KollegeApply - SEO Manager

KollegeApply is an AI-powered platform helping students discover, compare, and apply to colleges and universities worldwide. We serve program pages, exam & scholarship content, and guided application workflows that convert discovery into applications.

Role Overview:

Own end-to-end organic growth: from technical SEO foundations and scalable content systems to authority building and conversion. You'll partner with Content, Product, and Engineering to 10x qualified organic traffic and applications.

Strategy & Planning:

1. Build the quarterly SEO roadmap aligned to admissions cycles (UG/PG intakes, exams, scholarships).

2. Define keyword universe (non-brand + brand), topic clusters, and internal linking architecture.

Technical SEO:

1. Lead audits (CWV, crawl depth, orphan pages, log-file insights, faceted navigation, hreflang).

2. Own schema (College/Organisation, Course, FAQ, HowTo, Breadcrumb), sitemaps, robots, and canonicals.

3. Work with devs on Core Web Vitals, page speed budgets, lazy loading, and indexation controls.

Content & Programmatic:

1. Brief and QA scalable templates for colleges, courses, exams, scholarships, and comparisons.

2. Create guidelines for E-E-A-T, fact-checking, and safe use of AI-assisted content.

3. Improve CTR via titles/meta tests; run ongoing on-page experiments at scale.

Authority & Digital PR:

1. Build high-quality backlinks (edu/academic, gov, media) through content partnerships and PR.

2. Manage outreach calendar; maintain clean anchor and link velocity.

Analytics & Reporting:

1. Ship weekly dashboards; track keyword ranks, SERP features, CTR, CVR to lead/application.

2. Translate insights into backlog items; prioritise by impact/effort.

Must-haves:

1. Proven wins growing non-brand traffic at scale (multi-thousand URL sites).

2. Deep hands-on with GSC, GA4, Screaming Frog, and Ahrefs/Semrush.

3. Strong technical SEO (CWV, rendering, canonicals, hreflang, structured data).

4. Comfortable writing/QA-ing briefs and auditing content for accuracy & search intent.

5. SQL/Sheets fluency for analysis; can brief engineers with clear acceptance criteria.

Nice-to-haves:

1. Experience in edtech/aggregators/marketplaces.

2. Familiarity with programmatic SEO, templating, and internal link automation.

3. Basic HTML/CSS/JS; exposure to React/Next.js SSR/ISR concepts.

4. Looker Studio dashboards; Python for quick data wrangling.

Success metrics (KPIs):

1. Organic new users: {target}% MoM in peak seasons, {target}% QoQ overall

2. Non-brand share: {target}% of organic sessions

3. Top 3 / Top 10 keywords: {target} / {target}

4. CTR uplift: +{target}% across priority clusters

5. CWV pass rate: {target}% URLs passing (mobile)