Director, Search Engine Optimization

Upwork ($UPWK) is the world’s work marketplace. We serve everyone from one-person startups to large, Fortune 100 enterprises with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential.

Last year, more than $3.8 billion of work was done through Upwork by skilled professionals who are gaining more control by finding work they are passionate about and innovating their careers.

We are looking for a Director of SEO to lead the strategy for the company’s organic growth. This role involves working closely with and influencing the people, processes, and technology that deliver on this strategic vision. It is an exciting opportunity for a seasoned SEO leader to drive the organic growth of a highly trafficked marketplace for clients and freelance talent.

Your Responsibilities:

• Accountable: Own organic performance on both sides of our Marketplace (Client and Talent) and be accountable for delivering impact against stated goals.
• Strategy: Develop and evolve an SEO strategy to meet and exceed near-term business targets, with a long-range perspective on how we keep steps ahead of the search landscape. Maintain our position in the SERP while also evaluating vectors of growth to further strengthen foundations that drive performance and a trajectory that supports business growth.
• Manage and Support Your Team: Mentor, and provide leadership, and functional guidance (technical and content) while also supporting content creators, web developers, and marketing teams across the org. Be both a coach and a player where required.
• Functional Excellence: Keep our sites and pages technically optimized for mobile users and search performance - including information architecture, schema management, semantic HTML, page speed, and other components of crawling and indexing performance.
• Partnership: Work with cross-functional stakeholders and teams across product, BI, engineering, design, editorial, and marketing to pursue SEO improvements with a keen eye on the user experience. Partner with the SEM team to develop a unified approach to for search in key categories where we want to grow, translating that into tactical activities for both SEO & SEM teams
• Research: Closely monitor the changing SERP landscape and competitor activity to help inform our roadmap and advance business strategies. This includes how AI is impacting user behavior and the search landscape.
• Always Be Testing: Test, innovate, and build solutions with our world-class digital marketing, data science, and big data talent.
• Be …