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