Associate Director, SEO & AI Visibility

Tombras, a 450+ person, full-service, national advertising agency with a digital mindset, is seeking an Associate Director, SEO & AI Visibility to lead the next era of search for the agency and our clients.

You’ll be joining one of the top independent agencies in North America. Connecting Data & Creativity for Business Results® is working for our clients and creating a flywheel affect fueling both client and agency growth.  You’ll be a part of a highly creative agency that has been recognized by AdAge, Adweek, Communication Arts, Fast Company, Forbes and Fortune. Tombras was recently named 2025 AdAge Agency of the year and 2024 AdAge Independent Agency of the Year.

This is not a traditional SEO role. Search has evolved beyond blue links, rankings, and click-through rate alone. Today, brands are increasingly discovered through AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, YouTube, Reddit, reviews, maps, and other answer-first environments that shape consumer decisions before a website visit ever happens.

We are looking for a modern search leader who is equally comfortable driving enterprise SEO strategy, building AI-enabled content workflows, guiding GEO/AEO programs, and helping clients measure visibility across both traditional search engines and LLM-driven discovery platforms.

This role sits within Tombras’ Integrated Search team and reports into senior SEO leadership. You will lead a team of SEO analysts and strategists while serving as a senior strategic partner to clients across technical SEO, local SEO, content strategy, AI visibility, and organic performance measurement.

Where you'll be working: Knoxville or Atlanta. Relocation assistance may be provided.

What you'll be doing:

• Lead SEO and AI visibility strategy for national, enterprise, and multi-location brands across technical SEO, content SEO, local SEO, and emerging answer-engine optimization programs.
• Architect modern organic discovery strategies that improve brand visibility across Google Search, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, YouTube, Reddit, maps, reviews, and other platforms influencing consumer decision-making.
• Translate shifting search behavior into actionable client strategies, helping brands adapt to zero-click search, cited-answer environments, and AI-mediated discovery.
• Build and refine GEO/AEO frameworks focused on semantic clarity, entity optimization, structured content, source credibility, schema, internal linking, and answer-first content architecture.
• Develop AI-enabled content workflows that improve the speed, consistency, and quality of SEO deliverables, including content briefs, optimization recommendations, page refreshes, FAQ generation, internal linking recommendations, and other scalable workstreams.
• Ensure AI-assisted workflows are grounded in brand truth, first-party inputs, subject matter expertise, and sound editorial judgment rather than generic, low-value content generation.
• Partner with Content, Creative, UX, Development, PR, Social, Analytics, and Paid Search teams to improve the broader signals that influence both search rankings and AI citation visibility.
• Lead technical SEO strategy across crawling, indexation, renderability, schema, canonicals, hreflang, XML sitemaps, redirects, site migrations, internal linking, international architecture, and other core areas of enterprise SEO.
• Oversee local SEO and reputation programs for multi-location brands, including Google Business Profile optimization, listings consistency, duplicate suppression, ratings and reviews, local landing pages, and hyperlocal visibility.
• Monitor and analyze brand presence across traditional search and AI-driven experiences, including citations, mentions, answer inclusion, share of voice, and evolving visibility signals by LLM or platform.
• Help define and socialize new measurement frameworks for organic success, incorporating rankings, traffic, citations, mentions, AI visibility share, branded demand, local actions, and business outcomes.
• Partner with Analytics and Data Science teams to improve reporting tied to AI visibility, answer-engine exposure, and the changing relationship between visibility and clicks.
• Lead client presentations, strategic recommendations, reporting discussions, and testing plans with confidence and clarity.
• Manage workloads and quality across a team of SEO practitioners, providing mentorship, training, feedback, and hands-on support where needed.
• Contribute to department innovation, process improvement, POV development, and new business opportunities related to modern SEO, AI visibility, GEO, and AEO.

What you bring:

• 8+ years of experience in SEO, with meaningful experience leading enterprise SEO initiatives for large or complex brands.
• Strong hands-on expertise in technical SEO, content strategy, local SEO, and organic search performance.
• A clear and practical point of view on how AI Overviews, LLMs, answer engines, and generative discovery are changing search.
• Experience developing or applying GEO/AEO strategies designed to improve visibility in AI-generated results and answer-first environments.
• Experience using AI tools and workflow design to improve SEO productivity, content development, analysis, or execution.
• Strong understanding of structured data, semantic search, entity optimization, content architecture, and the signals that influence both search engines and AI retrieval systems.
• Ability to think beyond traditional SEO KPIs and help clients adopt smarter measurement frameworks tied to citations, mentions, visibility, discoverability, and business outcomes.
• Strong command of enterprise SEO platforms, site crawling tools, analytics tools, and local/listings platforms.
• Excellent client communication skills, including the ability to present complex ideas in a clear, concise, and persuasive way.
• Strong organizational and team leadership skills, with the ability to manage multiple workstreams and mentor junior team members.
• A player-coach mindset with the willingness to stay close to the work, solve hard problems, and push the discipline forward.

Preferred Experience

• Experience with BrightEdge, Conductor, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, Lumar/Deepcrawl, Google Search Console, GA4, and major local listings/reputation platforms.
• Experience with multi-location brands, enterprise sites, and international or complex website architectures.
• Familiarity with prompt design, retrieval-aware content structuring, entity SEO, schema strategy, and emerging AI visibility tooling.
• Experience building scalable SEO or content workflows that combine human strategy with AI assistance.
• Experience collaborating closely with paid media, analytics, PR, creative, and content teams in an integrated agency environment.
• Familiarity with CMS platforms such as AEM, WordPress, Drupal, Sitecore, or similar enterprise content systems.
• Working knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and how modern front-end frameworks affect search accessibility and indexation. 

Why you'll want to work at Tombras:

• Family - It comes first, on every list.  Tombras has been family-run since day 1, we strive to facilitate a family-oriented environment rooted in supporting one another.
• Dog-friendly offices
• Flexible PTO
• Generous parental leave for primary and non-primary caregivers
• Medical (PPO or High Deductible option) for employee + dependents
• 401(k) Participation
• Employer-paid Dental & Vision 
• A company culture of promotions from within and an atmosphere allowing for varied and rapid career development. 

Want more reasons to work at Tombras?  Check out the latest Tombras News and  Our Values.

Tombras is proud to be an equal opportunity employer dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce. 

Tombras is an E-Verify employer and participates in the E-Verify program.

This job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change or new ones may be assigned at any time with or without notice. Job may require traveling overnight, driving long distances as required and sitting for extended periods of time with occasional walking and standing and occasionally lifting or carrying articles weighing less than 10 pounds.

Remote employees must be based in the United States.