GEO/SEO Strategy Director

Company Description

With a history that dates back over 80 years, Starcom is a global communications planning and media leader. We are an agency still grounded in our founding principle that people are at the centre of all we do. Each day, we apply this belief to harness the transformative power of data and technology to inspire and move people and business forward. With more than 7,000 employees in over 100 offices around the world, we are the flagship Publicis Media agency that uses our ‘Power of One’ business model, with teams that span multiple disciplines across clients such as Aldi, P&G, Primark, Samsung, Stellantis, and Visa.

We place a huge focus on our People, and have driven flagship D&I and L&D programmes within Publicis Media; our goal is to help every individual reach their fullest potential, and we encourage everyone to make “Brave Plays” in how they approach their work and their own career development. As a result, we have an exceptionally energised and committed talent base, all of us proud of our welcoming and supportive culture, as evidenced by our recognition as one of Campaign’s Best Places to Work for five years in a row, Media Week's Agency of the Year 2025 and one of the Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2025.

Job Description

What will you be doing?

As our GEO/SEO Strategy Director, you will lead GEO/SEO acceleration by improving how brands, products, services, and locations are discovered, cited, understood, and represented across search engines, AI answer engines, generative platforms, maps, directories, and local-intent journeys.

Responsibilities

• Assess AI visibility, search visibility, citations, sentiment, and source inclusion across priority brands, categories, products, services, and local markets.
• Translate GEO findings into practical SEO, content, technical, structured data, authority, entity, and local search recommendations.
• Support prompt and query strategy for priority consumer journeys, including category questions, brand comparisons, product discovery, service discovery, and “near me”/local-intent searches.
• Partner with S&I, Commerce, PR, Social, Owned, and local market teams to coordinate AEO/GEO activation across the full search and discovery ecosystem.
• Identify priority content gaps, source gaps, entity gaps, technical gaps, authority gaps, and local visibility gaps.
• For MVH and other location-sensitive businesses, assess Google Business Profiles, maps visibility, local landing pages, directory presence, review signals, NAP consistency, service-area relevance, and local schema.
• Recommend improvements to owned content, location pages, service pages, structured data, FAQ content, reviews, internal linking, local authority signals, and source credibility.
• Help define test-and-learn plans that connect activation to measurable AI/search visibility improvement.
• Ensure recommendations are actionable and tied to what internal teams can realistically control.

Qualifications

• Strong SEO background, ideally with exposure to GEO, AEO, AI visibility, LLM citation analysis, or answer engine optimisation.
• Deep understanding of technical SEO, content strategy, entity optimisation, structured data, authority signals, search intent, and local SEO.
• Strong local search experience, including Google Business Profiles, maps visibility, location pages, local directories, reviews, NAP consistency, service-area content, and local schema.
• Familiarity with tools such as Semrush, Profound, Brandlight, Similarweb, Screaming Frog, GSC, GA4, BrightLocal, Yext, Whitespark, MozLocal, or comparable platforms.
• Ability to translate complex AI/search visibility issues into clear, practical actions for non-specialist stakeholders.
• Experience with enterprise brands, multi-location businesses, service businesses, healthcare, veterinary, retail, or multi-market programmes preferred.

Additional Information

Starcom offers a wide range of benefits to support our employees. Full details are shared when you join, but highlights include core benefits such as Pension, Life Assurance, and Private Medical cover, alongside enhanced policies like Reflection Days and Shared Parental Leave.

Publicis Groupe works primarily from the office or our clients' office four days per week. At Starcom, we are proud to be an equal opportunities employer. We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, and do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion or belief, disability, age, citizenship, relationship status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other protected characteristic.

We are committed to providing a fair, accessible, and inclusive recruitment process. If you have any access needs - for example, related to disability, neurodivergence, or a health condition - please let us know. We’ll work with you to ensure the process works for you. Sharing this information will never impact your application.

Guided by our values, we listen with empathy, uplift each other, take responsibility, and embrace change - building a culture where everyone feels seen, respected, and genuinely included.