What an SEO Job Title Describes
An SEO job title names a person's function within the discipline of improving a website's visibility in organic search. The field has matured considerably, and what was once handled by a single generalist is now split across content, technical, analytics, outreach, and strategy functions. As a result, job titles carry real information about scope and seniority - but only if you know how to read them, because the industry has never standardised its vocabulary. An SEO Manager at a five-person agency and an SEO Manager at a global retailer may do almost entirely different work.
For hiring managers, the title you advertise determines the applicants you attract. For practitioners, the title on your profile shapes the opportunities recruiters surface to you. And for business owners buying services, understanding these roles helps you evaluate whether an agency or freelancer actually has the specific capability your site needs.
How AAMAX.CO Gives You a Full SEO Team
Hiring a single in-house person means choosing which SEO discipline you get and which you go without. Working with us means you get all of them. AAMAX.CO is a full service digital marketing company offering web development, digital marketing, and SEO services worldwide, and our engagements bring together technical specialists who can fix crawl and rendering problems in your codebase, content strategists who build topical authority, link acquisition specialists who earn genuine authority, and analysts who report on revenue rather than vanity metrics. If you are weighing the cost of a senior hire against the breadth you actually need, our SEO services deliver the whole function for less than assembling it yourself. Hire us and skip the eighteen-month team-building exercise.
Entry-Level and Junior Titles
SEO Assistant or SEO Executive. Typically a first role in the field. Responsibilities centre on execution under supervision: keyword research support, on-page implementation, metadata writing, internal linking, basic reporting, and competitive research. Success at this level looks like reliability, accuracy, and curiosity.
SEO Analyst. Slightly more data oriented. This person lives in Search Console, analytics platforms, and rank tracking tools, building reports, spotting anomalies, segmenting performance, and increasingly writing spreadsheet formulas or light scripts to handle large exports.
Junior SEO Specialist. Often functionally similar to an executive role, with the title chosen to signal a defined specialism rather than general marketing support.
Mid-Level Titles
SEO Specialist. The workhorse title of the industry. A specialist owns discrete projects end to end - a content cluster, a site section, a set of technical fixes - and can diagnose problems independently. Expect competence across keyword research, on-page optimisation, basic technical auditing, and content briefing.
Technical SEO Specialist or Technical SEO Engineer. Focused on crawlability, indexation, rendering, site architecture, structured data, page speed and Core Web Vitals, log file analysis, internationalisation with hreflang, and migration planning. These practitioners are comfortable reading HTML, understanding how JavaScript frameworks render, and working directly with developers. On large sites, this is often the highest-leverage role in the team.
SEO Content Strategist or Content SEO Manager. Owns the intersection of editorial and search: topic and cluster planning, search intent mapping, briefing and editing writers, internal linking strategy, content refresh programmes, and pruning underperforming pages. Strong candidates think in terms of covering a subject comprehensively rather than chasing individual keywords.
Link Building or Digital PR Specialist. Focused on earning authority through relationships, newsworthy assets, expert commentary, and outreach. Increasingly overlaps with public relations, since the durable links come from genuine coverage rather than placements.
Local SEO Specialist. Concentrates on business profile optimisation, location pages, local citations, review acquisition and management, and map pack visibility. Essential for multi-location service businesses.
E-commerce SEO Specialist. Deals with faceted navigation, product and category page optimisation, product schema, out-of-stock handling, and the peculiar index bloat problems large catalogues create.
Senior and Leadership Titles
SEO Manager. Owns strategy and delivery for a site or portfolio, manages junior team members or agency relationships, sets priorities against business goals, and reports to marketing leadership. The role is roughly half practitioner and half planner.
SEO Lead or Senior SEO Manager. Broader ownership, often across multiple markets, brands, or product lines, with more emphasis on forecasting, resourcing, and cross-functional influence with product and engineering teams.
Head of SEO or Head of Organic Growth. Sets the organic strategy for the business, owns the budget, hires the team, and defends investment at the leadership table. Increasingly this role covers organic visibility broadly, including app stores, video platforms, marketplaces, and AI answer engines rather than web search alone.
Director of SEO or VP of Organic Growth. Executive scope, typically in larger organisations, integrating organic search with the full acquisition mix and long-term commercial planning.
SEO Consultant. An independent expert engaged for strategy, audits, and advisory rather than day-to-day execution. Seniority is signalled by track record rather than by the title itself.
Emerging and Adjacent Titles
The rise of AI-generated answers has produced a wave of new titles: Generative Engine Optimisation Specialist, AI Search Strategist, Answer Engine Optimisation Manager, and similar. The underlying work involves making a brand's expertise discoverable, quotable, and citable by AI systems, which shares much with classic SEO but adds new measurement problems and new content formats. We treat this as a natural extension of search work and offer it as dedicated GEO services alongside traditional optimisation.
You will also encounter hybrid titles where SEO is one component: Growth Marketer, Content Marketing Manager, Organic Acquisition Lead, Digital Marketing Manager, or Web Performance Manager. These indicate that search sits within a wider remit, which can mean valuable breadth or dangerously thin focus depending on the organisation.
Advice for Hiring and for Building a Career
If you are hiring, write the job description before you choose the title, then pick the title that most accurately reflects the work. Be explicit about whether the role is primarily technical, content, or link focused, because candidates self-select heavily on that signal. Test for diagnostic reasoning in interviews rather than for tool familiarity - ask a candidate to explain how they would investigate a thirty percent traffic drop, and listen for structured thinking.
If you are building a career, specialise deliberately once you have a broad foundation. Technical depth, data fluency, and genuine writing ability are the three capabilities that most reliably raise seniority and compensation. Keep a portfolio of documented outcomes - what you changed, what happened, how you measured it - because in a field with inconsistent titles, evidence travels further than labels.
Final Thoughts
An SEO job title is a rough map, not a precise specification. Read it alongside the responsibilities, the size of the site, the reporting line, and the tools involved before drawing conclusions. Whether you are hiring your first specialist, restructuring an existing team, or deciding between building in-house and partnering with an agency, start from the work your website actually needs and let the titles follow. The businesses that win in organic search are the ones that cover technical health, content depth, and authority together - however they choose to label the people doing it.
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