SEO Manager (Digital Marketing Agency, EST Hours)

SEO Manager (Digital Marketing Agency, EST Hours)

Pressure Washing Marketing Pros | Remote | Full-time, 9 AM to 5 PM EST

SNAPSHOT: $4,000 to $7,000 USD/month, depending on experience. Fully remote. 9 AM to 5 PM EST, hard requirement. You lead three SEO specialists, carry 10 to 15 of our hardest accounts yourself, and own SEO decisions day to day. Path to Head of SEO.

The apply link is at the bottom. Read the whole post first. We’ll know if you didn’t.

READ THIS FIRST

This role has two halves and you have to be good at both. You lead the SEO team, and you also run your own accounts. Most people can only do one of those.

Most SEO people who want to lead can no longer do the work. Most SEO people who can do the work do not want to lead. We have hired both. Neither one worked.

So if you want to work quietly on your own accounts and not manage anyone, this is not it. Close the tab. No hard feelings, those are good roles and we have hired them.

If you are strong at local SEO, you want to lead a team without giving up the hands-on work, and you want to grow into running a whole department, keep reading.

WHO WE ARE

We’re a digital marketing agency that works exclusively with exterior cleaning businesses (pressure washing, soft washing, window cleaning). We’re at $1.2M in revenue, 150 active clients, and client retention sits at 98 to 99%. Our clients love us, our results are real, and we built that by being obsessively good at one niche.

The SEO function here is not a startup. A team of specialists already executes consistently across 100+ local accounts, backed by a dedicated web and development team that handles the build work, and a client success team that owns the client relationships. The systems, the workflows, and the AI are already built in-house.

What the department does not have is a leader. Right now the founder approves every strategy, catches the problems, and makes the decisions. This role exists to change that.

THE ONE HARD REQUIREMENT

3+ years of hands-on local SEO at an agency, including at least one year with SEO people reporting to you.

Local. Read that again. Local or multi-location SEO for service businesses.

If your background is ecommerce, national, enterprise, or SaaS SEO, this is not a fit and we will not move forward. That is not a judgment on your skill. Enterprise and ecommerce SEO are genuinely hard. They are also a different job. Our world is Google Business Profiles, local pack rankings, service area and city pages, silo structure, citations, and keeping reviews coming in, across 100+ small local businesses in a single niche. A strong enterprise SEO would be starting over here, and would be bored inside a month.

We will not bend on the management year either. Leading three independent SEO specialists is a different skill from being the best specialist in the room. You need to have already had to look at someone else’s audit, decide it is not good enough, and tell them directly. If you have informally mentored people but have never been responsible for someone else’s work, this role will expose that fast.

THE SEAT, HONESTLY

You report directly to the founder. Three SEO specialists report to you. You are the final call on SEO decisions day to day.

You own your team’s standards and their output. You set the priorities, you give the feedback, you decide when work is not good enough, and you have those conversations yourself. The founder signs off on pay and hiring decisions, and he relies on your assessment of your team to make them.

You also carry your own book: 10 to 15 of our hardest accounts, hands-on. Our biggest clients, the accounts at risk, and the ones that just signed. That is on purpose. Your authority here is earned by doing the work, not handed to you with the title, and your specialists will know the difference inside a week.

Roughly how the week breaks down:

• 40% your own book of 10 to 15 accounts

• 25% reviewing the specialists’ work

• 20% leading the team: priorities, coaching, standups, hard conversations

• 10% digging into problems and recoveries across the full 100+ account book

• 5% client calls and strategy on our largest accounts

We are not promising you the Head of SEO role. We are telling you it is genuinely available to the right person, that it means owning the whole function across a larger book and a larger team as we grow, and that we would much rather promote into it than hire it from outside.

WHAT YOU’LL ACTUALLY DO

• Own SEO delivery across a 100+ account book. If work is late, wrong, or about to slip, you know before anyone tells you.

• Lead three SEO specialists: priorities, standards, coaching, and direct feedback when the work is not good enough.

• Run your own book of 10 to 15 of our hardest accounts, hands-on.

