SEO Operations Specialist - Content & Technical SEO

Location: Canada/Remote
Employment: Full-time
Client Focus: Dedicated to one client across four related brands

About the Role

Blacksmith is an award-winning SEO/AEO agency that strives to be an extension of our clients’ teams. We are accessible, use data to inform our decision-making and stay on top of shifts in the search ecosystem.

We are looking for an SEO Operations Specialist to work exclusively on one of our largest client accounts, supporting four related brands. We are based in Vancouver, BC, and the ideal candidate would share/overlap with most of our working hours of 9 am - 5pm PDT.

This is a hands-on position combining content publishing, on-page SEO, technical SEO, analysis, quality assurance and coordination with engineering and project management teams.

Approximately 50% of the role will involve preparing, publishing, updating and QAing content within Sanity CMS. The remaining time will focus on identifying and resolving SEO opportunities and issues across the client's websites.

This is not primarily a content-writing position, nor is it a purely technical SEO position. We are looking for someone comfortable moving between CMS production, SEO analysis and technical problem-solving.

You should be equally comfortable publishing and optimising an article, reviewing Google Search Console data, crawling a website to investigate an issue, updating internal links and metadata, documenting a technical SEO problem, and working with developers to get a template-level change implemented correctly.

You will be supported by a Project Manager, Performance Strategist, and a Performance Analyst.

The successful candidate will become deeply familiar with the client's websites and operate as an ongoing SEO owner across the four brands.

Primary Responsibilities: Content Publishing & SEO Implementation (Approximately 50%)

Manage the day-to-day publishing and optimisation of content across the client's four brands.

Responsibilities include:

- Publish new articles, landing pages and other content within Sanity CMS.
- Format content correctly using established page components and content structures.
- Add and optimise headings, metadata, internal links, images, alt text, calls-to-action and related-page links.
- Ensure URLs, titles, canonical settings and other SEO fields are configured correctly.
- Implement FAQ, Article, Breadcrumb and other structured data where supported by the CMS.
- Add links between related articles, commercial pages and supporting resources.
- Update and refresh existing content based on SEO recommendations.
- Maintain consistency across the four brands while respecting individual brand requirements.
- Preview and QA pages before and after publication.
- Check desktop and mobile presentation following publication.
- Identify publishing or template problems that could negatively affect SEO or user experience.
- Maintain accurate records of published, updated and scheduled content.
- Coordinate publishing schedules with writers, strategists and account stakeholders.

Attention to detail is extremely important. A technically optimised article that is poorly formatted, incorrectly linked or improperly published is not considered complete.

SEO Monitoring & Analysis

Regularly monitor organic search performance across all four brands and identify meaningful changes, problems and opportunities.

Responsibilities include:

- Review Google Search Console performance and indexing data.
- Review Google Analytics / GA4 traffic, engagement and conversion data.
- Monitor keyword rankings and SERP visibility.
- Identify significant changes in impressions, clicks, rankings, traffic and conversions.
- Investigate unexpected gains or losses rather than simply reporting them.
- Analyse page-level and query-level performance.
- Identify declining content that may require updating.
- Identify pages and topics gaining visibility that could benefit from additional optimisation.
- Evaluate internal linking opportunities.
- Monitor indexing and crawl behaviour.
- Identify potential keyword cannibalisation and content overlap.
- Assist with competitor and SERP analysis.
- Translate SEO data into clear recommendations and actions.

The expectation is not simply to produce reports. We want someone who can look at data, determine what it may be telling us and investigate further.

Technical SEO

Conduct ongoing technical SEO monitoring and resolve issues within the level of access available to the SEO team.

Responsibilities may include:

- Review shared site crawls and technical SEO audits.
- Investigate indexing and crawlability problems.
- Review robots.txt directives.
- Review XML sitemaps.




- Review canonical implementation.
- Identify redirect issues and redirect chains.
- Identify broken internal links and 404 errors.
- Review status codes.
- Identify thin, duplicate or near-duplicate content.
- Review metadata and heading implementation.
- Investigate pagination and faceted-navigation issues where applicable.
- Review internal linking architecture.
- Review structured data and schema implementation.
- Identify orphaned or poorly connected pages.
- Monitor Core Web Vitals and page performance issues.
- Review rendering and JavaScript-related SEO issues when appropriate.
- Identify problems introduced through CMS components or page templates.
- Support website migrations, redesigns and structural changes where required.

Where an issue can be resolved directly through Sanity or other tools available to the SEO team, you will be expected to implement the change.

Where engineering support is required, you will be expected to clearly document the problem and proposed solution.

Engineering Collaboration

A significant part of this role involves bridging the gap between SEO requirements and the client's development team.

You do not need to be a software engineer.

You do need enough technical understanding to explain what is happening, why it matters and what outcome is required.

Responsibilities include:

- Create clear SEO tickets for engineering teams.
- Provide example URLs and affected page types.
- Explain expected versus current behaviour.
- Provide recommended acceptance criteria.
- Work with developers when SEO changes affect templates, components or site architecture.
- Answer questions from engineering teams regarding SEO requirements.
- Test changes in staging environments where available.
- QA changes after deployment.
- Confirm that fixes have produced the intended SEO outcome.
- Identify regressions resulting from development changes.
- Maintain documentation around recurring technical issues.

Strong communication is particularly important. Engineering tickets should contain enough information that developers can understand and reproduce the issue without extensive back-and-forth.

Content & On-Page SEO

Support the broader content strategy through ongoing optimisation.

