SEO Specialist

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 an 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. You're strategic and analytical by instinct. You read about SEO when you don't have to, you've got opinions on what's changing, and you find it genuinely interesting.
• 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. You don't trust automation to make the calls that matter, you make those yourself. You're paying attention to AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and the rest, and you've got views on how SEO has to adapt.
• A translator: You can take complex SEO requirements and explain them clearly to whoever needs to act on them: developers who need to implement, marketing teammates who need to deliver on your strategy, or clients themselves who need to understand the strategy and back it. This isn't a client-facing role by default, but we encourage everyone to join client calls when it helps.
• A commercial thinker: You understand that traffic and rankings only matter if they translate into something a client can take to the bank. You think about pipeline, revenue and ROI, not just impressions.
• A truth-teller: You share our core value of unshakeable integrity. You'll tell a client when their idea won't work, own it when something hasn't landed, and be honest about what's realistic.

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

• 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. Schema, entity optimisation, structured content, and tracking how clients are being cited across AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Gemini.
• Interpret technical SEO audits, prioritise what matters commercially, and brief our developers on what to fix. You won't need to be a developer yourself, but you'll need enough technical literacy to know when a recommendation is right.
• Help shape our off-page service. You'll define what good looks like, decide how we deliver it, and make it a credible part of what we offer.
• Direct the content strategy. You decide what content is needed and why; the writing is handled separately.
• Contribute to how our SEO service evolves: what we offer, how we price it, how we report on it, what tools we use. We want your input.

The Essentials: Skills & Experience

• Three to five years of hands-on SEO experience, ideally agency-side, though strong in-house experience also works.
• A strategy and analysis-first approach to SEO. You think in terms of priorities, opportunities and outcomes, not just task lists.
• Comfortable across the breadth of SEO: technical, on-page, content strategy and off-page. You don't have to be world-class at all four, but you should be competent across all of them and have a view on where you're strongest.
• Solid technical SEO grounding. You can interpret a Screaming Frog crawl, prioritise what matters, and brief a developer clearly on what to do about it.
• Demonstrable awareness of AI-search visibility and how it's reshaping SEO. We're not expecting deep expertise, the field is too new for that, but we expect curiosity, experimentation and a point of view.
• 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 (Writesonic, Peec.ai, Otterly, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit or similar), B2B or professional services sector experience.

Why Xanthos?

The Perks:

• 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 – we find it beneficial for collaboration and teambuilding. Flexible start and finish times.
• 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 so you can keep learning and getting better at the work.
• Day to day: company pension, casual dress code, and a base at the St John's Innovation Centre with free on-site parking, free office meals at an on-site bistro and easy access via the A10 and Cambridge North train station.
• Long service awards because we want people to stay, and we want to mean it.

Our Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion

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. If you're excited about this role but your experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification, we'd still love you to apply. You could be the perfect addition to our team.

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. A chance for you to find out more about us and the role, and for us to find out about you and see if there's a fit.
• Stage two: an in-person interview at our Cambridge office. We'll be in touch as soon as we can, usually within a week or two.