Director of Search Marketing (Remote, Hartford)

About the role

Blacksmith Agency runs PPC and SEO for clients across multifamily, B2B and technical verticals. As Director of Search Marketing you lead that department. The PPC strategist and the SEO strategist report to you and they are the specialists in their channels. Right now nobody owns this function, which is the whole reason this seat is open. This is a management seat, not a senior individual contributor one. You will not be building campaigns, and on technical SEO your strategist will know more than you do. That is the arrangement, not a gap. You carry channel strategy and where budget goes as accounts scale. The strategists carry the execution of it, and you carry whether the department delivers.

What you own

• The PPC strategist and the SEO strategist: their quality bar, their development, their reviews, and the call when someone is not going to get there.
• The standard the work is held to: what a good audit looks like, what gets checked before work leaves the agency, how an account is reported. You write it and hold two specialists to it.
• Client results across the whole function, including whether reporting is honest (nobody is auditing attribution and GA4 accuracy today).
• The escalation when an account is at risk: you diagnose it, direct the strategist who fixes it, and you are on the call with the client.
• Channel strategy and where budget goes as accounts scale.
• What we tell sales we can credibly deliver before it gets sold.
• The hiring plan for the department and first‑round interviews for your own team, within about a quarter.

What you need

• Experience with strategists or specialists who have reported to you, where you owned their reviews, development, and the decision when someone was not working out (managing accounts alone does not qualify).
• 7+ years across paid media and SEO; owning one channel while sitting beside the other does not count.
• Enough depth in Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, Meta and Microsoft Ads to distinguish good work from work that merely looks good (a lower bar than doing it, a higher bar than reading a report).
• One account you turned around that you can discuss: the metric, the figure before, the figure after, and why the change worked (the diagnosis must be yours, not just who was on the keyboard).
• Comfortable being the client‑facing owner when an account is underperforming – the escalation call comes to you, not to the strategist.
• Agency‑level experience managing many accounts at once.
• Do not apply if: nobody has ever reported to you, or you have never owned someone's review or had to performance‑manage anyone.
• Do not apply if: you have only ever run one channel.
• Do not apply if: all of your