Associate Director of SEO & AI Growth Strategy

The Digital Stronghold; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

The Digital Stronghold is seeking an Associate Director of SEO & AI Growth Strategy to lead organic search and AI-driven discovery across its growing portfolio of brands. This senior individual contributor role reports to the SVP of Consumer Marketing and sets strategy, standards, and priorities across brand teams and Product & Technology.

You’ll own technical SEO, forecasting, and the roadmap for search and discovery, ensuring sites are crawlable, fast, and understood by search engines and AI.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of SEO and search marketing experience, ideally in ecommerce.
• Experience supporting multiple brands or sites, in-house or at an agency.
• Strong technical SEO skills, including Shopify experience, plus Google Search Console, GA4 and a major SEO platform.

Responsibilities

• Grow organic search and AI-referred traffic into profitable, scalable acquisition channels for every brand, and set targets with brand leaders.
• Build a search and discovery roadmap for each brand, prioritized by revenue impact, and manage one shared backlog across the portfolio.
• Keep every brand’s site technically sound and easy for search engines and AI systems to understand, including crawlability, structured data, site speed and migrations.
• Make collection pages, product pages and editorial content work harder in search results and AI-generated answers, in partnership with brand, merchandising and copy teams.
• Track how each brand shows up in AI answers, fix gaps and inaccuracies, and test new approaches as search changes.
• Create a shared playbook and spread what works across brands, so a win for one brand benefits all of them.

Skills

SEO Strategy

Technical SEO

Ecommerce SEO

Shopify

GA4

Google Search Console

AI in search

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Shopify

GA4

Google Search Console

SEO Platform

Job description

Associate Director of SEO & AI Growth Strategy

The Digital Stronghold - Remote Full-time

Help five distinctive brands in a growing portfolio get found in search, and in what AI says.

How people discover brands is changing quickly. Customers still search on Google, but they’re also asking AI assistants what to buy. We’re looking for a Director of Search and Discovery to make sure every brand in our portfolio is visible, accurately represented and recommended wherever customers are looking.

About The Digital Stronghold

The Digital Stronghold is home to a growing portfolio of consumer apparel and accessories brands, including Boston Scally, Taylor Stitch, The Tie Bar, Pedal Mafia and Glade Optics. Each brand has its own identity, customer and culture, from heritage menswear to unapologetic performance cycling to responsibly built outdoor apparel. We give them shared capabilities in people, finance, technology and operations, so they can grow further and faster than they could on their own, without losing what makes them different.

The Role

Reporting to the SVP of Consumer Marketing, you’ll own organic search and AI-driven discovery across the portfolio. This is a senior individual contributor role with a lot of influence. You’ll set the strategy and standards, decide where effort will pay off most, and partner with brand teams and Product & Technology to make it happen.

What You’ll Do

• Grow organic search and AI-referred traffic into profitable, scalable acquisition channels for every brand, and set targets with brand leaders.
• Build a search and discovery roadmap for each brand, prioritized by revenue impact, and manage one shared backlog across the portfolio.
• Keep every brand’s site technically sound and easy for search engines and AI systems to understand, including crawlability, structured data, site speed and migrations.
• Make collection pages, product pages and editorial content work harder in search results and AI-generated answers, in partnership with brand, merchandising and copy teams.
• Track how each brand shows up in AI answers, fix gaps and inaccuracies, and test new approaches as search changes.
• Create a shared playbook and spread what works across brands, so a win for one brand benefits all of them.

What You’ll Bring

• 8+ years of SEO and search marketing experience, ideally in ecommerce, with a track record of growing organic revenue.
• Experience supporting multiple brands or sites, in-house or at an agency.
• Strong technical SEO skills, including Shopify experience, plus Google Search Console, GA4 and a major SEO platform.
• The ability to write clear requirements for engineers and to influence teams without direct authority.
• Strong analytical skills, with a talent for turning data into clear recommendations for executives.
• Real curiosity about how AI is changing discovery, and an eagerness to test new approaches.

Why Join Us

• Shape search strategy across five distinctive brands at once.
• Lead the portfolio into AI-driven discovery, a field that’s still being defined.
• Join a team guided by values like Own the outcome, Learn and share and Build for the long haul.

The Digital Stronghold is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.