Off-page SEO Manager

Our smart thinking, expert team is looking to recruit an Off-page SEO Manager to support Varn as we continue to grow our business. Varn is the largest and longest-established specialist SEO agency in the South West, based in the beautiful town of Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, just outside Bath.

The role would typically look like this:

We are looking for someone who can take responsibility and lead on the delivery of off-page SEO and digital PR campaigns for clients, comfortable with client facing responsibilities and team management. With a background in content creation, off-page SEO or digital PR and a minimum of 2 years’ general search marketing experience, you will work with our clients, potential clients and our internal teams to help Varn deliver best-in-class SEO and content. The Off-page SEO Manager will plan and implement off-page SEO strategies and be comfortable with competitor research and campaign ideation and outreach. In addition to this, you will also work directly with our clients, keeping them up to speed with how their campaigns are performing and proactively reaching out to develop new ideas. You will work closely with the Head of Client Services, the Off-page SEO Manager and the wider Varn team. You will also be responsible for helping to train and line-manage junior Off-page SEO team members.

Key Responsibilities of this role would include:

• Off-page SEO specific duties:
• Ideation: You will lead the campaign ideation process, including playing an important part in the idea generation process.
• Content-Driven Link Acquisition: Collaborate with the internal or client’s content team to create high-quality, shareable content (e.g., research studies, infographics, whitepapers) that attracts natural backlinks. Promote and distribute this content to authoritative websites to secure backlinks.
• Content Outreach/Digital PR: Reach out to industry-related websites, blogs, and online publications for guest post opportunities and, ideally, link placements. Promote content via targeted outreach to acquire backlinks from relevant sources. Foster relationships with webmasters and content managers to secure valuable link placements. Maintain our media contact list and develop tactics to reach journalists.
• Link Building: Develop and execute a strategic link-building plan to acquire high-quality, authoritative backlinks. Identify, evaluate, and secure backlinks from relevant industry websites, blogs, and publications. Regularly monitor the link profile and ensure the acquisition of diverse, natural backlinks.
• Brand Mentions & Reputation Management: Track brand mentions online and convert unlinked mentions into backlinks. Monitor and manage brand reputation, ensuring that positive mentions are leveraged for SEO benefit and negative ones are addressed.
• Competitor Backlink Analysis: Analyse competitors’ backlink profiles to uncover link acquisition opportunities. Identify strategic gaps in competitors’ link profiles and develop tactics to surpass them in link acquisition.
• Monitoring & Reporting: Track the success of off-page SEO initiatives, including backlink acquisition, using SEO tools like SEMrush or Looker Studio. Regularly report on the progress of link-building campaigns and their impact on organic rankings. Monitoring our clients’ off-page SEO performance and data. Making contributions to wider SEO strategies which reflect the client’s business objectives, website performance, and available resources to achieve tangible results. Developing and maintaining strong relationships with clients, including presenting ongoing work in regular meetings. Keeping up to date with industry developments to ensure continuous development of our off-page SEO knowledge. Contributing proactively with thought leadership, creating and writing content to help share Varn’s expertise within SEO and search marketing.
• Line-managing 1 to 2 members of the junior Off-page SEO team, helping them to develop and meet their agreed performance goals. Contributing to an environment that fosters open communication and trust with all team members, clients and other stakeholders.

Who are you?

You have at least 2 years of hands-on experience in successfully implementing digital PR/outreach campaigns with measurable results. You have the ability to think creatively around problems and interpret clients’ requests. You have experience using outreach tools like Pitchbox and SEO reporting tools like SEMrush. You ideally have experience in developing and building long term client relationships within an agency or consultancy. You can confidently express yourself while discussing ideas with clients and team members. You are able to work well under pressure and carefully manage your own time. You like data, pay close attention to detail, and feel at home analysing data and putting together interesting stories from large data analysis. You have experience in mentoring, supporting and directing junior team members, or are keen to learn to line-manage others. You are a friendly, honest and hard-working individual who enjoys working alongside and contributing to a wider team.

About Varn

Our purpose is to nurture and develop a motivated and expert team. To care about our clients, our reputation and our clients results by being focused and passionate about the things we spend our time on. We accelerate profitable growth for happy clients by delivering full service SEO, scaling technical SEO, off-page SEO and AI search, data analytics and reporting.

Varn values

Our values articulate what’s truly important to our team, our culture and our business.

• Experienced experts: As a team we know our SEO stuff, from technical know-how through AI & data analytics, optimising websites and all of the content and digital activity in-between. This means your business benefits from obsessive SEO-ers that really do know all there is to know about SEO. We have to deliver results for our clients otherwise it’s all just SEO talk. Result metrics are always defined at the start of a project but typically are about outranking your competition and delivering more quality traffic. We like talking, but we like winning in SEO more.
• Helpful partner: We work alongside our clients as a helpful honest partner. Partnerships are always more rewarding as this ensures we get results and allows our relationships to flourish. Importantly this makes our client relationships really enjoyable for our team.
• Trustworthy & ethical: We take enormous pride in the fact you can trust Varn to always do the right thing, to be open and honourable. It is vital for us to work together with integrity and honesty, building strong partnerships on the way.
• Happy people: Happy people is what we focus on here at Varn. We think life is simply too short not to make it fun, so let’s enjoy working together. We love what we do and we want you to love your SEO journey with Varn :-)
• Caring team: We care deeply about our community, our environment and each other’s wellbeing. We have our own woodland which offsets our carbon footprint and our team seek to do good, as well as doing good business.

Job outline

Salary of £29,000-£39,000 depending on experience. Opportunity to be part of a growing agency. Company wide bonus scheme (up to 10% annual bonus). Access to our woodland office, our mobile Camper Varn office and Woolacombe (Devon) beach view workspace, so you can work outside and be inspired in new places. Up to 28 days off per year (including 20 standard days, 3 day Christmas close down, 1 day holiday for your birthday and up to 4 days long service bonus). Training and development opportunities.

Locations

Bradford on Avon. Woodland office (BoA). Beach office (to use 1 week a year in Woolacombe). Remote (one day flexible working).

Diversity & inclusion

Varn takes pride in creating an environment where everyone can be themselves. This starts with recruitment. All recruitment decisions we take will be based solely on the positive skills and behaviours that applicants display and nothing else. We do not discriminate based on any personal characteristic, we are a human first agency and we care about and celebrate individuals. If something is important to you or you have a particular need during the application process or during your time at Varn, please do let us know.

How to get in touch

To find out more about Technical SEO manager roles at Varn please email your CV to careers@varn.co.uk, with Off-page SEO Manager as the subject of the email. We are always on the lookout for talented individuals so please do not hesitate to reach out to us. Please include in your email an introduction to yourself and explain why you think you are ideal for this role at Varn.