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What does an SEO Specialist do?

SEO specialists grow organic traffic and signups by fixing what stops search engines from understanding a site and by building pages people are searching for.

Open roles now
6
Remote
33%
Most-requested tool
Generative AI

The job

An SEO specialist owns organic search as a channel. The job splits three ways: technical SEO (can search engines crawl, render and index the site), content SEO (do we have the right page for what people search, and is it the best answer), and authority (do other sites link to and mention us). Most roles lean toward one of the three, and the job post usually tells you which.

The work has changed a lot. AI Overviews and answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity now answer many informational queries directly, so good SEOs spend more time on queries with commercial intent, on pages built from data nobody else has, and on making their brand the source those engines cite. Programmatic SEO, where one template plus a real dataset produces hundreds of useful pages, has become a core skill at startups.

In-house SEOs work closely with content, product and engineering. Much of the job is persuasion: getting a fix into an engineering sprint or convincing a writer that the page needs to answer a different question.

A typical week

  • Review Search Console for pages losing clicks or impressions and work out why
  • Write briefs for two or three new pages based on keyword and SERP research
  • Crawl the site and file tickets for broken internal links, redirect chains or indexation problems
  • Check how the brand shows up in AI answers for the queries that matter most
  • Report weekly organic signups or pipeline, not just traffic, to the marketing lead

How they're measured

  • Organic signups, demos or revenue (the number that matters)
  • Non-brand organic clicks and impressions
  • Rankings for a tracked set of commercial keywords
  • Pages indexed versus pages published
  • Citations and mentions in AI search answers

Skills that matter

Technical auditing
Crawling, rendering, canonicals and indexation decide whether good pages count at all.
Keyword and SERP research
Picking the right query and intent matters more than any on-page tweak.
Content briefing
Most SEO wins ship through writers, so the brief has to be clear.
Analytics
Search Console, GA4 and basic SQL to tie traffic to signups.
Working with engineers
Fixes only matter once they ship.
AI search awareness
Knowing how answer engines pick sources is now part of the job.

Tools employers ask for

Share of 7 SEO job posts on HeyMarketers in the last 12 months that name each tool.

  • Generative AI100%
  • ChatGPT57%

Career path

  1. 1

    SEO coordinator or associate

    Keyword research, on-page fixes and reporting under a senior SEO.

  2. 2

    SEO specialist or manager

    Owns a site or section end to end and sets the roadmap.

  3. 3

    Senior SEO or technical SEO lead

    Handles migrations, programmatic builds and large sites.

  4. 4

    Head of SEO or organic growth

    Owns organic as a revenue channel, often with content reporting in.

Open SEO roles by level right now: mid level 50%, lead or director 50%.

How to stand out

  • Show a before-and-after: a site, the change you made and the traffic and signup numbers, with dates.
  • Bring one technical story (a migration, an indexing bug) and one content story (a page or program that ranked).
  • Talk in business outcomes. 'Organic demos up 40%' beats 'traffic up 200%'.
  • Have an opinion on AI search backed by something you've measured.

Preparing for interviews? See the questions SEO specialists get asked, or read a typical job description.

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Open SEO roles

Hiring now: Yotpo, Airbnb, Chime Financial, Inc, Datadog, Stripe.

See all 6 open SEO jobs

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Questions

What does an SEO Specialist do?

An SEO specialist owns organic search as a channel. The job splits three ways: technical SEO (can search engines crawl, render and index the site), content SEO (do we have the right page for what people search, and is it the best answer), and authority (do other sites link to and mention us). Most roles lean toward one of the three, and the job post usually tells you which.

Are SEO specialists remote?

33% of the 6 open SEO roles on HeyMarketers right now are remote. The rest are on-site or hybrid.

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