Sr. Director, SEO & Traffic Growth

Job Summary

GoTo Foods is a multi-brand restaurant platform operating seven iconic brands: Moe’s Southwest Grill, McAlister’s Deli, Auntie Anne’s, Cinnabon, Jamba, Schlotzsky’s, and Carvel. Collectively, the portfolio spans approximately 6,000 franchise locations across the United States. GoTo Foods is a Roark Capital portfolio company. Today, there is no dedicated SEO function, no organic search strategy, and no leadership accountable for organic discovery across any of the seven brands. This role exists to build that capability from the ground up.

About the Role

The Senior Director of SEO & Organic Traffic Growth will own the entire organic discovery strategy across all seven brands and will report directly to the Chief Growth Officer. This is not an optimization role. It is a build-from-zero mandate with the full endorsement of the Executive Leadership Team.

Essential Functions

• Organic search strategy across all seven brands, encompassing national, regional, and hyperlocal search for approximately 6,000 locations.
• App Store Optimization (ASO) for seven distinct mobile applications across iOS and Google Play.
• Local listings management and optimization, including Google Business Profiles, Apple Maps, and third-party directories for every franchise location.
• SEO architecture and technical foundation, working with the technology team on site structure, crawlability, page speed, schema markup, and content indexability.
• Content strategy for organic discovery, advising brand teams on search-informed content planning, blog strategy, and editorial SEO.
• Organic traffic analytics and reporting, building dashboards and cadences that tie organic performance to business outcomes: store visits, app downloads, digital orders, and loyalty enrollment.
• Experimentation program for organic channels, designing and running 3-5 tests per month to identify what drives incremental traffic and conversion.
• Cross-functional partnership with Paid Media, CRM/Owned Channels, Creative, and brand pod teams to ensure organic and paid strategies are complementary, not siloed.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree, Required.
• 15+ years of experience in SEO & Marketing Performance. Multi-brand or multi-property experience. You have managed organic strategy across distinct consumer brands or business units with different audiences and competitive sets.
• Local SEO at scale. Experience managing listings, reviews, and local search performance across hundreds or thousands of locations.

Skills

• A builder. Someone who has stood up SEO or organic growth capabilities at scale, ideally more than once, and knows what it takes to go from zero to operating rhythm.
• Deep technical SEO expertise. You understand site architecture, crawl behavior, indexation, Core Web Vitals, and structured data at an enterprise level.
• ASO fluency. You have optimized app store presence and understand the interplay between ASO, app engagement, and retention.
• Analytics rigor. You build measurement frameworks, not just reports. You can connect organic performance to downstream business metrics and present that story to senior leadership.
• Cross-functional credibility. You have worked effectively with engineering, product, content, and marketing teams and can influence without authority.
• A bias toward experimentation. You design tests, measure outcomes, and iterate. You are comfortable with ambiguity and move fast.
• A strong communicator. You can present complex SEO concepts to non-technical executives and franchisees in clear, business-relevant language.