Head of Digital Marketing
3 days ago
Glasgow
\n Head Of Marketing / Digital \n \n Search Strategy & Leadership \n \n ● Define and lead the agency-wide search strategy across organic and paid channels. \n • Build integrated search frameworks that align SEO, GEO, PPC, metasearch, and affiliate activity into cohesive client growth plans. \n • Identify emerging trends in AI-driven search, generative experiences, search \n automation, and attribution modelling. \n • Act as the senior strategic lead for key client accounts and new business \n opportunities. \n • AI Integration: Support the team in integrating Claude, Weavely and other AI \n automation tools into their existing processes, to create efficiencies, to standardise SOPs and improve profitability. \n • Develop scalable methodologies, playbooks, and best practices across all search \n disciplines. \n Billable Hours: In addition to owning billable hours each month, cover staff absence \n / billable hours where required. \n \n Team & Task Management \n \n ● Workflow Optimisation: Establish and maintain robust, standardised processes \n within ClickUp to ensure complete visibility, accountability, and seamless task \n ownership across the team. \n • AI Integration: Promote use of AI notetakers during meetings to automate post-call task creation directly within ClickUp, ensuring no action points are missed by your teams, including calls/meetings you are not in. \n • ClickUp Reporting & Dashboards: Maintain weekly automated reports and \n client-friendly ClickUp dashboards as required to monitor real-time project progress and performance. \n \n SEO & GEO \n \n ● Lead advanced SEO strategy including technical SEO, content strategy, digital PR, local SEO, international SEO, and site architecture. \n • Develop GEO strategies focused on visibility within AI search experiences, large language models, answer engines, and conversational interfaces. \n • Guide teams on schema, structured data, semantic optimisation, entity-based search, and AI content discoverability. \n • Oversee SEO forecasting, auditing, reporting, and performance measurement frameworks. \n • Ensure all SEO and GEO initiatives align with evolving search engine and AI platform guidelines. \n • Ensure the team are researching and proposing new client emerging opportunities to collaborate across channels and platforms, whether that’s with client social teams \n ,● external PR agencies, UGC websites such as Reddit, Quora, third party and OTA listings to maximise ‘Search Everywhere’ and GEO visibility uplifts. \n • Guide clients on upcoming changes in attribution that will impact their organic channel attribution (such as AI platform referrals, AI platform walled gardens and Google ‘zero-click’ cookie deprecation etc), educate them on the value of brand recommendations and agentic transactions to maximise retention. \n \n Paid Media \n \n ● Oversee paid search strategy across platforms including Google Ads, Microsoft Ads,YouTube, and emerging AI-driven advertising environments. \n • Lead campaign planning, budget allocation, bidding strategies, audience \n segmentation, and creative testing. \n • Drive innovation in automation, machine learning optimisation, and performance analytics. \n • Ensure paid media activity achieves client KPIs including ROAS, CPA, revenue growth, and profitability. \n \n Metasearch \n \n ● Lead metasearch strategies across travel and hospitality platforms where applicable. \n • Optimise bidding, feed management, attribution, and conversion performance across engines such as Google Hotel Ads, Trivago, TripAdvisor, and similar ecosystems.—Identify opportunities to improve visibility, booking efficiency, and acquisition costs. \n \n Affiliate Marketing \n \n ● Oversee affiliate strategy including publisher partnerships, network management, commission structures, and performance optimisation. \n • Develop scalable affiliate growth programmes that align with broader search and acquisition objectives. \n • Monitor partner quality, incrementality, compliance, and commercial performance. \n \n Commercial & Client Leadership \n \n • Client Relationships: Own senior client relationships and act as a trusted strategic advisor. \n • New Business: Support pitches, proposals, forecasting, and commercial planning. \n • Drive account growth through cross-channel opportunities and innovation. \n • Reporting: Translate complex performance data into clear commercial insights and \n recommendations for monthly and quarterly client reports and meetings/calls. \n • Quarterly Meetings: Take ownership of Marketing elements of client quarterly meetings include slide deck creation, strategic insight, roadmapping & opportunities. \n • Retainer Oversight: Regularly review retainer usage within ClickUp to ensure commercial viability and that all projects remain strictly within scope. \n • Timesheet & Efficiency Analysis: Conduct weekly reviews of team timesheets to audit billable versus non-billable hours, flagging any anomalies and ensuring retainer hours are being fully and efficiently utilised. \n ● Communication & WIPs: Monitor client-facing Work-In-Progress (WIP) calls to ensure the team is prioritising high-impact tasks and maintaining proactive, high-quality client communication. \n \n \n Team Leadership & Development \n \n ● Daily Stand-ups: Facilitate daily team stand-ups to review ClickUp priorities, resolve operational blockers, and ensure the team actively manages their tasks with accurate time estimates for precise tracking. \n • Briefing & Strategy: Lead strategic briefings and team planning sessions for all new client requests, translating high-level strategy into actionable project plans. \n • Workload Capacity: Oversee resource scheduling, monitoring team capacity to balance workloads effectively and prevent bottlenecks. Provide a resource report to the MD each month. \n • Tuesday