Associate Director, SEO & AI Visibility

Tombras, a 450+ person, full-service, national advertising agency with a digital mindset, is seeking an Associate Director, SEO & AI Visibility to lead the next era of search for the agency and our clients.

You’ll be joining one of the top independent agencies in North America. Connecting Data & Creativity for Business Results® is working for our clients and creating a flywheel affect fueling both client and agency growth.  You’ll be a part of a highly creative agency that has been recognized by AdAge, Adweek, Communication Arts, Fast Company, Forbes and Fortune. Tombras was recently named 2025 AdAge Agency of the year and 2024 AdAge Independent Agency of the Year.

This is not a traditional SEO role. Search has evolved beyond blue links, rankings, and click-through rate alone. Today, brands are increasingly discovered through AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, YouTube, Reddit, reviews, maps, and other answer-first environments that shape consumer decisions before a website visit ever happens.

We are looking for a modern search leader who is equally comfortable driving enterprise SEO strategy, building AI-enabled content workflows, guiding GEO/AEO programs, and helping clients measure visibility across both traditional search engines and LLM-driven discovery platforms.

This role sits within Tombras’ Integrated Search team and reports into senior SEO leadership. You will lead a team of SEO analysts and strategists while serving as a senior strategic partner to clients across technical SEO, local SEO, content strategy, AI visibility, and organic performance measurement.

Where you'll be working: Knoxville or Atlanta. Relocation assistance may be provided.

What you'll be doing:

• Lead SEO and AI visibility strategy for national, enterprise, and multi-location brands across technical SEO, content SEO, local SEO, and emerging answer-engine optimization programs.
• Architect modern organic discovery strategies that improve brand visibility across Google Search, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, YouTube, Reddit, maps, reviews, and other platforms influencing consumer decision-making.
• Translate shifting search behavior into actionable client strategies, helping brands adapt to zero-click search, cited-answer environments, and AI-mediated discovery.
• Build and refine GEO/AEO frameworks focused on semantic clarity, entity optimization, structured content, source credibility, schema, internal linking, and answer-first content architecture.
• Develop AI-enabled content workflows that improve the speed, consistency, and quality of SEO deliverables, including content briefs, optimization recommendations, page refreshes, FAQ generation, internal linking recommendations, and other scalable workstreams.
• Ensure AI-assisted workflows are grounded in brand truth, first-party inputs, subject matter expertise, and sound editorial judgment rather than generic, low-value content generation.
• Partner with Content, Creative, UX, Development, PR, Social, Analytics, and Paid Search teams to improve the broader signals that influence both search rankings and AI citation visibility.
• Lead technical SEO strategy across crawling, indexation, renderability, schema, canonicals, hreflang, XML sitemaps, redirects, site migrations, internal linking, international architecture, and other core areas of enterprise SEO.
• Oversee local SEO and reputation programs for multi-location brands, including Google Business Profile optimization, listings consistency, duplicate suppression, ratings and reviews, local landing pages, and hyperlocal visibility.
• Monitor and analyze brand presence across traditional search and AI-driven experiences, including citations, mentions, answer inclusion, share of voice, and evolving visibility signals by LLM or platform.
• Help define and socialize new measurement frameworks for organic success, incorporating rankings, traffic, citations, mentions, AI visibility share, branded demand, local actions, and business outcomes.
• Partner with Analytics and Data Science teams to improve reporting tied to AI visibility, answer-engine exposure, and the changing relationship between visibility and clicks.
• Lead client presentations, strategic recommendations, reporting discussions, and testing plans with confidence and clarity.
• Manage workloads and quality across a team of SEO practitioners, providing mentorship, training, feedback, and hands-on support where needed.
• Contribute to