Responsibilities include:

- Conduct keyword and topic research.
- Identify search intent.
- Recommend page titles and meta descriptions.
- Optimise heading structures.
- Recommend internal links.
- Identify content gaps.
- Recommend existing pages for expansion or consolidation.
- Assist with content briefs where required.
- Review content for SEO requirements before publication.
- Identify opportunities for FAQ content and structured data.
- Improve connections between informational and commercial content.
- Monitor published content and recommend subsequent improvements based on performance.

This role is primarily responsible for optimisation and publishing rather than long-form content writing, although strong writing and editing skills are required.

SEO/AEO

Search is increasingly happening across traditional search engines, AI-generated search experiences and answer engines.

The role will therefore also support emerging SEO/AEO initiatives, including:

- Structuring content so that information is clear and easily understood by search engines and AI systems.
- Improving entity and topical relationships across websites.
- Implementing structured data where appropriate.
- Creating clear question-and-answer content.
- Strengthening internal linking and supporting content relationships.
- Reviewing how brands and content appear within AI-driven search experiences.
- Supporting experiments designed to improve visibility across traditional and AI search platforms.

We do not expect candidates to claim expertise in every emerging AI search platform. Solid SEO fundamentals and an ability to learn and experiment are considerably more important.

Tools

You should already be comfortable with several of the following:

- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics / GA4
- Screaming Frog
- Ahrefs, or similar SEO/AEO platforms
- Google Sheets / Excel
- CMS platforms
- Project management systems such as ClickUp, Slack, Jira or similar

Experience with Sanity is highly desirable but not mandatory.

Experience working with a structured or headless CMS such as Sanity, Contentful, Storyblok,



Prismic or similar is an advantage.

Familiarity with the following is also beneficial:

- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript fundamentals
- Schema.org / JSON-LD
- Chrome DevTools
- Looker Studio
- PageSpeed Insights
- GitHub or developer ticketing workflows

You are not expected to be a developer, but you should be comfortable looking at HTML, understanding how webpages are assembled and communicating technical requirements to developers.

Required Experience

We are primarily looking for candidates with approximately 3–5 years of hands-on SEO experience.

Agency or in-house experience is acceptable.

Candidates should have demonstrated experience with:

- Technical SEO fundamentals.
- On-page SEO.
- Content publishing.
- Google Search Console.
- Google Analytics.
- SEO crawling and auditing tools.
- Keyword and SERP analysis.
- Internal linking.
- Metadata optimization.
- Indexation and crawlability.
- Working with CMS platforms.
- Interpreting SEO performance data.
- Documenting SEO recommendations.
- Working with developers or technical teams.

A degree is not required if you can demonstrate relevant experience and practical SEO knowledge.

What We Are Looking For

The right person for this position is someone who likes execution as much as analysis.

You are likely to succeed in this role if you:

- Have unusually strong attention to detail.
- Are comfortable performing repetitive publishing tasks without allowing quality to slip.
- Naturally investigate when data looks unusual.
- Understand the difference between identifying an SEO issue and understanding its cause.
- Can work independently without needing every task explained step-by-step.
- Know when you can fix something yourself and when engineering needs to become involved.
- Communicate technical problems clearly.
- Keep good records of changes and completed work.
- Can manage a large volume of URLs and content without losing track of details.
- Are comfortable working within established processes while identifying opportunities to improve them.
- Are curious about changes in Google Search and AI-driven discovery.
- Understand that SEO improvements often involve many small improvements rather than one large intervention.

What This Role Is Not

- This is not a pure content-writing position.
- This is not a link-building or outreach position.
- This is not a software engineering position.
- This is not a role where SEO recommendations are simply handed off to somebody else for execution.

The person in this position will be expected to actively implement as much of the SEO program as their access allows and help drive remaining recommendations through the appropriate technical teams.

How Success Will Be Measured

Success will be evaluated across both execution quality and SEO performance.

Key indicators may include:

- Content published accurately and on schedule.
- Low publishing error rates.
- Consistent SEO QA across all four brands.
- Technical issues identified and resolved.
- Time from issue identification to resolution.
- Quality of engineering tickets and documentation.
- Growth in organic search visibility.
- Growth in non-branded search traffic.
- Improvement in rankings for priority topics.
- Increased indexed and discoverable content.
- Improvements to internal linking and site architecture.
- Reduction in technical SEO errors.
- Performance of newly published and refreshed content.
- Ability to identify meaningful opportunities from search data.

Because many SEO outcomes take time and are influenced by factors outside one person's control, performance will not be judged solely on rankings or traffic.

Execution quality, problem identification, analysis and successful implementation will be equally important.

Preferred Candidate Profile

Our ideal candidate has approximately 3–5 years of SEO experience and has worked on websites large enough that technical SEO, publishing workflows and developer coordination were necessary.

You may currently be working as an:

- SEO Specialist
- Technical SEO Specialist
- SEO Analyst
- SEO Executive
- SEO Content Specialist
- Organic Search Specialist
- SEO Operations Specialist

You are interested in taking deeper ownership of a smaller number of brands rather than constantly moving between dozens of unrelated client accounts.

This position provides the opportunity to become deeply familiar with one client's websites, data, technical infrastructure, content and SEO opportunities and to see projects through from identification to implementation and measurement.

Pay: $55,000.00-$70,000.00 per year

Benefits:

- Disability insurance
- Extended health care
- Flexible schedule
- Life insurance
- Work from home

Work Location: Remote

📌 SEO Operations Specialist (Canada)
🏢 Blacksmith SEO & Digital
📍 Canada