SEO Manager

About the role

We are looking for an experienced SEO Manager to own our organic search strategy across Southeast Asia and to build the SEO team from the ground up. You will lead technical SEO, content strategy, and link building across multiple markets and languages, and you will be measured on real business outcomes: organic traffic growth, keyword rankings, and conversions from organic search.

This is a builder role. In the early months you will work hands-on across the whole function, then define the team structure, hire the right people, and grow them into a high-performing unit. If you want the freedom to shape a team and a strategy rather than inherit one, this role is for you.

Key responsibilities

• Own and deliver the overall SEO strategy and roadmap across Southeast Asian markets, with clear quarterly targets for traffic, rankings, and organic conversions.
• Lead technical SEO: site architecture, crawlability, indexation, page speed and Core Web Vitals, structured data, canonical tags, and hreflang for multi-market, multi-language sites.
• Run keyword research and competitor analysis for each target market, and turn the findings into content briefs and a prioritized content plan.
• Set market priorities and allocate effort across countries based on search volume, competition, and commercial opportunity.
• Manage on-page optimization across the site: titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal linking, and content structure.
• Build and manage off-page strategy, including link building, digital PR, and partner outreach, with a strong focus on link quality over volume.
• Oversee localized SEO across markets, briefing native-language writers and translators so local pages are properly optimized rather than directly translated.
• Work closely with developers and product teams to scope, prioritize, and validate SEO fixes and new page templates.
• Manage external agencies, freelancers, and content vendors: set the brief, review the output, and hold them to agreed deliverables.
• Build and maintain reporting dashboards, and present monthly performance reviews with clear insights and next actions for senior management.

Team Building and Leadership

• Define the SEO team structure: decide which roles are needed first, and whether each is best filled in-house, by a freelancer, or by an agency.
• Write job descriptions, run interviews, and make hiring recommendations, working together with HR and senior management.
• Onboard new team members and set clear goals, responsibilities, and performance expectations for each role.
• Coach and develop the team through regular one-on-ones, feedback, and training, and build a culture of testing and learning.
• Plan the team budget and headcount alongside management, and justify each hire with a clear business case.
• Build and maintain internal processes, documentation, and quality standards so the team's work stays consistent as it grows.

About you

• 5–7 years of hands-on SEO experience, including at least 2 years leading a team or running a full SEO programme.
• Direct experience hiring and developing people: writing job descriptions, interviewing candidates, onboarding, and managing performance.
• A proven track record of growing organic traffic and conversions, with numbers you can talk through.
• Strong technical SEO knowledge: crawling and indexing, JavaScript rendering, site speed, redirects, schema markup, and log file basics.
• Confident with the core toolset: Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, Ahrefs or Semrush, Screaming Frog, and Looker Studio.
• Experience running link building or digital PR campaigns in competitive niches.
• Comfortable working with data: able to pull, clean, and analyse performance data in Excel or Google Sheets and explain it simply.
• Strong written and verbal English, and the ability to manage native-language writers and translators across different markets.
• Able to work with developers, explain SEO requirements clearly, and defend priorities with evidence.
• Comfortable being hands-on in the early stage while the team is still small, and able to switch between doing the work and leading it.