Director SEO

Job Description

The Director, SEO, will be responsible for identifying ESPN's current and future audience expansion opportunities. The ideal candidate will have experience in analyzing trends and data sets, a proven track record building audiences on third-party platforms and an expert understanding of the digital media landscape. The Director manages both people and process, and requires an understanding of a 24/7 news environment that includes desktop, mobile, social and personalized platforms. The person in this role will be responsible for executing the day-to-day search optimization strategy for ESPN's digital sports coverage, working with editorial leadership across teams. This job is based in Bristol, CT.

Responsibilities:
• Identify, research and assess new strategic audience opportunities and develop a plan to target and develop these new audiences, ensuring audience goals are met and exceeded.
• Provide advance as well as real-time insights aimed at increasing audience reach, suggesting optimization practices that result in more traffic back to our platforms.
• Oversee experiments, collaborating with teams across Editorial, Product and Audience Engagement.
• Develop a framework for making decisions around data, utilizing analytics and testing to identify opportunities to attract new users, broaden impact and deepen engagement.
• Act as the go-to person for editors seeking answers on all things SEO, formulating an in-depth strategy for content, researching content key phrases and generating search-friendly ideas for the site across all verticals.
• Extract, clean and package data, and present critical, easy-to-digest insights to allow content creators to make informed decisions.
• Evaluate and provide insights into new social/digital platforms, staying on top of the industry news, trends and developments, including Search, Social and other off-platform algorithm changes
• A comprehensive knowledge of data tools such as Adobe Analytics, Chartbeat, Google Analytics and experience working with third-party platforms such as Apple News, Flipboard, Smartnews, and Reddit.

Basic Qualifications:
• A minimum of 8 years of experience in a news environment, including at least three years in people management.
• Clear record of growing audiences across multiple channels
• Understanding and appreciation of news, story play and trending topics.
• Highly curious, collaborative and passionate about digital media
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and news judgment.
• Basic knowledge of all major sports.
• Knowledge of web authoring tools and software, search engines and audience acquisition.

Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience with driving audience expansion through off-platform channels for original content
• Familiarity with tools that measure online traffic, consumer habits and usage patterns

Required Education
• High School Diploma or equivalent

Preferred Education
• Bachelor's Degree or higher in Journalism, Communications, Marketing, English or a related field.

This role is considered hybrid, which means the employee will work a portion of their time on-site from a Company designated location and the remainder of their time remotely.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-r1bepy-3-144-187-103-42 in your application.