VP – SEO & GEO

Hard Rock Digital•United Kingdom, ENG

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Hard Rock Digital is building a team focused on becoming the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We’re building a team that resonates passion for learning, operating, and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We care about each customer interaction, experience, behavior, and insight and strive to ensure we’re always acting authentically. Rooted in the kindred spirits of Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the new Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known the world over as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We’re taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space. This is a leadership role reporting directly to the President, carrying full accountability for how Hard Rock Digital is found, read, and ranked — by humans and by machines. You will be responsible for leading the team vision and determining where we invest our time and resources to build a lasting content marketing strategy that stays ahead of one of the most competitive industries in the country. We are looking for someone who has strong tactical opinions about technical SEO hygiene and can also present a content investment thesis to the executive team. You'll build and lead a team, but you'll also get your hands dirty — writing briefs, reviewing technical audits, and staying ahead of how Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and whatever comes next are changing the search landscape.

Requirements

10+ years in SEO with at least 3 years in a senior leadership role managing cross-functional teams
Demonstrated experience in a high-volume, multi-market environment — regulated industries (gaming, sports betting, finance, healthcare) a strong plus
Hands-on experience with GEO / AI search visibility
Proven track record growing organic traffic and rankings at scale, including in competitive, content-heavy verticals
Equally comfortable writing a content brief and presenting a board-level strategy
Deep technical SEO knowledge — you can read a crawl report, diagnose a Core Web Vitals issue, and write a schema markup spec
Strong editorial instincts — you know what good content looks like and why it ranks
Data-driven: you build dashboards, track the right KPIs, and make decisions with evidence
Genuinely excited about AI search and what it means for the industry
Collaborative leader who earns trust across Engineering, Product, and Marketing
High sense of urgency; you move fast and expect the same from your team

Responsibilities

Lead all SEO strategy and execution across Hard Rock Digital's portfolio — sportsbook, casino, and ancillary products — spanning every active and upcoming market. You'll set the keyword strategy, own the content hierarchy, and drive ranking performance from launch through maturity in each market.
Own Hard Rock Digital's strategy for visibility in AI-powered search surfaces — including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and emerging answer engines. This means building the frameworks, content structures, and entity strategies that ensure HRD is cited, surfaced, and trusted as AI search becomes the dominant discovery channel.
Define and execute content strategies across web and mobile that serve both user intent and algorithmic performance. You'll lead editorial direction, content calendar ownership, and quality standards — ensuring every page we publish earns its place.
Bring a search-informed perspective to external content channels. You'll have meaningful influence over affiliate strategy, media partnerships, and influencer content — ensuring these channels amplify organic authority. You'll collaborate closely with business development and marketing to align external partnerships with content and SEO goals.
Own the technical SEO roadmap in partnership with Engineering and Product. This includes site architecture, crawlability, Core Web Vitals, structured data, hreflang, and domain strategy across a multi-state, multi-product environment. You'll be the voice of SEO throughout the product development process.