Job Description
SEO & AI Optimisation Specialist – 12 month FTCStoke – 3 days in office£35-38kAbout our clientForward Role are excited to be partnering with a prestigious higher education institution, as they look to recruit an SEO & AI Optimisation Specialist to join their in-house digital team. This is a genuinely exciting, long term contract at the cutting edge of where search and AI are heading, and a real opportunity to make a visible, measurable impact on how a well-known institution is discovered online. There is potential for this role to be made permanent.The roleThis is a hands-on delivery role sitting at the heart of the digital team, acting as the operational bridge between strategy and execution.
Working closely with an external agency, you'll take audit findings and strategic recommendations and turn them into real outcomes — spanning technical SEO, content optimisation, and authority development.Crucially, this role also covers AI optimisation — how the institution appears in AI-generated responses and summaries. That's still a relatively new space, and this is a brilliant opportunity to get ahead of the curve and own it.What the role involvesImplementing SEO and AI optimisation recommendations from agency audits and action plansImproving rankings and visibility for priority course, subject, and destination-related searchesOptimising technical SEO including site structure, crawlability, performance, and metadataIdentifying and delivering content improvements aligned to search intentEnhancing how the institution is represented in AI-generated answers and summariesOptimising content for clarity, authority, and answerability across the websiteSupporting activity to improve domain authority and strengthen the backlink profileActing as the key link between the agency, web, content, and marketing teamsMonitoring the impact of changes on search rankings, traffic, and AI platform visibilitySupporting faster implementation of high-impact changes during critical recruitment periods such as ClearingWhat we're looking forEssential:Solid hands-on SEO experience, covering both technical and content-led optimisationUnderstanding of how AI platforms surface and cite content, and how to optimise for themExperience working within a CMS to deploy website updatesAbility to translate strategic recommendations into practical, delivered outcomesStrong collaboration and stakeholder management skillsA data-driven approach to performance monitoring and continuous improvementNice to have:Experience working in higher education or a similarly complex organisationFamiliarity with tools such as GA4, Google Search Console, and SEO platformsExperience working alongside or managing external agenciesKnowledge of backlink development and domain authority buildingAs an industry leading, nationwide Marketing, Digital, Analytics, IT and Design recruitment agency, we are continually receiving new assignments to work on, so keep a close eye on our website, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages for a full list of current permanent and interim opportunities as well as marketplace news and fun stuff.Forward Role is operating as an employment agency.TPBN1_UKTJ