SEO team: the roles, the order to hire them, and how to fit the team around the work
Who an SEO team needs, how it changes from one person to ten, and where it should sit in the company.
Published by AI Knows Us · Updated 22 October 2026
An SEO team is the group that makes a website easier to find in search: it fixes the technical side so pages can be crawled and indexed, plans and improves content around what buyers search for, earns links and mentions from other sites, and measures the results. A small business usually starts with one person who covers all four jobs. As the site grows, the team adds a technical specialist, content people and an analyst, in roughly that order. The most important member is often not on the team at all: a developer with time set aside, because almost every SEO fix ships as a code or content change.
The four jobs every SEO team covers
Whatever the size, the same four kinds of work have to be owned by somebody.
- Technical. Crawling, indexing, site speed, redirects, structured data, internal linking and the templates every page is built from.
- Content. Keyword and topic research, briefs, writing or editing, and updating the pages that already exist.
- Authority. Getting other sites to link to and mention you, through digital PR, partnerships, data studies and outreach.
- Measurement. Search Console, analytics, rank tracking, reporting, and turning the numbers into the next set of priorities.
A team is well built when each job has a clear owner, even if one person owns three of them.
The roles, and what each one owns
| Role | Owns | Usually added when |
|---|---|---|
| SEO lead or manager | Strategy, priorities, the roadmap, and getting work into other teams' queues | First hire, or the first person given the job |
| Technical SEO specialist | Crawl audits, templates, migrations, structured data, working with engineers | The site has many templates, many pages or a migration coming |
| Content strategist or editor | Topic plans, briefs, editing, refreshing old pages | Content output becomes the bottleneck |
| Writers | Drafting pages to brief | Often freelancers first, staff later |
| Digital PR or outreach lead | Links, mentions and coverage | Content is strong but rivals have more authority |
| SEO analyst | Reporting, forecasting, testing | Leadership asks for numbers the lead has no time to produce |
| SEO project manager | Tickets, timelines and cross team delivery | Larger teams with many open fixes |
If you are writing a job description, our page on what an SEO manager owns covers how that title differs from specialist and head of SEO.
How the team grows, stage by stage
One person
A single SEO generalist, often a marketer who has taken on search, covers everything at a basic level. The priority is the technical floor and the pages closest to revenue: service pages, product and category pages, and the location pages for a local business. Specialist work, such as a site migration or a link campaign, is bought in from a freelancer or agency for a fixed project.
Two to four people
The lead now has help. The usual second hire is a technical specialist on a large or complex site, or a content editor on a site that wins through publishing. Writers are frequently freelance. Reporting is still part of the lead's job.
Five or more
Specialisms separate: a technical group, a content group, someone on authority, and an analyst. At this size a project manager or an agreed ticket process becomes worth its cost, because the team's output is mostly requests to other departments.
In house, agency or a mix
Most companies end up with a mix, and the split follows one question: which work needs deep knowledge of the business, and which needs a skill used only now and then?
- Keep in house: strategy, priorities, content that needs product knowledge, and the relationship with engineering.
- Buy in: one off technical audits, migrations, digital PR campaigns, and extra writing capacity.
When you do buy a specialist, ask for the deliverable before the price. Our comparison of technical SEO specialists sets out what a good one hands over.
Where the team sits in the company
There are three common shapes.
- Central team in marketing. Simple to manage and close to content. The risk is that technical fixes wait at the back of the engineering queue.
- Central team with embedded partners. A small core sets standards, and named people inside product, engineering and content carry SEO into their own work. This shape scales best on large sites.
- Inside product or engineering. Common in companies whose site is the product. Technical work ships quickly, and content needs a strong link back to marketing.
Whichever shape you choose, agree a set amount of developer time each sprint for SEO tickets. A team that has to win every fix in open competition with product features ships very little.
How to judge whether the team is working
Measure the team on outcomes it can influence and in the order they appear:
- Fixes shipped and pages published or improved each month.
- Indexed pages and impressions in Search Console for the topics that matter.
- Clicks and rankings for those topics.
- Leads, sign ups or sales from organic search.
The first two are the earliest to read, in your own tracker and in Search Console. The last two depend on competition, your offer and your budget, so a team judged only on revenue in its first quarter is being judged too early.
A line most SEO team reports leave out
An SEO team's dashboard is built around one surface: the search results page. Buyers now also ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity which supplier to choose, and those answers are assembled from the same pages, reviews and articles the team already works on. Adding a monthly check of what the assistants say about your category gives the team a second scoreboard for the work it is already doing. AI Knows Us measures that for a business, recording which names the assistants give and which sources they relied on, so the content and authority leads can see where their work is being read.
Questions about building an SEO team
What should the first SEO hire be?
A generalist who can do the work, not only plan it, and who is comfortable asking engineers for changes. Specialists come later, when one area clearly limits growth.
How big should an SEO team be?
It depends on the size of the site and how much of growth comes from search. A useful test is the backlog: if valuable fixes and pages wait months for anyone to touch them, the team or its developer time is too small.
Should writers sit on the SEO team?
Often they sit in content or marketing and work to SEO briefs. What matters is that the SEO team writes the brief and reviews the page before it goes live.
Is an agency cheaper than an in house SEO team?
For a small site, usually yes. As the site grows, the knowledge an internal team builds, and the speed of getting fixes shipped, tend to tip the balance toward in house with agencies for specialist projects.
Who should the SEO team report to?
Most often the head of marketing or growth. On sites where the website is the product, reporting into product works well, as long as content still has a clear owner.