Tombras, a 450+ person, full-service, national advertising agency with a digital mindset, is seeking an Senior Vice President, 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 leadership role. It is a pivotal department-head position responsible for helping Tombras and its clients navigate the shift from traditional organic search to AI-mediated discovery. This leader will define Tombras' POV on modern SEO, AEO, and GEO while building the AI-enabled workflows behind it-improving productivity, grounding content in first-party expertise, and scaling high-quality, answer-first outputs across technical SEO, local SEO, and AI visibility programs.
You will join one of the most decorated performance teams in the country, recognized with 30+ U.S. Search Awards, a Google Agency Excellence Award, and distinction as a Google AI Lighthouse agency.
As search behavior shifts from blue links to AI Overviews, cited answers, conversational discovery, and platform-native search experiences, this leader will help brands win wherever consumers are making decisions-across Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, YouTube, Reddit, maps, reviews, and other influential surfaces.
Reporting to the Chief Digital Officer, this person will lead the future of the SEO department while partnering closely with Media, Analytics, Creative, Strategy, and Technology. We are looking for a senior, entrepreneurial, player-coach leader with deep enterprise SEO expertise, strong executive presence, and a clear point of view on where search is going next.
Where you'll be working: Knoxville. Relocation assistance may be provided.
What you'll be doing:
Lead the future of SEO at Tombras
- Define and lead Tombras' POV on SEO, AI visibility, AEO, GEO, and organic discovery.
- Build commercially viable offerings that evolve the department beyond legacy SEO deliverables.
- Translate industry change into scalable frameworks, workflows, training, and client recommendations.
- Design and scale agentic AI workflows that improve SEO productivity, insight generation, and content quality.
Lead enterprise SEO strategy for high-value clients
- Architect strategies for national, enterprise, and multi-location brands across technical SEO, content, local SEO, and authority-building initiatives.
- Guide complex client work across site architecture, crawling and indexation, migrations, schema, internal linking, international SEO, local landing pages, reviews, and listings consistency.
- Connect organic visibility to broader brand demand, media performance, and business outcomes.
- Help clients understand how classic SEO metrics are changing and what new visibility signals matter most.
Build Tombras' AI visibility and AEO/GEO capability
- Develop frameworks that improve discoverability, citations, and brand presence across AI-driven search experiences.
- Build grounded content systems that combine LLMs, retrieval, first-party data, expert inputs, and structured content rules to produce high-quality, brand-safe outputs.
- Define best practices for entity optimization, semantic clarity, structured data, source credibility, expert-led content, and content architecture.
- Partner across content, social, PR, creative, analytics, and paid media to improve brand presence in the broader information ecosystem shaping AI outputs.
Evolve measurement for a zero-click world
- Lead the shift from click-only thinking to broader measurement across visibility, citations, share of search, branded demand, local actions, and business impact.
- Partner with Analytics and Data Science to define success in an AI-assisted search environment.
- Ensure reporting keeps pace with market change while maintaining rigor around traditional KPIs where they still matter.
Lead Local SEO and reputation at scale
- Own Tombras' point of view and service delivery around multi-location SEO, listings management, Google Business Profile optimization, ratings and reviews, duplicates, and data consistency.
- Ensure local SEO remains a core strength of the department as AI visibility evolves.
- Connect local authority, review signals, and business data accuracy to broader search and AI performance.
Build and lead a best-in-class department
- Lead, mentor, and scale the SEO team with high standards for strategy, execution, communication, and innovation.
- Create a culture of experimentation and continuous learning around AI, automation, and the future of search.
- Improve workflows, quality standards, staffing models, training, and career development.
- Partner with senior leadership on hiring, retention, team design, and long-term department growth.
What you bring:
- 12+ years of SEO experience, including leadership of enterprise SEO programs and senior teams in an agency or consulting environment.
- Deep expertise in technical SEO, content strategy, local SEO, and organic growth for complex brands.
- Strong command of enterprise SEO platforms, site crawling tools, Google Search Console, analytics tools, and listings/reputation platforms.
- Clear point of view on how AI Overviews, LLMs, conversational interfaces, and generative search are changing SEO.
- Experience building repeatable methodologies, client recommendations, and scalable team adoption around emerging industry change.
- Strong fluency in multi-location and local SEO, including listings management, reputation, reviews, duplicate suppression, and local optimization at scale.
- Experience building AI-enabled or agentic workflows that improve SEO efficiency and scale high-quality, grounded content outputs.
- Strong communication and executive presence, with the ability to translate technical complexity into clear business language.
- Proven success developing teams, mentoring talent, and driving department performance.
- A player-coach mentality with the judgment to move between executive strategy, client leadership, and hands-on problem solving.
Preferred Experience
- Experience with BrightEdge, Conductor, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog, Deepcrawl/Lumar, and leading listings/reputation platforms.
- Familiarity with schema strategy, entity SEO, knowledge graph concepts, and modern content architectures.
- Experience partnering closely with paid search, analytics, PR, social, and content teams in an integrated environment.
- Experience building or scaling new offerings tied to AI-enabled discovery, automation, or next-generation search.
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.
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