Additional Locations: New York office is preferred; Boston, MA is a secondary location
Overview:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is looking for a seasoned Search Engine Optimization expert to join our Digital Marketing team as our SEO Director. This is a new in-house role at HMH as we look to build our internal digital muscles. In this role, the SEO Director will be an individual contributor leveraging his/her skills along with the necessary tools to develop, drive and implement SEO strategies and best practices as part of HMH’s K-12 Marketing organization.
The SEO Director will be tasked with developing organic search marketing initiatives that will improve the visibility of our website content along with driving more revenue from our eCommerce channel. Because this is a new role and a new focus within HMH, it will be essential that the SEO Director is able to communicate effectively and educate the different stakeholders and content producers about the various facets of search engine optimization.
As the owner of all things SEO for HMH, the Director will serve as the key liaison between multiple functions at HMH, inside and outside of the Marketing department, including web content developers, the website’s business product owner, and IT. This role’s performance will be measured by assessing impact to keyword rankings, traffic to the site, and eCommerce revenue, amongst others metrics.
Primary Responsibilities:
AUDIT AND OPTIMIZE EXISTING WEB PROPERTIES
Levarging the necessary tools, the SEO Director will conduct a full audit of existing web properties to identify gaps and opportunites. This will include both on-page evaluation (html constructs, tags, keywords, etc.), off-page evaluation (inbound links, link analysis, etc.), and technical evaluation (sitemaps, robots.txt, 301 redirects, site performance, site structure, etc.)
Following an initial audit and plan to optimize and resolve, the SEO Director will monitor and optimize on an on-going basis.
DEVELOP SEO STRATEGY
The SEO Director will be responsible for creating a short term and long term road map to deliver against traffic and eCommerce goals for our web properties. The person in this role will:
- Leverage keyword research, data analysis, user experience research, and knowledge of SEO to identify growth opportunities
- In partnership with our content developers, create a content plan that aligns with SEO opportunities and goals by identifying ways to improve existing content and identify new content opportunities
It will be essential for this experienced influencer to work cross functionally with our web team, content developers and IT partners to execute the SEO strategy.
SEO REPORTING
The SEO Director will work with our Digital Analyst to build a reporting framework to monitor search engine rankings, traffic generation, and track performance against goals
Education and Relevant Experience:
- Bachelors (B.A. or B.S.) from a four-year college or equivalent
- 5+ years focused hands-on experience in search engine optimization, leveraging only white hat practices
Knowledge, Skills and Other Requirements:
- Expert level knowledge of technical and content related SEO strategies
- Strong technical background is preferred
- Adherence to the highest standards of SEO
- Experience in link building, content generation & conversion optimization
- Keyword Planner and other tools to uncover valuable queries
- Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Moz, SEMRush and other resources to track and report SEO performance
- Clear and effective written and verbal communication skills and ability to interact with all levels of end users and technical resources
- Self-motivated team player who is results oriented.