Head of SEO & AI Search
The Role
We're looking for a Head of SEO & AI Search to own the search practice at Surge45: its standards, its strategy, and its commercial results across the SaaS portfolio. This is a 12-month contract role for someone who has already led search at an agency or in-house. You'll decide how we do organic search across technical SEO, content strategy, link acquisition and AI search, and you'll be accountable for turning it into pipeline and ARR rather than ranking screenshots. SaaS experience is essential. So is hands-on experience with Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and LLM platform visibility: optimising for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and SGE is a core part of this role, not a bonus.
What You'll Do
- Own the search practice: strategy, standards, and commercial performance across the portfolio
- Lead SEO strategy directly on 4–6 of the highest-value SaaS accounts
- Conduct technical SEO audits, prioritise fixes, and oversee implementation
- Develop keyword strategy mapped to funnel stages: awareness, consideration, intent
- Brief and review SEO-optimised content in collaboration with content strategists
- Design link acquisition programmes through digital PR, outreach and partnerships, and govern how the client’s team runs them
- Set the standards for AI search and LLM visibility (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini citations) and review published work against them
- Specify the Looker Studio / GA4 reporting model and review what the client’s team builds against it
- Identify and advise on Core Web Vitals, crawl budgets, and structured data implementation
- Present performance reviews to client stakeholders monthly
- Set the quality bar for the search team and review published work against it
- Scope and price search retainers, and lead the search half of new business pitches
What We're Looking For
- 7+ years in SEO, including time leading a team or owning a practice. SaaS experience is essential, not just preferred
- Proven track record of growing organic traffic and pipeline specifically for SaaS products (please include examples in your application)
- Deep expertise in technical SEO: crawling, indexing, Core Web Vitals, schema markup
- Strong understanding of SaaS buyer journeys and funnel-stage content mapping
- Confident in analysing GA4, Search Console, and rank tracking data independently
- Experience briefing and quality-reviewing long-form SEO content
- Hands-on experience with AI search optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), including LLM platform visibility (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini), entity optimisation, and SGE. This is essential, not optional
- Excellent client communication and presentation skills
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with Python or JavaScript for SEO automation tasks
- Experience managing international or multilingual SEO programmes
- Previous experience at a SaaS marketing agency
About Surge45
Surge45 is a specialist SaaS SEO and AI search consultancy helping companies achieve T2D3 growth: Triple, Triple, Double, Double, Double. We advise across the full discovery and growth system — SEO, AI search, paid acquisition, lead generation, CRO, lifecycle, attribution and retention — setting the strategy and governing the outcome. Our clients’ teams and their agencies do the execution.
We work with post-PMF to scale-stage SaaS companies and have a direct line of sight from our work to $100M+ in client pipeline. We're a remote-first team with a high-trust, high-autonomy culture.
Tools & Technologies
Role Summary
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Apply below in three short steps — about five minutes, CV attached along the way. Our team reviews every application personally, typically within 3–5 business days.