Victor.Ijomah
All roles
Open to UK SEO Manager roles

SEO Manager for the AI Search era.

I'm Victor Ijomah. I lead SEO end-to-end: strategy across technical, content, and discoverability, plus the team and stakeholder work that holds it together. Based in the UK, available now.

Experience4+ years hands-on
Published50+ articles
Notice4 weeks
Right to workUnited Kingdom

The role, as I see it

What an SEO Manager actually owns.

An SEO Manager owns the SEO function: the strategy across technical, content, and discoverability, the team that delivers it, the reporting that proves the case, and the relationships with engineering, product, content, and leadership that keep the work moving.

In practice, that looks like:

  • Setting the SEO strategy and getting buy-in across technical, content, and growth teams
  • Building and managing the SEO team: technical SEOs, content strategists, analysts
  • Owning the quarterly roadmap, the reporting cadence, and the case for headcount
  • Translating SEO opportunities into the language of business outcomes for leadership reviews
  • Representing SEO in cross-functional planning around launches, migrations, and content initiatives
  • Staying close enough to the work to know when a recommendation is genuinely on track and when it is being delayed

It is the role where you stop being measured on a single audit and start being measured on the whole organic growth picture. That requires breadth, depth, and the patience to play a quarter-by-quarter game.

What I bring

01

Technical depth most SEO Managers do not have.

Many SEO Managers came up through the content or keyword research route. They cannot lead a Technical SEO directly because they cannot meaningfully review the work. I can. That changes what kind of technical projects you can take on as an organisation, and how quickly engineering trusts SEO recommendations.

02

Already operating in AI Search.

llms.txt, AI crawler management, entity optimisation, schema for citation. These are the levers that decide who gets cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. I have been building for this since the standards started emerging, while most SEO Managers are still working out what AI Search means for them.

03

Builds teams that ship.

At my consultancy I lead a small team across development specialisms. I scope projects, prioritise work, review deliverables, and hold the line on quality. The same approach scales to an SEO team with mixed skill sets across technical, content, and analytics.

04

Strategic and tactical in the same week.

Comfortable in a leadership review on Monday and reviewing a schema implementation on Friday. The combination matters because SEO Manager work flips between those modes constantly, and the depth of the tactical work changes the quality of the strategic decisions.

The stack

Tools and platforms I work with daily.

Crawling and indexing

Google Search ConsoleBing Webmaster ToolsScreaming FrogSitebulbCloudflare

Analytics and reporting

Google Analytics 4Looker StudioBigQuery

Schema and structured data

Schema.org vocabularyJSON-LDYoast SEORankMathSchema App

Research and benchmarking

AhrefsSemrushMozSimilarWeb

Log file analysis

JetOctopusCustom BigQuery pipelinesSplunk basics

AI Search and AI crawlers

llms.txtai.txtGPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot rule managementManual citation tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity

Selected work

Recent Technical SEO projects.

/feature-a/use-case/solutionuncrawled
SSR rollout →
/feature-a  ✓/use-case  ✓/solution  ✓indexed
B2B SaaS · 40k monthly users

Crawl efficiency audit and render fix

Site was losing 60% of programmatic landing pages to indexation problems behind client-side render. Owned the diagnosis, made the case for engineering investment, worked through the SSR rollout in priority order, and reported progress to leadership.

Outcome

Indexed page count up 4x in one quarter, organic visibility followed.

{
"@type": "Article",
"author": {...},
"publisher": {...},
"sameAs": [ … ]
}
Content Publication · 200k monthly visits

Schema migration for AI Search citation

Editorial site needed schema strong enough to be cited in AI Search. Designed the architecture, briefed the development team on implementation, aligned with editorial leadership on long-form markup approach, and ran citation tracking through the rollout.

Outcome

Citation appearances in ChatGPT and Perplexity went from rare to weekly within the tracking window.

