SEO Team Lead

Liberty Marketing; Cardiff; Hybrid; GBP 45,000 - 55,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

36 days off a year

One day a week in Cardiff office

Quarterly visits for remote workers

Job summary

Liberty Marketing in Cardiff is seeking an experienced SEO team lead to own the SEO function, manage people and client engagements, and drive revenue growth. You’ll report to the Organic Search Director and have room to shape the service, team structure and how we exceed client expectations.

You’ll be supported by the ops team, collaborate with other channel leaders, and lead cross‑functional efforts to win new business, improve margins and deliver measurable results.

Qualifications

• Managed a team of SEO specialists in an agency setting.
• Experience at an agency with 20–100 staff across SEO, content, digital PR, paid media.
• Grew agency client lists and revenue, not only maintained them.
• Hired, coached and managed underperformance to deliver client outcomes.
• Comfortable with commercial conversations about budget and margins.
• Experience in ecommerce, B2B lead generation, beauty and wellbeing, or financial services.

Responsibilities

• Grow the SEO channel with more clients and work per client.
• Lead SEO portion of client pitches and set revenue/lead forecasts.
• Hire, develop and manage team; address underperformance swiftly.
• Keep the service current; align SEO, content and digital PR for visibility.
• Be escalation point for campaigns off track and drive high-priority stories.
• Collaborate with Paid Media, Social, Content and Client Services for cross-channel thinking.

Skills

SEO leadership

Team management

Agency experience

Job description

Liberty Marketing, Cardiff £45,000 - £55,000 depending on experience Hybrid (one day a week in the office) or remote with quarterly visits options available

The Job

You'd run our SEO team: its people, its clients and its revenue number. You'd report to our Organic Search Director, and you'd have the room to make real decisions about how the service works, who's on the team and how to exceed our client’s expectations.

Supported by the ops team, you’ll have the data you need available to make decisions (revenue, margin, utilisation etc.) The Organic Search Director will collaborate with you and you’d work together on significant decisions. You’ll sit alongside a group of other channel leaders working the same challenges in order to grow their own teams (Social, Content, Digital PR and Paid Media). You’ll be responsible for owning the outcome; grow the amount of work the SEO team is doing quarter on quarter, and develop the team accordingly. You’ll be supported and coached by senior leadership to do so.

What you'd be doing

Articulating value: setting the right targets with clients, and making sure the team hits them and can show that it has. That means agreeing KPIs that fit what a client can spend and what the market allows, building the plan to get there, and running a team that measures the right things, reports them clearly and can explain to a founder or a marketing director exactly what our work has done for their business.

Additionally:

• Grow the channel. More clients, more work per client, and pitches won from new business (you’d be leading the SEO part of client pitches, and setting revenue/lead forecasts).
• Hire, develop and manage people. Coach your team, deal with any underperformance swiftly, and decide when to make the next full time hire.
• Keep the service current. Search is changing faster than it has in years. We want someone with views on how AI answers are reshaping the customer journey, and who can get SEO, content and digital PR working as one unit to earn visibility in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and whatever comes next.
• Be the escalation point when a client or a campaign is off track, and lead the high priority QSRs where the commercial story gets told (what has the client spent and what have the results been).
• Work with Paid Media, Social, Content, Digital PR and Client Services to ensure a clients gets joined up cross channel thinking.

How billable you are will vary. Some weeks you'll be mostly in client work and pitches, some weeks mostly running the team. Our Team Leads often swing how billable they are depending on what's needed in order to grow the team. The measure is whether the team's revenue and margin are growing.

Who we think this is

• You've managed a team of SEO specialists in an agency and been judged on client outcomes (leads, revenue, profit), not just rankings and traffic.
• You've probably been at an agency of 20 to 100 people, with SEO, content, digital PR, paid media and social on the services list.
• You've grown an agency’s client list and revenue, not just maintained it.
• You've hired, developed and, managed underperformance.
• You're comfortable in commercial conversations: with a founder asking why the spend is worth it, and with an agency colleague asking what margin we're making.
• You've worked in at least one of ecommerce, B2B lead generation, beauty and wellbeing, or financial services.

If you're a strong SEO strategist who'd rather stay close to the work than own the team’s business outcomes, we do have strategist roles, and we'd be glad to talk about those instead. This is a business focused role, for someone who wants to lead the team.

About Liberty

We've been in Cardiff since 2008 and we're one of the largest independent digital agencies in Wales. We were chosen this year by Visit Wales for the biggest marketing account in the country. Our CEO, Gareth, is a true digital marketer who built an agency, and sits on the board of the CIM. Doing good marketing is at the core of what we stand for. Our people speak at Hero Conf, Brighton SEO and Women in Tech.

You’d be joining an SEO team known for doing some exciting work: Universal Music Group trusted us with the technical SEO for a migration of 22 websites across 17 territories. Our local SEO for Pizza Express generated over £36m in extra table bookings in 18 months. Peacocks saw a 98% year-on-year increase in organic revenue. San Carlo took around £1m of December bookings from organic search. Aldermore Bank now gets regular traffic and conversions from LLM search off the back of our work, and a single Astutis digital PR campaign earned 54 new AI citations.

Our values are Accountable, Brave and Curious. In practice this means that you own the outcome, say when something isn't working, and keep looking for a better way to do it.

• 36 days off a year (25 holiday, bank holidays and Christmas closure)
• One day a week in the Cardiff office if you're local; quarterly visits if you're not