THE ROLE.

Search is fragmented. Discovery no longer starts or ends with Google. Buyers research across AI tools, social platforms, publishers, review sites and communities before they ever return to a traditional results page. Search is now one discipline across Google and AI answers, and the brands that win are the ones that are visible, cited and recommended wherever their audience is looking. GEO is now central to how clients win in search, and it is the heart of this role.

As Search Account Director at Found, you will lead GEO and SEO delivery across a portfolio of complex client accounts and own the senior client relationships behind them. You will own complex enterprise client relationships, where strategy spans multiple markets, products and teams. You will bring a strong grounding in SEO, built through leading teams and accounts, and use it to drive how clients are found, cited and trusted in AI answers, while keeping their search foundations strong.

You will champion a modern search approach that works with Found Media and Found Social to keep brand messaging consistent, and build a unified strategy across AI platforms, search engines and social by combining GEO, Technical SEO and UX, multimodal content, topical and brand authority, and Digital PR.

You will sit within the Found Search team, line managing Search Account Manager(s) and Senior Search Executive(s). You will coordinate delivery across GEO, Technical SEO, Content, Digital PR and CRO within Found Search, and bring in Found Studio and Found Influence so that content, PR and creator work run against a single plan. Beyond account delivery, you will shape best practice, drive innovation and influence how Found Search operates across the agency in an AI-driven, multi-platform world.

IMPACT OF THE ROLE

Your work will directly contribute to:

• Strategic and Commercial Leadership: Guiding modern search strategy across a client portfolio with a sharp focus on KPIs, ROI and long-term growth, with AI visibility at the centre.

• Visibility Across All Platforms: Treating AI visibility and rankings as one picture, across AI answers, Google and the third-party sources AI draws on, such as YouTube and Reddit.

• Client Success and Retention: Acting as the senior point of contact to build deep, productive client relationships and identify upsell opportunities.

• Team Performance and Development: Leading, developing and nurturing Account Managers and Executives, ensuring high standards and career growth.

• Operational Excellence: Ensuring all accounts are delivered efficiently, meeting strategic goals, budget parameters and best practice benchmarks.

• Integrated Marketing Strategy: Championing cross-channel collaboration to deliver unified client strategies across Found Search, Found Media and Found Data & AI.

• Innovation and Leadership in GEO: Staying at the forefront of GEO as it develops, and embedding what works into best practice so clients stay ahead.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

ACCOUNT LEADERSHIP

• Build and maintain strong, trusted relationships with senior client stakeholders, acting as their strategic partner for the future of search.

• Act as the final escalation point and accountable owner for portfolio commercials, ensuring Search Account Managers have clear direction for day-to-day delivery and client communications.

• Lead key meetings and contribute to QBRs, proposals and client development planning.

• Ensure reporting, forecasting and delivery standards across your portfolio are consistently high, commercially sound and trusted by clients.

• Own portfolio resourcing, ensuring the right people are allocated at the right time across accounts.

GEO & AI VISIBILITY

• Own GEO as the core of the strategy on every account: how a client is visible, cited and recommended in AI answers, and how it is described when it appears.

• Build audience and prompt research that reflects who is asking and what they ask, then track visibility, citations, sentiment and AI referral traffic against it.

• Identify the owned content, third-party sources and technical gaps that determine AI visibility, and turn them into a prioritised plan across Found Search, Found Studio and Found Influence.

• Use SEO strength as the foundation, so that rankings, technical health and content performance support AI visibility and the other way round.

• Stay at the forefront of GEO as AI platforms change, refining methodology and scaling what works across accounts.

STRATEGY

• Define and own the search strategy across your portfolio, building holistic roadmaps that target user intent across AI platforms, search engines and social.

• Prioritise opportunities using measured data combined with expert judgement, and defend those calls when clients challenge them.

• Ensure performance frameworks are set across AI visibility, search and social surfaces (KPIs, reporting, review cadence), monitoring outcomes and pivoting strategy when needed.

• Guide teams to implement and validate strategy, ensuring outcomes are measurable and impactful.

• Work with development teams from the start of a brief on structured data and crawler readiness, rather than as a late request.

• Collaborate with Found Media and Found Social to maximise visibility and ensure consistent brand messaging.

COMMERCIAL MANAGEMENT

• Manage the profitability of your portfolio, ensuring strict adherence to scope and budget.

• Proactively identify opportunities to grow the account (upsell and cross-sell) by spotting gaps in the client’s AI and search presence.

