SEO, GEO & AEO Lead

Overview

• This is a senior, enterprise-level role for a practitioner who thinks in ecosystems, not channels. As SEO, GEO & AEO Lead for Africa, you will own and elevate organic search visibility across its three most critical and rapidly evolving dimensions — traditional search engine optimisation (SEO), generative engine optimisation (GEO), and answer engine optimisation (AEO) — delivering superiority across a connected PESO framework for a major global FMCG client.
• You are not a channel specialist. You are a strategic architect who understands how owned, earned, paid, and shared media interconnect, and who can engineer search-driven demand at enterprise scale — across diverse African markets, languages, and consumer behaviours.
• This role demands a rare combination: the commercial instincts of a senior marketer, the technical depth of a search engineer, and the cultural fluency to navigate the complexity of the African continent.

Responsibilities

What you'll be doing

Strategy & ecosystem leadership

• Defining and owning the integrated SEO, GEO, and AEO strategy across African markets, embedded within and connected to the broader PESO ecosystem
• Ensuring organic search performance is architected as a system — where paid amplifies earned, owned content feeds generative engines, and shared signals reinforce authority
• Leading enterprise-level search thinking for a global FMCG client, translating brand and commercial objectives into search opportunity across the full consumer journey
• Acting as the senior search authority in client relationships, contributing to C-suite and regional leadership conversations with data-led recommendations

Generative & answer engine optimisation (GEO / AEO)

• Developing and executing strategies to ensure brand content surfaces prominently in AI-generated responses across platforms including Google SGE/AI Overviews, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, and voice assistants
• Structuring content to be cited, quoted, and surfaced by large language models — through authoritative sourcing, entity optimisation, and semantic clarity
• Designing AEO frameworks for FAQ, conversational, and zero-click content across product categories, ensuring brand answers dominate high-intent queries
• Monitoring and reporting on AI SERP feature ownership and generative citation rates as emerging KPIs

Technical SEO excellence

• Conducting and directing comprehensive technical audits across multi-market, multi-domain environments — including site architecture, crawl efficiency, Core Web Vitals, structured data (schema.org), JavaScript rendering, and international SEO (hreflang, ccTLDs)
• Setting and enforcing technical SEO standards across agency and client-side development teams
• Leading the adoption and expert-level use of the full search toolstack: Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Botify or Lumar, Looker Studio, GA4, and AI-native search monitoring tools
• Owning the entity and knowledge graph optimisation strategy — ensuring brand, product, and category entities are correctly established across Google's Knowledge Graph and Wikidata

Multi-market Africa execution

• Adapting global SEO/GEO/AEO strategies for the nuances of African markets, including language and dialect variation (English, French, Arabic, Swahili, Afrikaans, and others), infrastructure constraints, and mobile-first consumer behaviour
• Managing in-market SEO priorities across key African hubs (e.g. South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, Ghana) while maintaining strategic coherence at a continental level
• Navigating the distinct digital landscape of African markets — including the role of WhatsApp, social search, and platform-specific discovery — in shaping the broader search ecosystem

Content & PESO integration

• Partnering with content, PR, social, and paid media teams to ensure organic search is embedded at the planning stage — not bolted on after the fact
• Championing content that earns links, generates citations, and feeds generative AI engines: authoritative, structured, and locally resonant
• Leading the development of pillar content, topic cluster architectures, and content calendars that serve SEO, GEO, and AEO objectives simultaneously

Measurement & reporting

• Building and owning multi-market SEO performance dashboards that report on traditional, generative, and answer engine visibility in one connected view
• Presenting performance, strategic direction, and recommendations to senior client stakeholders with clarity and commercial context
• Establishing baselines, setting measurable targets, and holding the broader team accountable to them

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years in a senior SEO role, with a clear track record of delivery on global, multi-market accounts at enterprise scale — agency or client-side
• Demonstrable expertise across all three disciplines: SEO, GEO, and AEO — including hands-on experience with AI-driven SERP features and answer engine strategy
• Marketing-qualified with a strong commercial foundation — you understand brand building, consumer behaviour, and FMCG category dynamics, not just rankings and traffic
• Expert-level proficiency across the full SEO toolstack (GSC, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, Botify/Lumar, GA4, Looker Studio) — you don't just use these tools, you extract strategic advantage from them
• Deep technical SEO capability: JavaScript SEO, schema markup, log file analysis, international SEO architecture, Core Web Vitals
• Experience working within or across a PESO framework, with a clear understanding of how organic search connects to paid, earned, and shared media
• Knowledge of African markets and the associated digital complexity — mobile-first behaviour, multilingual environments, infrastructure variation, and platform differences
• An enterprise mindset: able to navigate complex organisational structures, manage senior stakeholder relationships, and drive alignment across global and local teams
• Exceptional communicator — equally at home presenting to a CMO or working through a technical brief with a developer

Nice to have

• Experience with retailer and e-commerce search in African markets (Jumia, Takealot, etc.)
• Familiarity with Arabic, French, Swahili, or other African language SEO
• Knowledge of entity SEO, knowledge graph management, and Wikidata optimisation
• Experience with headless/composable CMS architectures and their SEO implications
• Exposure to programmatic SEO at scale