I've been on the job market for a few months now. Actively, deliberately, with a spreadsheet and everything.
And somewhere between tailoring my fourteenth application and getting rejected by an ATS in under an hour, I started paying attention to something more useful than the rejections themselves: the patterns in what companies say they want when they're hiring senior SEO managers in the UK right now.
Not what the job titles say. What the job descriptions actually reveal when you read them carefully.
It's a different picture than most SEO career content prepares you for.
1. The word "technical" is doing a lot of heavy lifting
Almost every senior SEO role I've looked at in the UK mentions technical SEO. Most of them mean different things by it.
At one end, "technical SEO" means someone who can audit a site, flag crawl issues, and brief a developer. At the other, it means someone who has shipped a CMS migration on a site with millions of pages, built custom crawl scripts, and can hold a technical conversation with an engineering team without needing a translator.
The job description rarely tells you which one they actually need. The interview does.
What I've noticed: companies that have been burned by a bad migration, a traffic drop they couldn't explain, or a site that grew faster than the SEO infrastructure could handle; these companies know exactly what they want. They ask specific questions. They care less about channel breadth and more about whether you've been in genuinely high-stakes technical situations.
The ones that haven't been burned yet tend to hire for the idea of technical SEO rather than the practice of it. They want someone senior, they want the word technical on the CV, but the actual work is closer to content optimisation and reporting.
Neither is wrong. They're just different jobs wearing the same title.
2. What they say they want vs. what they keep asking about
The stated requirements are fairly consistent across the market right now: experience with GSC and GA4, familiarity with tools like Screaming Frog or Semrush, some exposure to content strategy, stakeholder management.
Standard. Expected.
But pay attention to where the conversation actually goes in first-round interviews. In my experience, it keeps landing on three things that barely appear in the job description:
- How you report upward: Not what metrics you track. How you translate SEO performance into something a CFO or a commercial director finds useful. There's a growing gap between SEO managers who speak in rankings and impressions and the ones who can connect organic performance to pipeline, revenue, and commercial decisions. Companies hiring at senior level are increasingly trying to find the second kind.
- Whether you've worked inside product and engineering teams: Not alongside them. Inside them. There's a difference between an SEO manager who sends briefs to developers and one who attends sprint planning, understands prioritisation constraints, and can make the case for SEO work in a language that product teams respond to. The latter is significantly harder to find.
- What you've done when search changed under you: The AI Overviews question is everywhere right now. Not "are you familiar with GEO", that's the table-stakes version. The more interesting version is: "We lost X% of our informational traffic to AI Overviews in the last six months. What would you do?" How you answer that question is more revealing than anything on the CV.
3. The gap nobody talks about
Here's the thing I keep observing from the inside of this search.
The UK market is hiring senior SEO managers in reasonable volume. The roles exist. The budgets are there. But there's a meaningful gap between what companies think they're hiring for and what the role actually requires once someone's in it.
Most job descriptions are written for an SEO channel manager. Most hiring managers, when you get in the room with them, are actually trying to solve a commercial growth problem that search happens to be central to. They want someone who understands both sides of it, the technical infrastructure that makes organic search work, and the commercial logic that makes it worth doing.
The candidates who get hired at senior level right now aren't the ones with the longest tools list. They're the ones who can answer: "Here's what was broken, here's what I did about it, here's what it was worth."
That's a different brief than the job description suggests.
And honestly? The market hasn't fully worked out how to hire for it yet.
