Senior SEO Manager
You are accountable for SEO outcomes beyond your own portfolio. You oversee other leaders. Your success is defined by the calibre of management below you and the strength of a team that extends beyond your direct oversight. You are accountable for the client portfolios your managers' teams run, rather than running accounts yourself. You make sure expertise in SEO keeps pace with the discipline across teams.
How this role differs
You shift from direct delivery to leading managers. Your personal billable execution drops away, and maintaining excellence across several pods becomes your primary objective.
The Senior Manager delivers the wider outcome through managers and builds successors. The Senior SEO Consultant delivers it through expertise and external standing, accountable for results without controlling the resource.
Roles and responsibilities
- Own an SEO outcome across teams: a service line, a capability, or a standard others are held to.
- Set the SEO standards other managers' accounts are measured against.
- Build the technical case behind significant new business.
- Build successors: SEO people ready to step up before the role exists.
- Make SEO, Digital PR and AI search deliver as one answer across teams rather than three workstreams.
- Lead a set of pods through Managers and Senior Leads, holding them accountable for their own people and commercial outcomes.
- Be accountable for the client portfolios your managers' teams run, holding managers to delivery quality, client outcomes and commercial performance.
- Develop managers: coach them through hard conversations, review their calibration and correct management that is drifting.
- Own the forecast, utilisation and headcount plan for your pods, and defend it in agency planning.
- Act as the senior escalation point for clients: the person who arrives when a relationship is in trouble.
- Run calibration so that ratings and progression decisions mean the same thing in every team.
- Own succession and progression across your pods: who is ready, who is blocked, and who needs a different role rather than a bigger one.
Entry requirements
Gateway skills needed at 8+ in the previous role to step into this one (proposed).
How this role is weighted
Immediate growth path
Owns a function agency-wide, including its commercial performance.
Accountable for outcomes beyond own portfolio or discipline. Same level, no drop in title or reward.