SEO Manager- HomeAway Real Estate

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Opportunity:

The SEO Manager must be a self-driven, data-centric, hands-on individual and will be responsible for the natural search performance of the new global HomeAway Real Estate web sites. The ideal candidate will have an in-depth understanding of the principles of search engines and the internet, and will leverage that knowledge to design and implement successful SEO strategies for the HomeAway Real Estate web sites in the US, UK, Germany, France and all other counties in which we operate.

The SEO Manager will report to the General Manager for HomeAway Real Estate. While the SEO Manager will be focused on HomeAway Real Estate, he/she must work closely with the SEO teams for each HomeAway brand to develop synergistic SEO strategies that will maximize traffic and cross-sell opportunities.

The SEO Manager must become fully aligned with the business goals for HomeAway Real Estate. The individual is expected to work closely with the general manager, product manager, developers and IT personnel. The successful candidate must be able to bring clarity to complex problems and make recommendations to stakeholders with a variety of goals and depths of understanding of natural search. The individual is expected to live and breathe the search data for the site, becoming intimately familiar with how the site functions, its structure, the seasonal trends of the business and search, and characteristics of branded, geographic, generic and other types of search keyword phrases.

The successful candidate must be able to demonstrate an ability to identify opportunities, and create and implement action plans to make the most of those opportunities. A thorough understanding of the relationship between the crawl, internal and inbound links, content, rankings and traffic is necessary. Daily monitoring of search traffic and identification of sudden changes, positive or negative, is expected. Further analysis of keyword patterns or performance trend is a fundamental requirement.

 

Responsibilities Include:

• Create natural search channel plan, including defining goals for traffic and revenue; and setting the strategy and plan for achieving the goals

• Define natural search and other traffic-building strategies

• Create and implement project plans for content and link development

• Recommend and develop requirements for natural search-improving product features or enhancements and work with general manager and product manager to implement such features

• Implement process and systems improvements based on data analysis to assist in achieving business goals and objectives

• Participate in regular business, product or development meetings pertaining to the site for which the individual is responsible

• Monitor crawl logs, search engine and search keyword performance

• Conduct referring keyword analysis, keyword research and competitive research to identify threats and opportunities

• Monitor rankings, pages in the index and links

• Report search and other traffic performance metrics

• Ongoing industry research into industry best practices and emerging trends

• Review of site maps, administration of webmaster tools for websites

• Work with the editorial, marketing and pr teams to help create seo-optimized newsletters, press releases, website articles/copy, and email marketing campaigns

 

Qualifications:

• Experience managing organic search for large, global, dynamic websites

• Demonstrated success solving problems that are unique to search; gathering and analyzing large amounts of data from disparate sources.

• Demonstrated ability to identify and execute on opportunities to improve natural search performance

• Demonstrated use of site structure enhancements to positively impact natural search performance

• Proficiency with web analytics tools such as Omniture, Google Analytics, or Coremetrics

• Proficiency with webmaster tools, such as Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo! Site Explorer and MSN Webmaster Center

• Proficiency with Excel, including creation of pivot tables, chart, and graphs

• Proficiency with MS Access and SQL

• Expertise with XML sitemaps and other data feeds

• Demonstrated understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other web technologies

• Experience with online marketing channels, such as paid search, affiliate programs a plus

• Experience with data feeds, app or widget development, Drupal or Wordpress a plus

• Previous experience as a developer is a plus

• Excellent written and oral communication skills and a demonstrated commitment to achieve organizational goals

• Bachelor’s degree or comparable industry experience; background in linguistics, computer science, math, physics, economics, information science a plus

 

Location:

Location will be Austin, Texas. Limited travel will be required if any.