• Lead the commercial side of renewals and annual planning, ensuring the value of the work is clearly linked to the client’s business goals.

• Support accurate scoping and resourcing for new initiatives (including GEO programmes), ensuring plans are deliverable within budget and timelines.

• Present and defend strategy and diagnostic findings directly to clients and prospects, including when challenged live.

• Support wider agency growth by contributing to pitches and developing commercially viable strategy proposals for prospective clients.

TEAM MANAGEMENT

• Line manage and coach Search Account Managers and Executives, setting clear expectations and goals.

• Conduct weekly 1:1s and quarterly development sessions, and manage performance against personal development plans (PDPs).

• Support your team’s growth by reviewing outputs, delivering feedback and providing stretch opportunities, including building the team’s GEO skills.

• Act as a mentor and department leader, setting the tone for collaboration, knowledge-sharing and performance culture.

AI & INNOVATION

• Use AI responsibly and ethically in line with company policies, ensuring transparency and trust in its application.

• Guide teams in using AI to create efficiencies and automate routine tasks such as audits and reporting, unlocking capacity for higher-value strategic work.

• Advocate for AI-enabled practices that strengthen client partnerships and deliver strategic impact.

COMPANY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Consistently follow company and team processes, ensuring alignment and efficiency across all projects.

• Use company platforms (such as Asana, Float and other internal tools) effectively to manage tasks, resources and workflows.

• Log time accurately and on schedule, providing transparency and supporting operational planning.

• Promote and uphold Found’s values and culture, acting as an inspiring, supportive and accountable team member or leader.

• Ensure consistent, high-quality service delivery that enhances Found’s reputation and strengthens client trust.

• Maintain an up-to-date understanding of Found’s technology, products and services, and apply them effectively in your role.

• Stay informed of industry standards, innovations and emerging approaches in digital marketing, applying relevant insights to client and agency work.

BEHAVIOURS IN THIS ROLE

• Strategic Thinker: Drives innovation and long-term thinking, aligning client goals with evolving industry trends and anticipating how AI and search will develop to keep Found’s proposition market-leading.

• Commercially Astute: Understands the financial implications of client relationships, protecting profitability while actively identifying opportunities for revenue growth.

• Influential Communicator: Simplifies complex concepts for senior stakeholders, using data and storytelling to persuade and guide decision-making, and defends recommendations with confidence when challenged.

• Strong Leader & Mentor: Inspires, develops and holds the team accountable with empathy and confidence, fostering a culture of high performance.

• Collaborative & Cross-Functional: Works seamlessly across teams, breaking down silos to promote integration and shared success.

• Curious & Experimental: Actively stays ahead of industry updates and demonstrates curiosity to test and learn, challenging the status quo to find better ways of working.

• Solutions-Focused & Adaptable: Leads calmly through change and ambiguity, viewing challenges as opportunities and inspiring the team to take action.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

Commercial Performance

• Proactively identifies and secures upsell opportunities across the portfolio, directly contributing to wider agency revenue growth.

• Supports agency growth by contributing to pitches and developing commercially viable proposals for prospective clients.

• Delivers profitable growth, ensuring work is delivered efficiently to balance exceptional client outcomes with healthy agency margins.

Strategic Excellence

• Delivers measurable gains in AI visibility for clients: presence, citation and sentiment in AI answers, and AI-referred traffic.

• Develops and implements modern search strategies that use the full mix of GEO, Technical, Content and Digital PR to deliver measurable performance against client KPIs.

• Moves reporting beyond standard SEO metrics, providing a unified view of visibility, traffic and impact across all search platforms, and links visibility to client pipeline or revenue.

• Proactively identifies opportunities to position search as a critical driver of business success, ensuring clients stay ahead of the curve.

Client Satisfaction & Growth

• Builds and sustains long-term client relationships, acting as a trusted partner.

• Demonstrates clear evidence of upsell success, retention and client advocacy.

• Ensures client goals are consistently exceeded through insight-led recommendations.

Team Leadership

• Leads and inspires a high-performing Found Search team, fostering a culture of collaboration, accountability and innovation.

• Provides mentorship, structured development and career progression opportunities, ensuring direct reports consistently perform at a high level.

• Builds GEO capability across the team and encourages continuous learning as the field changes.

Operational Efficiency

• Ensures accounts are run to best-practice standards, with accurate time usage, clear reporting, strong process discipline and strict adherence to budgets and timelines.

• Creates clarity for teams by setting direction and maintaining structured account roadmaps.

