architectures preferred
Exposure to experimentation, CRO, and personalization programs that intersect with search preferred
Experience supporting both B2B and DTC audiences within a shared or federated web ecosystem preferred
Experience partnering with paid media teams/agencies on landing page and discovery alignment preferred

Responsibilities

Own and evolve a portfolio-wide search strategy spanning multiple web properties with distinct audiences, business models, and conversion goals.
Balance upper-funnel brand visibility, mid-funnel product and solution discovery, and lower-funnel conversion optimization across B2B and DTC properties.
Define search priorities by property, audience, and intent type (informational, commercial, navigational, transactional), ensuring alignment with broader marketing and business objectives.
Establish and enforce SEO governance standards that scale across sites, templates, and business units while allowing for necessary differentiation between B2B and DTC experiences.
Serve as the marketing-side technical authority for SEO across multiple site architectures, content models, and merchandising frameworks.
Partner with Innovation UX and Development teams to define technical SEO requirements and acceptance criteria for new site modules, templates, releases, and migrations.
Own SEO implications for: Crawlability, indexation, and rendering, Site architecture and internal linking at scale, Performance and Core Web Vitals, Structured data and entity clarity across products, solutions, and content, and Canonicalization, redirects, pagination, and faceted navigation
Implement monitoring and controls to rapidly identify and mitigate SEO regressions across all properties and business lines.
Develop scalable frameworks for search-driven content and discovery across B2B and DTC use cases, including: Topic clusters and solution ecosystems (B2B), Product discovery, category optimization, and comparison content (DTC), and Brand and authority-building content that supports both audiences
Partner with Content Production and Brand Marketing to ensure content is optimized for search intent while maintaining brand integrity and audience relevance.
Guide content creation, refresh, and consolidation strategies using performance data, competitive analysis, and evolving search behavior.
Own the approach to improving visibility and accuracy across AI-powered discovery surfaces, including AI Overviews and LLM-based assistants.
Assess how B2B and DTC content is retrieved, summarized, and cited by LLMs, identifying gaps in authority, clarity, and entity representation.
Design and execute experiments to improve AI-surface inclusion and brand representation, including: Structured data and entity optimization, Content structure and formatting, and Authority and topical depth strategies
Translate emerging LLM trends into practical guidance for content, experience design, and technical implementation.
Own organic search and AI-discovery performance reporting across all properties, with clear differentiation between brand, discovery, and conversion metrics.
Partner with Analytics & Optimization to connect SEO efforts to: B2B lead quality and conversion contribution and DTC revenue, conversion rate, and average order value (where applicable)
Build dashboards and monitoring routines that surface both portfolio-level trends and property-specific performance drivers.
Communicate insights, risks, and opportunities in a way that informs roadmap decisions and cross-functional trade-offs.
Act as the primary SEO and AI-discovery partner to: Digital Experience Lead: CRO roadmap, experimentation, and personalization impacts, Innovation UX & Development: technical implementation, sequencing, and QA, Digital Merchandising: taxonomy, navigation, product, and solution discovery patterns, Brand Marketing Business Partners: campaign alignment, segment priorities, and messaging consistency, Content Production / Copywriting: scalable content systems and optimization standards, and Paid Media AOR: landing page alignment, insight sharing, and major launch coordination
Advocate for early SEO involvement in planning cycles to avoid late-stage rework and performance risk.