Lunch & Learn: Lead Tuesday lunch & learn sessions including new innovations in our channels/platforms, best practice, technological advancements, Google/Microsoft/Meta announcements and what this means for our team/agency via a short deck and interactive session. \n • Celebration of Cross-team Wins: Ensure sharing of account wins to encourage teams to continue their good work. \n • Weekly Client Focus: Lead an agency wide meeting to focus on one key client account each week to review results holistically across all channels, growth opportunities and any concerns, as well as including competitor analysis. \n • Foster Communication & Collaboration: Bring the teams together and foster collaboration to drive client account growth and cross-disciplinary learning. \n • Foster Accountability: lead the teams to be accountable and meet deadlines etc. \n • Team Growth & Training: Lead, mentor, and grow multidisciplinary search teams. \n \n • Support recruitment, capability development, and succession planning. Provide\n \n personal development plans and training opportunities. \n • Culture: Create a high-performance culture focused on collaboration, accountability, \n and continuous learning. \n • KPIs & Processes: Establish clear KPIs, operational processes, and quality \n standards across departments, utilising AI to automate tasks that free up the teams \n time to focus on high value output. \n • Team Performance Reviews: Facilitate monthly 121s and annual reviews, \n maintaining all documentation and \n • HR Platform Management: Maintain accurate and up to date records for team \n members in our HR platform including holiday approvals, sickness reporting, \n document maintenance. \n \n Analytics & Performance \n \n ● Ensure robust measurement frameworks are in place across all channels. Utilise \n Weavely to output monthly reports and quarterly decks. \n • Work closely with analytics and data teams on attribution, reporting automation, dashboards, and forecasting.● \n ● Data Studio Reporting, GA4 & GTM: Setup Google Data Studio Report and use connectors to ensure accurate reporting on, setup GA4 and GTM event tags and tracking to facilitate Data Studio report. \n • Escalation: Be the main point of contact for any bug fixes/connector issues via Weavely, and any issues with marketing platforms including Google Ads, Meta Ads, Google Search Console etc. \n • Conversion Rate Optimisation: Support team with CRO retainer work to improve website conversion - ensure all teams are aware of CRO best practice, ensure CRO development changes are briefed. \n • Drive a culture of experimentation, testing, and continuous optimisation. \n • Monitor industry benchmarks and competitor activity to inform strategic direction. \n \n Required Experience & Skills \n \n ● Minimum 8+ years’ experience in search and performance marketing, including senior leadership responsibility. \n • Deep expertise across SEO, paid search, and performance marketing ecosystems. \n • Strong understanding of AI-driven search, GEO, and emerging discovery platforms. \n • Experience managing large media budgets and complex client portfolios. \n • Proven track record of driving measurable growth and commercial success. \n • Strong technical SEO knowledge including crawling, indexing, Core Web Vitals, structured data, and analytics. \n • Experience with metasearch platforms and affiliate ecosystems. \n • Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills. \n • Strong analytical mindset with experience using tools such as GA4, Looker Studio, \n • Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs, SA360, or similar platforms. \n • Commercially focused with experience contributing to agency growth and new business development. \n \n \n Desirable \n \n ● Experience within a digital agency or performance marketing consultancy. \n • Knowledge of attribution modelling and marketing mix measurement. \n • Experience working with enterprise brands across multiple markets. \n • Familiarity with AI tooling, automation workflows, and data visualisation platforms. \n • Public speaking, thought leadership, or industry event participation. \n \n What Success Looks Like \n ● Growth in client performance and retention across search channels. \n ● Expansion of the agency’s integrated search capabilities and market positioning. \n • Strong team engagement, retention, and capability development. \n • Increased adoption of innovative AI and GEO strategies. \n • Delivery of measurable commercial impact for clients and the agenc \n \n Salary range £50,000 - £70,000. \n \n FURTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION: \n Gilchrist Recruitment Partnership are a specialist recruitment agency and recruiting partner within the Marketing, Digital communications/PR, Creative & Design and Advertising industry for Scotland, both agency and client side. \n When submitting your application, please outline your current salary, salary expectations and notice period. It is also essential that you are already legally permitted to work in the UK with the associated paperwork if you are not a UK citizen. \n If you are not currently living in Scotland, please explain/outline your plans and timelines for relocation to Scotland. We are a Scottish based recruiter who generally do not represent “remote” opportunities - thus you will be either living in Scotland or have solid plans to relocate. \n We cannot guarantee a response to each individual application, made necessary by the level of response we receive. We will contact only those candidates we wish to shortlist. Apologies in advance for any inconvenience this may cause. \n We aim to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to ensuring that no applicant receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status or race. \n Unless clearly stated otherwise, the advertised position is a permanent contract. \n \n