SEO Specialist in Cambridge

Xanthos is a digital marketing agency based in Cambridge. We pride ourselves on being authentic in who we are and what we do, so you won't find any slick sales talk or BS when we talk to our clients. We're also dependable and accountable: we want our clients to succeed, we own our mistakes, and our partners know they can count on us.

Our approach to digital marketing is built on three core pillars:

• Transparent and honest: we cut through the noise and will always tell a client when something isn't working.
• Competent: we know what we're doing and we're good at it.
• Proactive: we don't just do the bare minimum to manage campaigns, we actively help our clients grow.

Internally, our goal is to be one of the best agencies to work at. If we're a great place to work, we attract the best staff, who do the best work for our clients, which means we can keep rewarding them. We take what we do seriously. We try not to take ourselves too seriously.

We're looking for an SEO Specialist to join our team as we expand the department and what we offer. SEO has always been one of our core services, and we're growing the team to match the demand we're seeing and the direction search is heading in. This is a strategy, analysis and execution role at heart. You'll be the person who looks at a client's situation, works out what actually needs to happen to move the needle, and makes sure it gets done. You don't need to be expert in every area of SEO, but you should know your way around technical, on-page, off-page, AI-search visibility, and the strategic thinking that ties it all together. You'll need to get SEO, get what it means to deliver it well inside an agency, and be genuinely excited about where search is heading next. It's a role for someone who cares whether the client actually grew. This role reports to our Digital Operations Director.

We care as much about who you are as what you can do. The right person for our team will be:

• An SEO obsessive: You've spent three to five years getting properly good at SEO and you want to keep getting better.
• An AI-era pragmatist: You embrace AI tools and you're excited about what they can do, but you've got the experience to know when they're wrong.
• A translator: You can take complex SEO requirements and explain them clearly to whoever needs to act on them.
• A commercial thinker: You understand that traffic and rankings only matter if they translate into something a client can take to the bank.
• A truth-teller: You share our core value of unshakeable integrity.

Your primary mission is to take ownership of SEO across your portfolio of clients and contribute to how we deliver it across the agency.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Devise and own the SEO strategy for your clients, across technical, on-page, content direction and off-page, tailored to what each client actually needs to grow.
• Lead AI-search visibility for your accounts.
• Interpret technical SEO audits, prioritise what matters commercially, and brief our developers on what to fix.
• Help shape our off-page service.
• Direct the content strategy.
• Contribute to how our SEO service evolves.

The Essentials: Skills & Experience

• Three to five years of hands-on SEO experience, ideally agency-side.
• A strategy and analysis-first approach to SEO.
• Comfortable across the breadth of SEO: technical, on-page, content strategy and off-page.
• Solid technical SEO grounding.
• Demonstrable awareness of AI-search visibility and how it's reshaping SEO.
• Deep familiarity with the standard toolkit: GA4, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs or Semrush, Data Studio.
• A strategic mindset, good time management, and the ability to work autonomously across multiple clients.
• Clear communicator, with the confidence to brief developers on technical fixes and explain SEO to clients in plain English.

Nice to have: WordPress and Shopify familiarity, experience with AI-visibility tracking tools, B2B or professional services sector experience.

Why Xanthos?

• Salary: £35,000 to £40,000 depending on experience.
• Protected capacity: we manage your client load so you have the time to do great work without burning out.
• Hybrid and flexible working: two days a week in our Cambridge office, the rest from home.
• Health and wellbeing: private AXA healthcare, health cash plan, income protection, enhanced sick pay and mental health support.
• Time off that recognises a life outside work: 23 days annual leave plus milestone leave, and compassionate leave when needed.
• Investment in your growth: dedicated self-development time.
• Day to day: company pension, casual dress code, and a base at the St John's Innovation Centre with free on-site parking.
• Long service awards because we want people to stay, and we want to mean it.

We believe the best strategies and strongest partnerships come from a team with diverse perspectives and lived experiences. Xanthos is committed to building an inclusive, equitable environment where everyone feels welcome, valued and empowered to do their best work. We strongly encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and abilities.

What to expect: We try to review applications as they come in. The process is two stages: Stage one: a 15 to 30 minute introductory Teams call. Stage two: an in-person interview at our Cambridge office.