Senior Manager, Search & Digital Marketing, OCCM

Responsibilities

• This position is for Office of Corporate Communications and Marketing (OCCM).
• Search Everywhere Strategy and Governance
• Develop and own SMU's Search Everywhere strategy, covering traditional search engine optimisation (SEO), Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), social search, and emerging voice and multimodal discovery surfaces.
• Establish governance frameworks and standards for search discoverability across owned digital assets, ensuring consistent application across web, campaign, social, and research content.
• Maintain a current, evidence-based view of algorithmic changes, AI model updates, and platform search behaviour shifts, translating these into institutional implications and recommended actions.
• Define and track a unified set of search performance indicators, and report on SMU's discoverability health across surfaces to the Head, Digital Marketing.
• SEO, AEO, GEO, and AI Discoverability Optimisation
• Lead the technical and strategic SEO function, ensuring SMU's web and content architecture is optimised for crawlability, indexability, site health, and page experience (Core Web Vitals).
• Develop and implement an AEO strategy to ensure SMU content surfaces prominently in featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, and knowledge panels across major search engines.
• Build and execute SMU's GEO framework - ensuring the University is accurately and favourably represented in AI-generated responses across platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and equivalent generative AI surfaces.
• Lead entity and knowledge graph optimisation, including structured data implementation, semantic markup, and entity association across SMU's digital estate.
• Manage keyword strategy and search intent mapping across the prospective student journey, from awareness through to application, across priority markets.
• SEO Agency Management
• Serve as the primary institutional interface for SMU's SEO agency, setting the strategic agenda, reviewing deliverables against agreed KPIs, and holding the agency accountable to technical feasibility, brand alignment, and measurable outcomes.
• Evaluate agency recommendations critically for feasibility within SMU's content management system environment, flagging and resolving recommendations that cannot be implemented as proposed.
• Ensure all agency-produced content and optimisation work meets SMU's editorial standards and brand tone of voice before submission or publication.
• Conduct regular performance reviews with the agency, redirecting effort where performance falls short of institutional expectations, and providing documented feedback on deliverable quality.
• Content Discoverability Architecture and Advisory
• Advise content and social teams on structuring content for maximum discoverability - including headline strategy, metadata, internal linking, schema markup, content depth, and topic cluster architecture.
• Collaborate with the Content and Social Lead to embed search intent into editorial planning, ensuring priority keywords and discovery opportunities are reflected in the content calendar from inception.
• Work with the Analytics and Data Lead to integrate search performance data into broader marketing analytics frameworks and to surface audience signal patterns from search behaviour.
• Develop and maintain SMU's search content taxonomy, including pillar pages, programme-level keyword architecture, and market-specific search intent maps across priority student recruitment markets.
• Social Search and Platform Discoverability
• Define SMU's strategy for discoverability on social search surfaces - including TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube - ensuring content is optimised for platform-specific discovery algorithms.
• Provide channel-specific discoverability guidance to the Content and Social team on caption strategy, hashtag frameworks, and content formats that improve social search visibility.
• Monitor shifts in social search behaviour across priority student markets - India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, China, and Singapore - and adapt strategy accordingly.
• Performance Analytics and Reporting
• Own search performance reporting, covering organic traffic, keyword rankings, AI citation frequency, f

Additional Information

COMPANY DESCRIPTION Singapore Management University is a place where high-level professionalism blends together with a healthy informality. The 'family-like' atmosphere among the SMU community fosters a culture where employees work, plan, organise and play together - building a strong collegiality and morale within the university. Our commitment to attract and retain talent is ongoing. We offer attractive benefits and welfare, competitive compensation packages, and generous professional development opportunities - all to meet the work-life needs of our staff. No wonder, then, that SMU continues to be given numerous awards and recognition for its human resource excellence.

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