SEO Manager

Hays Travel • Sunderland, England, United Kingdom • £28.80k - £43k / year • 3w ago

The SEO Manager is responsible for developing and leading strategies that optimise the Hays Travel Groups brand’s visibility, authority, and performance across search engines (Google/Bing), AI‑powered search and generative engines. This includes AI overviews, chat‑based search tools, LLM‑driven answer engines, and multimodal discovery systems.

This role sits at the intersection of traditional SEO, AI content strategy, data optimisation, and prompt‑driven discovery. The SEO GEO Manager ensures that content, data structures, and brand authority are optimised to be correctly understood, surfaced, and cited by search engines and generative AI models.

You will be accountable for driving organic lead generation, strengthening high-intent visibility, and delivering measurable contribution to the sales pipeline through structured, scalable SEO frameworks. You will work closely with Product, Paid Media and Digital Managers

Key Responsibilities

Define, execute, and continuously optimize on-page and off-page SEO, website optimization, link-building initiatives, based on latest best practices and industry standards.
Drive qualified organic lead and pipeline growth with a strong focus on high-intent and revenue-driving keywords.
Lead keyword mapping and content gap analysis by product, division, market and buyer intent.
Optimize existing content and implement changes to landing pages based on performance, intent, and conversion data.
Develop and optimize SEO performance dashboards (rankings, traffic quality, pipeline influence)
Track inclusion rates in AI answers, accuracy of brand citations, and AI‑driven traffic indicators.
Conduct competitive SEO/GEO audits comparing brand representation across major engines.
Contribute to authority-building initiatives (thought leadership content, long-term keyword strategies, YouTube and video SERP exploration).
Enable and train internal stakeholders (content creators, marketers, social) on SEO best practices and frameworks.
Identify high‑value topics where generative engines provide answers and align content creation to gain inclusion.
Manage brand entity optimisation across knowledge graphs, schema markup, and structured data systems.
Optimise content so it is machine‑interpretable, context‑rich, and aligned to LLM retrieval patterns.
Optimise website architecture for AI discoverability, including crawlability, clarity, and structured metadata.

Required Skills & Experience

Essential

Experience in SEO with a strong understanding of AI search, LLMs, or generative AI‑based discovery – minimum of 5 years
Knowledge of structured data, knowledge graphs, and entity optimisation.
Ability to analyse LLM‑generated search experiences and identify optimisation opportunities.
Strong skills with analytics and SERP‑monitoring tools (including AI‑focused visibility tools).
Understanding of content architecture and semantic optimisation.

Desirable

Experience with AI tools or natural language processing.
Familiarity with multimodal search behaviours (voice, image, chat‑based search).
Experience with enterprise‑level SEO.
Technical familiarity with schema markup, HTML, and structured data frameworks.

Personal Attributes

Future‑thinking and enthusiastic about emerging AI trends.
Analytical, curious, and comfortable experimenting with new technologies.
Excellent communication skills with strong stakeholder influence.
Ability to bridge technical, creative, and strategic disciplines.

About Us

As the UK’s largest independent travel agency, Hays Travel specialises in providing good value, quality holidays, alongside excellent customer service. We work with all leading suppliers and can package holidays that include hotels, flights, cruises, tours, attraction tickets, and more. We have over 470 Branches throughout the UK and our Head Office based in Sunderland, is home to tour operator teams, finance, marketing, people/HR and IT, plus many more. We have been operating for over 40 years, and continue to grow each year.

Our values

Our SMILE values are embedded in to our company and ensure our teams work strongly together. You and all of our colleagues will ensure that the Hays Travel values are demonstrated at all times.

Supportive
Motivational
Innovative
Loyal
Excellent

What it’s like to work for us?

Whichever location or department you work in, our people are always at the heart of everything we do. We offer a range of training programmes to help you progress personally and professionally, as we know the benefits of promoting and rewarding our hardworking colleagues are extremely important.

Of course, it's not all about work. We're very sociable and there are always lots of team nights-out and company parties. Plus, there are opportunities to travel abroad on educational trips, and you can also take advantage of our colleague discount when booking your own holidays.

Hays Travel is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of all colleagues. As an accredited employer provider of apprenticeships, we undertake basic checks through the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) to ensure the safety of our apprentices for relevant roles.