/products/shoes
├─?color=red✓ canonical
├─?color=red&s=8✗ blocked
├─?s=8&color=red✗ blocked
└─?brand=nike✓ allowed
E-commerce Brand · 1,200 SKUs

Faceted navigation crawl budget recovery

Crawl budget was being wasted on filter URL combinations, hurting product page indexation. Mapped the waste via log analysis, designed the strategy, and worked across product and engineering to get the changes prioritised and shipped.

Outcome

Crawl waste cut by 78%, important product pages re-prioritised by Googlebot within weeks.

Where this role is heading

Why SEO Managers with technical depth matter more, not less, as AI Search grows.

Classical SEO had one consumer of structured data: Googlebot. AI Search adds GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, and a growing list of crawlers that read sites with different rules and produce different outputs.

Each one needs technical accommodation: schema that survives different parsers, llms.txt that declares intent, log analysis that distinguishes them from each other, crawl rules that allow the ones you want and block the ones you do not.

An SEO Manager who cannot have these conversations with engineering at depth becomes a bottleneck. An SEO Manager who can becomes disproportionately valuable, because they can both make the case to leadership and direct the team that ships the work.

This is the work I have been building for. Hiring me means hiring an SEO Manager who can lead both the technical and the content sides of AI Search readiness, not someone who can only direct one half.

Continuous learning

Confidence comes from competence.

So I completed every major SEO course in the field. Each one verifiable.

Kristina Azaranko

Tech SEO Pro

Ahrefs

Academy Certification

Moz Academy

SEO Essentials

Semrush

Academy Certification

HubSpot Academy

SEO 2

HubSpot Academy

SEO 1

Plus broader marketing credentials: Google Fundamentals of Digital Marketing, Google Online Marketing Fundamentals, HubSpot Inbound Marketing.

Recommendations

From people who have shipped work with me.

Victor took our crawl efficiency issues seriously and shipped fixes inside two weeks that previous consultants had told us would take months. The reporting was clear and the team trusted him from day one.

LM

Laura Mitchell

Head of Growth, B2B SaaS Platform

Working with Victor on our SSR rollout was rare. He understood our codebase, knew exactly what SEO needed, and translated between the two without friction. Most marketing people slow engineering down. He sped us up.

MT

Marcus Tate

Senior Engineer, SaaS Platform

We brought Victor in for a schema migration on our editorial platform. Six weeks later we were being cited in ChatGPT responses for the first time. Specific, technical, gets the work done.

RA

Rachel Adeyemi

Editorial Director, Content Publication

Victor publishes some of the clearest writing I have read on llms.txt and AI crawler management. I have sent his posts to clients more than once when explaining what is coming next in search.

TA

Tobi Adekunle

SEO Consultant, Independent

Victor approached his M.Sc dissertation with rigour and a practical focus that stood out across the cohort. His grasp of Technical SEO concepts was notable.

CB

Dr. Catherine Bell

Course Leader, Digital Marketing M.Sc, University of Chester

Recommended reads

From the Library.

Common questions

Things hiring managers usually ask.

Four weeks notice from my current role. Available to begin within four weeks of an accepted offer.

No. I hold right to work in the United Kingdom. No sponsorship required, now or in future.

Open to all three. Currently based in the UK. Comfortable with travel for on-site days where the role requires it.

Yes. I currently lead a small team across full-stack, UI/UX, and frontend development at my consultancy. The mix of skill sets translates well to managing an SEO team that combines technical, content, and analytics work. Formal performance management is the addition I would build into a permanent role.

They are not opposing investments. Technical SEO is the foundation that makes content investment pay off. Content SEO is what fills the foundation with value. The balance question usually comes from leadership wanting a single answer, but the honest answer is: invest in both, sequenced by what is broken now. If indexation is the problem, technical first. If indexation is fine, content first.

Both. Permanent is my preferred path for the next two-plus years. Open to contracts of six months or longer where the work is the right fit.

Hands-on enough to stay credible. I will still write schema where useful, run the occasional audit, and review work that team members produce. Most of my time goes to strategy, team, and stakeholder work, but I do not stop doing the craft.

Yes. The recommendations above are a preview. Full references with direct contact details are available on request after an initial call.

Ready to talk?

Download the CV for the full work history, or jump straight to a 30-minute call.