Senior SEO Lead

WittyPen is a strategic content marketing company. Since 2015, we've worked with 500+ companies, built a vetted network of 1,800+ writers, and shipped 85,000+ pieces of content. Today we run two disciplines as one system, Search Growth and Brand Authority, because you can't really do one without the other anymore: AI engines pull citations from where brands are actually discussed well, and brand work only turns into pipeline once it's found and cited.

We're a small, high-ownership team. We'd rather ship steady, good work at a sustainable pace than perform busyness, and we're not chasing move fast and break things or fail fast, fail forward as personality traits.

Search doesn't work the way it did two years ago. AI engines now answer the question directly and cite a handful of sources, and those citations come as much from where a brand is genuinely well covered as from where it ranks. Whoever owns SEO here has to hold technical, on-page, off-page, and AI-visibility work as one connected system, and lead it, not execute inside a plan someone else wrote.

This is an agency role, so it's as much about clients as it is about crawlers. You'll own a set of accounts, build the strategy, run the audits, present to stakeholders, set expectations, and be the first person in the room when something isn't working. You'll also own our AI-visibility practice and run it on Zerply, our own agentic-SEO platform, using it every day for WittyPen and for clients and feeding what you learn back into the product.

What you'll do

• Own SEO as a function. Hold technical, on-page, off-page, and AI-visibility work together as one system, not four separate checklists. You set the direction; you don't wait for someone else's plan.

• Run the audits yourself. Quarterly deep technical audits covering crawlability, indexation, rendering, site architecture, internal linking, Core Web Vitals, and log-file analysis, with lighter monthly checks so you catch a regression before the client does.

• Build the strategy per account. Keyword and market research, competitive and SERP-gap analysis, and a roadmap that says what happens in the first 30, 60, and 90 days, and what results are actually realistic in that window.

• Drive links and authority. Backlink and digital-PR strategy you execute, not a document handed to someone else to run, plus regular link-profile risk checks and clean-up.

• Work across content and dev. Brief our writers so content maps to search and citation intent, and work with developers on schema, page speed, migrations, and crawler access, so implementation actually ships.

• Own AI visibility. Win citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews: entity clarity across the Knowledge Graph and Wikidata, answer-first structure, and deliberate AI-crawler access (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) in robots.txt. Track share of AI voice and citation rate as first-class metrics, since citations drift 40 to 60 percent month to month, so a one-off check tells you nothing.

• Run Zerply daily. Use our own AI-visibility and agentic-SEO platform for WittyPen and for clients, and feed what breaks, what's missing, and what works back to the product team.

• Own your client accounts. Be the strategic point of contact for your accounts: run the monthly and quarterly calls, present the strategy and the results, and set expectations honestly, including the wins that take two quarters, not two weeks.

• Handle the hard conversations. Be the first escalation point when something's underperforming, get ahead of it before it becomes a churn risk, and spot where more scope genuinely helps the client, not just the invoice.

• Lead the function and the people. Set the audit, reporting, and QA standards the rest of the team follows, review their work, and mentor one or two specialists as the function grows.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years in SEO with real technical depth, the kind that reads a log file and a Core Web Vitals report, not SEO that's mostly content-adjacent.

• A track record you can point to: rankings recovered, a migration that didn't lose traffic, a link or PR campaign you ran end to end, or an audit that changed what a team actually did.

• Client-facing experience at an agency or similar: you've owned accounts, presented to stakeholders, set expectations, and handled the call where the numbers were down.

• Current fluency in how AI answer engines retrieve, rank, and cite content, including what's changed in the last year, and a point of view on GEO you can defend.

• Hands-on with the real stack, comfortable and not just familiar: Ahrefs or Semrush, Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, Search Console, GA4, and Looker Studio.

• Some experience leading, whether or not you held the title: mentoring, reviewing others' work, or setting the process others follow.

• Heavy, daily use of AI tools across your own workflow.

• Comfortable leading the function, not only executing inside one someone else built.

Nice to have

• Experience building or scaling an SEO function from the ground up.

• Direct experience with AI-visibility or GEO tools, such as Zerply, Profound, or Peec AI.

• Digital-PR or earned-link relationships you can bring with you.

• Time at a content marketing agency, where SEO and writing have to work as one team.

Compensation

₹9–15 LPA.

Location

Pune