SEO Specialist

This is a paid freelance and remote position

ScreenRant is the #1 entertainment website and publishes breaking news and exclusives on blockbuster movies, TV shows, comic books, books, and other forms of entertainment.

As a worldwide leader, ScreenRant operates at a rapid pace and is always looking for experienced and passionate contributors who can create original high-quality content in a timely manner. 

Your Responsibilities:

Search Growth & Performance

• Own growth in total search clicks and clicks per article, driving the initiatives required to hit targets.
• Build and maintain the keyword and topic roadmap, prioritizing opportunities by traffic potential, competitive difficulty, and commercial value.
• Identify underperforming and high-potential URLs and convert that analysis into a prioritized, clearly briefed queue of work for editorial.
• Monitor rankings, impressions, CTR, and click share; diagnose movement and respond quickly to volatility, algorithm updates, and competitive shifts.
• Balance the mix of evergreen and timely coverage, protecting the compounding traffic base while capturing trending demand.
• Improve on-page and template-level SEO : titles, metadata, internal linking, structured data, and site architecture.

• Evaluate the brand’s presence across AI Overviews and other AI-generated search surfaces, and establish repeatable ways to measure inclusion and citation rates.
• Identify the query types and content patterns that earn AIO citations, and translate them into concrete, usable editorial guidance.
• Maximize inclusion through content structure, entity coverage, schema, answer formatting, and source credibility signals.
• Track the click and traffic impact of AIO across affected query sets, and adjust strategy where zero-click behaviour erodes performance.
• Stay ahead of developments across AI search surfaces and LLM assistants, and advise leadership on the implications for the brand.

• Develop a strong evergreen playbook: a documented, repeatable system covering how evergreen topics are selected, briefed, structured, published, updated, and measured — and drive its adoption across the editorial team.
• Grow and defend the evergreen content base — the durable, compounding library that drives the majority of recurring search clicks.
• Identify evergreen opportunities through demand and gap analysis, and brief them as long-lived assets built to rank and be cited for years.
• Define the evergreen standards and templates behind the playbook — depth, structure, entity coverage, internal linking, and update cadence — so quality is repeatable at scale.
• Pressure-test and evolve the playbook against results, keeping it current as search behaviour and AI surfaces shift.
• Identify republishing and refresh candidates through a data-driven model:  traffic decay curves, ranking slippage, seasonality, SERP and AIO changes, and content gaps.
• Maintain a prioritized republishing pipeline with clear briefs so editorial knows exactly what to change and why.
• Define and enforce refresh standards, and measure post-republish lift to validate what actually works.
• Manage the content lifecycle end to end: refresh, consolidate, redirect, or prune.
• Maintain an update cadence for the evergreen library so top assets stay accurate, competitive, and AIO-eligible.

• Monitor KPIs across clicks, impressions, rankings, engagement, and revenue per article; provide clear reporting and actionable insight.
• Ensure tracking accuracy and data integrity across Search Console, analytics, and third-party rank and visibility tools.
• Run structured tests against search levers and turn what works into repeatable playbooks.

• Identify high-friction, repetitive SEO workflows — reporting, keyword clustering, SERP and AIO monitoring, content auditing, internal-link mapping — and surface them as automation candidates.
• Partner closely with the portfolio data scientist to scope, prototype, and deploy AI agents and tooling against those opportunities.
• Define the problem, supply context and success criteria, and validate outputs before rollout.
• Support adoption across the team and help scale proven automations to other brands in the portfolio.

• Contribute to growing topical authority through coverage depth, entity building, and internal-link architecture.
• Support the transition from a single-site model to a multi-product, multi-surface presence, extending search strategy across new surfaces.
• Contribute to the ideation and validation of new content ventures, sizing the search opportunity before investment.

• Work cross-functionally with Editorial, Product, Data, and Leadership, translating search insight into work others can act on.
• Upskill writers and editors on search and AIO best practice, and keep guidance current as the landscape shifts.
• Foster a culture of accountability, experimentation, and performance.