SEO Strategist - South Africa

Brafton is one of the world's leading content marketing firms, with offices in Boston, London, Toronto and Sydney. We aspire to continually raise the bar on what people consider "marketing content." We create result-focused strategies and content to drive SEO, social engagement and leads for our clients. Our teams continuously build expertise across new media formats, including video, blogs, infographics and web design.
This is a remote, full-time contract position and is open to candidates anywhere in South Africa.    Brafton is looking for an SEO strategist to join our consulting team.   The ideal candidate has previous agency experience, a passion for digital marketing, excellent problem-solving skills, very, very strong attention to detail, and a ton of curiosity about the ever-changing search landscape.    SEO is always evolving - even more important than being a current expert is being a perennial learner. The right person will be an exceptionally curious individual who is both autodidactic and capable of learning from others.   This is a client-facing role that interfaces with many internal stakeholders and produces consistently thoughtful work. To succeed, the SEO strategist must have strong people skills (communicating, problem-solving, building relationships), be exceptionally analytical and technical, and also be a very strong writer.  This individual needs to make complex search concepts and technical items easy to understand and interesting.   Responsibilities & Tasks:   • Craft competitive and compelling audits, proposals, and reports • Expertly utilize our software tools (like MarketMuse, SEMRush, and Hrefs) to • Assess the health of our clients' websites • Itemize errors and opportunities  • Execute against planned scopes relating to site optimization or other technical SEO-specific tasks. • Undertake SEO-specific research or optimization work for projects including but not limited to: UX/Website redesigns; large-scale organic SEO work (including but not limited to keyword research); and backlink-focused projects. • Leverage a strong understanding of Google Analytics • Develop and execute strategies to improve brand visibility within Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) and generative search engines.
• Optimise site architecture and content to be easily parsed by LLM crawlers, focusing on semantic density and clear entity relationships.
• AI Performance Tracking: Utilise emerging tools and methods to monitor brand mentions and citations within generative search results.
• Be a versatile team player who can tackle various projects and collaborate with all teams.
• Be a constant student of SEO who is applying his or her learnings to their work and sharing knowledge with internal and client-facing teams.   Qualifications:   • 3-5 years or more of experience contributing to or managing SEO programs, preferably in an agency setting • Evidence of success with previous SEO campaigns for medium to large brands, ideally including ecommerce companies • Strong understanding of cross-channel marketing principles • Compelling written and verbal communication skills, a positive attitude and the ability to thrive in a collaborative and fast-paced environment • Strong proficiency in the Microsoft Office Suite: Word, PowerPoint, and especially Excel • Advanced understanding of technical SEO concepts (crawling, indexing, rendering, AMP, site migrations, page speed optimization, core web vitals and more) • Strong project management and organization skills, ability to prioritize and manage multiple projects • Advanced understanding and experienced user of Google Analytics and Google Search Console - Tag Manager and/or Publisher Center is also a plus • Understand recent developments in SEO • Develop and execute strategies to improve brand visibility within Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) and generative search engines.
• Optimise site architecture and content to be easily parsed by LLM crawlers, focusing on semantic density and clear entity relationships.
• AI Performance Tracking: Utilise emerging tools and methods to monitor brand mentions and citations within generative search results. • Intermediate to advanced knowledge of HTML, Javascript, and CSS as they impact search performance • Strong knowledge and experience using standard and enterprise search tools and platforms (Botify, Sitebulb, Conductor Searchlight, Stat, SEMRush, Sistrix, DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, SEMRush, etc.) • The ability to meet scheduled and proposed deadlines. • Comfort with and mastery of (or ability to quickly learn) spreadsheet formats (Google Sheets, Excel).  • Comfort and skill with formatting professional presentations and reports in MS PowerPoint and Google Slides.   Contractors must provide their own industry hardware and a stable internet connection.