• Check the specialists’ work before it goes out: audits, on-page changes, content briefs and silos, Google Business Profiles, citations, internal linking.

• Figure out why rankings and local pack positions drop, and own the fix rather than the explanation.

• Approve monthly account strategies and make sure every account has a strategy and a report in the system on time.

• Look at the web team’s work for anything that will hurt SEO. They check their own build. You catch what will cost rankings.

• Work with our Ops and Delivery Manager on anything that crosses between teams, and talk to Client Success directly when an SEO account is in trouble. They hear it from you, not through a middleman.

• Keep the SEO processes and SOPs accurate and useful, and improve them once the system is yours. Documented and actually followed, not written once and forgotten.

• Get on client calls for our largest accounts and the ones in trouble, to defend the strategy and reset expectations. Roughly 10 to 15% of your time.

WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• 3+ years of hands-on local SEO at an agency, with at least one year managing SEO people. Non-negotiable, see above.

• Able to work 9 AM to 5 PM EST, Monday through Friday. Hard requirement.

• Real depth across on-page, off-page, technical, and local: Google Business Profiles, local packs, service area and city pages, silos, schema, internal linking, citations.

• Strong at figuring out what went wrong. Given an account that dropped, you come back with a real explanation of why, then prove it or rule it out. Not a guess, and not a generic checklist.

• You think in systems. When something goes wrong twice, you fix the process instead of the symptom, and you write it down so the next person does not have to work it out again.

• Vocal and proactive. You raise problems early, you propose the fix instead of waiting to be told, you say the uncomfortable thing in the meeting, and you push back on the founder when you think he is wrong. If you avoid conflict, this role will be miserable for you.

• Able to lead people who are used to being left alone. SEO specialists are independent by nature. You have to earn their respect with your work first, then actually direct them.

• Fluent in Ahrefs, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics.

• Strong with AI. We use it throughout the agency and expect you to use it to work faster and cleaner, not to think for you. Hands-on experience with Claude is a plus.

• Excellent written and spoken English. A lot of this job is written, and you are in front of our biggest clients some of the time.

• Comfortable in ClickUp, Slack, Loom, and Google Drive.

WHO WILL NOT SUCCEED HERE

Being honest because it saves us both time:

• The manager who can no longer do the work. You run good meetings and a clean board and you cannot audit a site yourself. We already know how that ends.

• The specialist who will not lead. You are excellent working on your own, and you go quiet when a decision or a hard conversation is yours to handle. That is half of this job.

• Ecommerce, national, or enterprise SEO backgrounds. See above.

• People who show up and start rewriting the system in week two.

• People whose strongest skill is interview polish or AI-assisted writing rather than live thinking.

• People who get defensive or go quiet when challenged directly. You will be challenged directly here, often.

• People who need a checklist for every task and reassurance every day.

If any of that is you, this role will make you miserable and you will not last. Please apply elsewhere. We genuinely wish you well.

TOOLS YOU’LL WORK WITH

• Ahrefs

• Google Search Console, Analytics, and Tag Manager

• Claude and our internal AI workflows

• ClickUp

• Slack and Loom

• Google Drive, Sheets, and Docs

COMPENSATION AND TERMS

• Pay: $4,000 to $7,000 USD/month, depending on experience and your ability to lead at a senior level without a long ramp-up period. The top of the range is for someone who can take over the department quickly. Your pay is based on the work you show us, not on what you ask for.

• Hours: Full-time, Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM EST. Hard requirement. This is a leadership seat, which means being available when your team, the other departments, and our clients are.

• Location: Fully remote. We hire globally if you can reliably work 9 AM to 5 PM EST.

• Tools and systems: We provide the tools, the automation, and our internal AI workflows.

• Path to more: Head of SEO as we scale, with the pay and ownership that comes with it.

HOW TO APPLY

We have a structured process, and it is built to reward people who can actually do the work rather than people who interview well.

We will not consider:

• AI-generated applications. We can tell, and we won’t move forward.

• Incomplete applications.

Apply only through this link:

https://hiring.pressurewashingmarketingpros.com/hiring/seo-manager/job-post-6643