• Champions scalable ways of working that drive efficiency without sacrificing quality.

Departmental Impact

• Plays a key role in shaping the culture, practices and growth of Found Search.

• Brings thought leadership and innovation to improve processes, positioning the department as best-in-class in GEO.

• Actively contributes to agency-wide initiatives and collaborative projects.

Cross-Channel Integration

• Ensures search strategies work seamlessly alongside Found Media, Found Social, Found Studio, Found Influence and Found Data & AI.

• Runs content, digital PR, Found Studio and Found Influence against a single plan rather than separate briefs, and knows when to bring each in and how to brief them.

• Demonstrates how integrated thinking has improved efficiency or performance for clients.

• Collaborates with sister agencies and Tomorrow Group partners to unlock joint opportunities.

EXPERIENCE & PROFILE

• A career built in SEO, proven experience in a similar agency role, leading teams and accounts as a pod leader, account lead or equivalent.

• Hands-on experience at the forefront of GEO: you are already moving clients or teams into AI visibility, including tracking and improving brand visibility, citations and sentiment in AI answers, and measuring AI referral impact.

• Experience managing enterprise accounts across multiple markets, products and stakeholder groups.

• Experience owning strategy, commercials and delivery for a high-value account where several internal specialists and external parties contribute.

• Experienced in costing projects, creating proposals and managing team allocation to ensure account profitability.

• Experience managing senior client governance on complex accounts, including multiple stakeholders, competing priorities and regular executive reporting.

• Understands the financial implications of client relationships, protecting profitability while actively identifying opportunities for revenue growth.

• Proven ability to define long-term, multi-channel roadmaps that drive measurable business impact across traffic, revenue and brand metrics.

• Strong working knowledge of Technical SEO, with experience directing complex initiatives such as site migrations, international SEO and ecommerce websites.

• Strong grounding in Content Strategy, with experience shaping content that serves both search engines and AI answers.

• Demonstrable experience coordinating Found Media, Found Studio, Found Influence and PR teams against a single plan to drive unified performance and efficiency.

• Strong track record of delivering complex projects on time and to budget. You are highly organised, able to oversee multiple workstreams and ensure quality control across all deliverables.

• Proven experience in line management, with a track record of developing talent, conducting performance reviews and fostering career growth.

• Understands how AI-driven discovery is changing search behaviour, with a strong desire to keep evolving the agency's offering.

• Excellent ability to simplify complex search concepts for senior stakeholders, articulating the business value of modern search and AI clearly.
  
  PERKS AND BENEFITS

  • Dynamic, Flexible Working 🏠 – Work is what we do, not where we do it. We believe in having a working environment where we thrive and can do our best work, whether that is at home, in the office or on the beach.

  • Private Medical Insurance 🧑‍⚕️ – We support your health and wellbeing with either a cash pot or enhanced medical insurance to help with both medical and dental needs.

  • Financial Wellbeing Coaching 💷 – Access to Bippit which provides access to professionally qualified coaches who assist with household financial accounts, budget monitoring, and creating holistic financial plans for all aspects of life.

  • 1-1 Counselling & Mental Health Support 🧠 – Supporting your mental health, you will have access to six 1-1 sessions of therapy, plus access to self-directed content and frequent live workshops with Oliva for life.

  • Subsidised Gym Membership 🤸 – Access to a platform of multiple gyms across the UK.

  • Enhanced Parental Leave 👶 – We offer competitive packages to support our team with big life changes with up to 6 months enhanced primary caregiver pay and 6 weeks secondary caregiver pay.

  • Interchangeable Bank Holidays ➡️ – We have a global multicultural team, so everyone gets the choice to swap bank holidays to cultural/religious days that are important to them.

  • Matchable Partnership 🫶 – Two paid volunteering days via Matchable, a platform that promotes social impact by connecting individuals with meaningful community volunteering opportunities.

  • Work from Abroad 🌍 – Up to 30 days a year working from another country.

  • Personalised Career Progression 📝 – We know that progression is highly individual. You'll have a personalised development plan with meaningful, impactful training opportunities.

  • And lots more! ⭐
    

  At Found, we're passionate about building a team of talented individuals from all walks of life who share the skills and drive to help us achieve our mission. That's why we're committed to a hiring process free from judgment, prejudice, or bias. We encourage everyone to apply for our roles—your gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, or background will never impact how your application is considered. We're dedicated to fostering an inclusive culture where everyone feels empowered to do their best work, enjoy their journey, and truly feel they belong.