Content & SEO Lead
We are looking for someone who can open a client's Search Console, work out what the site is really missing, and then come up with the article nobody else in that niche would have thought to write.
This is not a copywriting job with a bit of SEO attached. Around half of it is working out what to write and why, from real data, and the other half is writing it well enough that it performs.
Who we are
Lakewood media is a small UK agency. I started it in 2013, and I still run it day-to-day. We work under two brands.
HauteLab is our luxury adult brand, and it is where you would sit. Ten years in the sector, working with elite escort agencies, companionship services and premium adult brands across the UK, Europe and Australia. Everything is handled in-house and with complete discretion.
Peak Narrative covers education, environmental and outdoor lifestyle clients. That side is being rebuilt, so work there will follow later.
We are deliberately small: no layers, no committee, nobody sitting between you and the decision.
We also care about more than rankings. We are working towards planting 1,000 trees by 2027, and we pay attention to the places our team live: the UK, the Philippines and South Africa.
What you would actually do
Run the projects. Each client is a live project on a monthly cadence, and you would own the ones assigned to you. Keeping them moving, hitting the dates, and knowing what state each one is in without having to go and look.
Set the strategy. Decide the direction for each campaign and what gets built in what order. Live in Search Console, Ahrefs and GA. Find the gaps in what we are already running and bring them to me rather than waiting to be asked.
Bring ideas. Angles nobody in the sector is using. If the plan we have is boring, say so and put something better on the table.
Content. Decide what gets written each month and why that piece rather than another. Write the pieces that carry a cluster. Brief and edit freelance writers, and hold the line when a draft is not good enough.
The SEO work in between. On-page fixes and internal linking audits: the orphaned pages, the hubs nobody points at, the anchors doing nothing. Checking what Google has crawled and quietly not indexed. Tracking stage keywords, running competitor and link-gap analysis, and turning a Screaming Frog or Ahrefs audit into a prioritised list you then get through.
Plan the links and the PR. I run the link programme myself at the moment, but the planning should come from you: which pages need links next quarter, which publications are worth going after, and what we would pitch them. Most of that work is writing and publisher relationships, so it extends what you would already be doing rather than being a second job. Over time I would expect you to take the whole programme on; this is built into an AI workflow, so not as daunting as it sounds.
Clients and reporting. Day-to-day client email is collaborative. Content plans going out for approval, chasing what has gone live, answering the questions that come back. I stay on the relationship and run the monthly review calls. You produce the monthly deliverables summary for each client and keep the workbooks accurate.
What we need you to be good at
Content. Native-standard English, written in British English. Short sentences, no filler. Persuasive, because most of what we produce is moving someone from curious to booked. And ideas with a commercial job attached, not just nice ones.
SEO. Read Search Console, Ahrefs and GA4 and reach a conclusion rather than produce a screenshot. Understand internal linking properly, and how value moves around a site. Know what a content hub is for, and why the structure is often what wins the head term. Judge which pages should receive links.
You do not need to be a senior SEO specialist, so please do not count yourself out.
Communication. You must be excellent at communicating ideas, strategies and being able to deal with stressed clients when needed. You will also need to pitch topics to publishers and clients. You will need to draft questions to clients to answer to improve a piece of content, etc.
Organisation. You would be juggling content stages, link logs, publisher conversations and reporting dates across several clients. None of it is hard on its own. all of it goes wrong at once when the trackers slip. Claude Cowork is used heavily as the in-between to make this manageable at scale.
The tools we use
Ahrefs, Google Search Console, GA4 and Screaming Frog for the SEO work. Asana for tasks, Missive for email and internal chat, Notion for documentation, Google Workspace for everything else. WordPress on most client sites.
We also use Claude heavily, including Cowork and Claude Code. Real experience there counts for a lot, so do say if you have it.
On AI
A lot of pure writing work has dried up because the brief now goes to a model and the writer gets handed the edit. What has held its value is people who write well and also know what the writing is for. That is the job.
So I expect you to use AI heavily. That said, we are not looking for an AI operator. We use AI as a tool; it should not replace you.
The test is simple. If we took the AI away tomorrow, could you still do this job to the same standard, just slower? If yes, you are the person I am looking for.
Used badly, AI produces confident copy that says nothing and confident analysis that is wrong. You would be checking both. You are welcome to use it during the assessment, I just want to see it.
What we are not looking for
The last person in this seat logged in each morning, worked quietly on their own all day, and logged off without a word. Everything reached me as an AI-generated report at the end of the day, by which point it was too late to discuss any of it. That is the one thing I do not want to repeat.
What I want instead is someone who talks to me while the work is happening. Who says "I have been through this site and the internal linking is a mess" before I have asked. Who reads a report properly and spots the number that does not add up. Who would rather get on a call or send a Loom and argue about a campaign than send three paragraphs about it. Start your application with the word Ampersand, so I know you have read this far.
Beyond that, this will not work for:
How we work
Distributed team, flexible on hours. The shape of your day is yours, as long as you are contactable through the working morning and around for the calls we book (which aren’t that frequent).
Core overlap: 08:00 to 13:00 SAST, Monday to Friday.
Terms
How to apply
Please do not send a cover letter. I have read hundreds of them and they mostly say the same thing. I would much rather hear from you.
Apply through the form on this page. In the application itself, give me a few paragraphs in your own words on why you are right for this particular role, and which bits of your experience actually matter here. Not a career history, that is what the CV is for.
Better still, send a Loom. Five minutes, on camera, walking me through your CV and making the case. There is a field for the link. Last time round, the people who could explain their own work out loud turned out to be the people who could do the work.
There are a handful of screening questions below. Most are one click. A few want a sentence or two, and I do read those properly.
A few things worth knowing before you write. I read the CV alongside what you tell me, and if they disagree, I go with the CV. Anything that reads as a template will not get a reply. And how things go during the process is what I will assume working together is like, so if you say you will send something, send it.
Shortlisted candidates get a recorded assessment: around thirty minutes, screen and voice, done live.
Include the reference in your application: HL-CL-0826
Thanks for reading this far, and good luck.
Adam
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