Technical Search Director, Croud
Contractor (6 weeks)
2-3 days a week in office
Performance marketing agency
Be an early applicant
Performance marketing agency
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
2-3 days a week in office
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To drive business performance and growth for ambitious brands through reinvention.
Role
Who you are
- Extensive experience in Technical SEO within an agency environment
- Expert knowledge of Technical SEO best practice, site migrations and web performance optimisation
- Strong understanding of AI search, emerging search technologies and the evolving search landscape
- Confident working with developers and translating technical recommendations into actionable solutions
- Commercially minded with excellent stakeholder management and communication skills
- Proven experience leading technical teams and driving capability development across a business
What the job involves
- We are looking for an experienced Technical Search Director Contractor for 6 weeks to lead the strategic direction, operational excellence, and technical delivery of Croud’s Web Experience and Technical SEO capability, ensuring client websites are optimised for modern search discovery, AI chat engines, and technical performance across the Organic Performance portfolio
- You will serve as Croud’s interim senior technical authority on Web Experience and Technical SEO workstreams
- This is a specialist director role that combines expert-level, hands-on technical execution with cross-departmental leadership and agency-wide capability development
- Reporting into the Head of Organic Strategy, you will work in close alignment with Croud’s Organic Strategy teams to audit, architect, and roadmap technical SEO improvements designed for next-generation search
- You will ensure client websites are fully crawlable, accessible, and structured for maximum content extraction, not only for traditional search engines, but also for AI summaries and conversational LLM interfaces
- Acting as the vital bridge between SEO strategy and technical delivery, you will partner directly with client web development teams to translate audits into clear, actionable code specifications and tickets, while serving as the senior point of expertise on technical projects such as site migrations and platform rebuilds
- 1. Technical SEO & New-Age Search Strategy
- Advanced Web Auditing: Lead end-to-end technical site audits, identifying structural obstacles, rendering issues, and optimisation opportunities to enhance site usability, speed, and indexing efficiency. With experience with Apache configuration files (redirects) and knowledge of CLI (command-line interface) tools
- Next-Gen Search Optimisation: Architect technical strategies tailored for modern search ecosystems, ensuring client websites are optimised for crawlability, accessibility, and content extraction across traditional search, AI summaries, and generative AI chat experiences
- Semantic & Structural Design: Oversee structured data schema implementation, semantic HTML, site architecture, and rendering optimisation (client-side, server-side, dynamic rendering) to maximise machine understanding
- Performance & Core Web Vitals: Oversee front-end web performance analysis, leveraging tools like Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, and WebPageTest to drive Core Web Vitals compliance
- 2. Developer Engagement & Execution
- Actionable Ticketing: Translate complex technical audit findings into clear, digestible, developer-ready specifications and tickets (e.g. Jira, Azure DevOps) that client engineering teams can seamlessly implement
- Developer Advocacy: Work directly with client web developers, frontend engineers, and technical architects to communicate requirements, align on standards (W3C, WCAG), and validate implemented fixes
- Front-End & Code Expertise: Apply strong knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to debug complex front-end SEO issues, client-side frameworks, and DOM manipulation challenges
- 3. Technical Project Leadership
- Site Migrations: Serve as the senior lead on technically heavy projects, including site migrations, platform rebuilds, re-architectures, and international rollouts, protecting baseline traffic and mitigating operational risk
- Technical Roadmapping: Formulate and manage robust technical roadmaps for key accounts, scoping accurate effort requirements and resource allocation
- Escalation & Technical Resolution: Serve as the senior point of escalation for complex technical issues, indexing emergencies, or performance drops across the Organic client portfolio
- 4. Proposition Operationalisation & Innovation
- Evolving the Proposition: Continuously modernise Croud’s Web Experience methodology with improved processes and agentic workflows to integrate emerging web technologies, generative AI search behaviours, and evolving search engine guidelines, whilst driving efficiency in delivery
- Test & Learn: Lead regular "Test & Learn" technical initiatives to evaluate new tools, web standards, and indexing patterns, turning insights into client strategies
- Case Studies & Thought Leadership: Produce high-quality case studies and whitepapers that showcase Croud’s technical SEO innovation and elevate the agency’s profile in the market
- 5. Growth & Capability Development
- New Business & Growth: Support sales and pitch initiatives by delivering high-impact technical audits, pitch inputs, and solution design on complex technical opportunities
- Croudie Network Management: Oversee brief quality, project management, and quality control for work assigned to specialist on-demand network experts
- Upskilling & Mentorship: Provide ongoing training, mentorship, and technical guidance to Web Experience Managers and the wider Organic Performance team
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Marketing teams are often under-resourced and over-stretched, and the 24/7 nature of the field only amplifies these difficulties. Yet, digital marketing continues to be a vital part of businesses marketing strategy as the opportunities for business success online continue to grow.
Croud has a unique approach to assisting digital marketers. Its proprietary technology supports planning, automation and delivery of digital marketing campaigns. Croud's capability to deliver this at scale is supported by its "Croud Control" platform, a digital platform that links over 2,300 on-demand digital experts known as "Croudies" to clients.
Croud continues to expand its network of "Croudies" and the digital products available to clients. For example, its in-house "Croud Creative" team provides instant creative resources to media teams, allowing them to create world-class campaigns. It also continues to make acquisitions to strengthen its position and remains well-regarded in the space.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (1 round)
Nov 2019
$40.2m
LATE VC
Total funding: $40.2m
Company benefits
- Work from home opportunities
- 25 days holiday a year
- Annual performance bonus
- Sale commission
- Recruitment referrals bonus
- Gym membership contributions
- Ride to Work scheme
- Rail card
- Season Ticket loan
- Free fruit, breakfast cereals and tea & coffee
- Free home office chair
- Life and income protection
- Medical cash plan
- Share option scheme
- Agile Working Policy
- Summer Fridays
Company HQ
London, UK
Leadership
Ben Knight
(Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer)Ben worked within search for over ten years, and realised there was a gap in the market to deliver a more innovative way of working, so founded Croud, to cater to clients' 24/7/365 demands
Luke Smith
(Co-Founder & Global CEO)Luke started his career at News International and The Economist, then turned his hand to agency relationship management at Google, where his belief that the agency model was broken grew.
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