SEO and AI Search Specialist [AQ-21157]

Aquent is partnering with a leading organization dedicated to shaping the future of digital engagement. This company is at the forefront of innovation, driving impactful strategies that redefine how businesses connect with their audiences across rapidly evolving search landscapes. Their mission is to empower clients through cutting-edge digital solutions, and they are seeking a visionary to significantly contribute to this goal.

Are you a visionary in organic search and AI, ready to make a significant impact? We are seeking a highly skilled professional to lead the charge in optimizing our client’s digital presence across traditional organic search, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and emerging AI search platforms. This is an exciting opportunity to join a forward-thinking team where your expertise will directly influence how the organization connects with its audience. You will be at the heart of digital innovation, shaping the future of their search strategy and directly influencing content visibility and user engagement in an increasingly AI-driven world.

Engagement Details

• Initial Term: 4-week project engagement
• Hours: Approximately 20 hours per week
• Potential Extension: Longer-term contract engagement and potential full-time conversion based on the work
• Tools: Semrush, GA4, Google Search Console, Looker Studio, CMS, and Asana

Key Responsibilities

• Recommend priorities and identify opportunities for both organic and AI search programs.
• Present recommendations with clear reasoning, outlining trade-offs and providing supporting evidence.
• Proactively identify areas where the organization might be lagging in industry developments or emerging search practices.
• Prioritize initiatives based on expected impact, clearly communicating any areas of uncertainty.
• Collaborate with marketing leadership to translate recommendations into a cohesive search roadmap.
• Stay at the cutting edge of AI search through continuous industry research, primary documentation, platform updates, release notes, and credible practitioner insights.
• Evaluate emerging AEO practices through hands-on testing and experimentation.
• Document test results, including inconclusive findings, and transform successful approaches into repeatable processes.
• Monitor AI visibility across platforms such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot.
• Measure citation presence and AI visibility in addition to traditional organic rankings.
• Take ownership of optimizing commercial, conversion-focused pages, including service, industry, and solution pages.
• Optimize title and heading structures, entities, subtopics, internal linking, schema, and extractable answer content.
• Write replacement copy when page content requires improvement, moving beyond just recommendations.
• Develop a repeatable scoring methodology for evaluating pages based on SEO, AEO, extractability, and conversion potential.
• Strategically balance AI/search optimization with the site’s sales and conversion objectives.
• Provide implementation-ready recommendations to the web team.
• Develop detailed briefs for middle- and top-of-funnel content.
• Define target queries, search intent, entities, subtopics, heading structure, questions to answer, sources/citations, internal links, and conversion paths.
• Ensure briefs align with existing editorial standards and writer workflows.
• Coach writers and subject matter experts on SEO/AEO best practices.
• Maintain templates and standards to ensure consistency as content volume grows.
• Conduct thorough crawl and index analysis, covering crawl budget, indexation, duplicate and thin content, orphaned pages, redirect chains, canonicals, and status codes.
• Monitor AI crawler access and identify rendering or site-structure issues impacting indexing and AI citations.
• Develop and maintain schema, structured data, entity, and internal-linking standards.
• Support URL taxonomy migrations, including redirect mapping, equity preservation, and post-launch troubleshooting.
• Reconcile data across Semrush, GA4, Google Search Console, and Looker Studio to determine appropriate metrics for reporting.
• Accurately separate AI-referred traffic from traditional organic traffic and connect both to pipeline performance.
• Document SEO/AEO processes and identify opportunities to improve or automate workflows using AI.
• Develop prompts, templates, and workflows that can be adopted by the broader team.
• Ma…