Director of SEO and Agentic Search

About the role

LawnStarter is expanding its reach to become the one-stop-shop for all home services. This role leads the team responsible for making organic search and AI-powered discovery successful at scale.

Responsibilities

• Own organic strategy across the brand portfolio, setting the vision, roadmap, and standards for competing in organic search and AI-powered discovery.
• Establish our brands as cited, authoritative sources in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and emerging conversational search surfaces through answer-first content architecture, entity authority, and structured data that AI systems can discover, extract, and trust.
• Lead the technical SEO and architecture efforts, including large-scale technical infrastructure, Core Web Vitals, structured data, crawl efficiency, and product architecture decisions that drive organic performance.
• Direct the editorial work that produces pages, guides, studies, and resources that rank, get cited, and convert.
• Build and elevate teams, making the hard talent calls when they are needed, and creating an environment where people know what great looks like.
• Work closely with Engineering, Analytics, and Data to build the technical and measurement foundation organic needs to operate at scale.
• Diagnose and recover from significant traffic declines, and diagnose and act on root causes related to algorithm shifts, content quality, technical debt, and AI Search cannibalization.
• Define and implement a measurement approach for AI Search visibility, turning raw signals into a reliable view of AI Search visibility.
• Build and elevate teams, making the hard talent calls when they are needed, and creating an environment where people know what great looks like.
• Execute alongside the team while owning the direction, hiring, and standards.

Requirements

• Sees around corners, understanding where search is going and building for it.
• Understands external visibility as foundational, navigating external networks like journalists, creators, review platforms, and communities.
• Operates with a business mindset, tying organic initiatives to CAC, acquisition, and revenue impact.
• Diagnoses fast, acts faster, using data to find the signal in the noise and make a call.
• Builds and elevates teams, developing leaders and creating an environment where people know what great looks like.
• A company-wide evangelist, selling the vision for organic search and influencing roadmaps, securing investment, and getting cross-functional partners excited.
• Technically fluent and willing to ship, able to get into the weeds on structured data, crawl budgets, and Core Web Vital, and know when to set direction.
• AI-native, using AI tools daily and understanding how LLMs and generative AI work well enough to build an AI Search strategy grounded in how these systems actually discover and evaluate content.