The challenge
SEEK identified a major content opportunity — and needed search expertise to help build it
SEEK’s team had already identified career advice as a significant growth opportunity. Millions of Australians search for career guidance every month, and SEEK had the brand authority and editorial resource to own that space. What they needed was someone embedded in the team to help prioritise, structure the product for search, and ensure it reached the people it was built for.
The approach
Start with what job seekers actually need
I embedded with SEEK’s product, marketing, content, and development teams — working across the organisation rather than alongside it. This was a genuinely cross-functional effort, and the team I worked with were exceptional. Talented content creators, UX designers, developers, and marketers who cared deeply about building something useful.
My role was to bring SEO as a lens — helping the team understand demand, identify what people were actually searching for, and then figure out how to capture that demand in a way that balanced content quality, user experience, and technical execution.
We structured role pages around the query patterns that mattered most — how to become a role, salary expectations, day-to-day responsibilities, career pathways. Each page was designed to answer the questions real people were asking, not just target keywords.
Take market share, then expand
The strategy was deliberate. We started by identifying which roles our competitors were ranking for — large US-based platforms that had years of head start — and targeted those first. By combining search volume data with SEEK’s own first-party data (job listings, salary insights, application trends) alongside third-party research, we could prioritise the roles that had both user demand and business value.
We launched pages with a good-better-best content model: start with structured data and core information, measure performance, then invest deeper in the roles where demand was evident. This let us move fast without compromising quality — the UX and content teams iterated on the experience based on real user research, while I helped ensure the architecture and prioritisation kept us focused on where we could win.
Within two years, we’d taken significant market share from zero — overtaking established US competitors who’d been in the space for years.
Scale across South-East Asia
Once the model was proven in Australia, we expanded across South-East Asia. This meant keyword research in Thai, Malay, and Filipino — understanding how people in each market searched for career information in their own language, not just translating English content. The same principles applied: understand demand, structure content around real queries, and build something genuinely useful for each audience.
The outcome
1M+ monthly organic clicks — and still growing
SEEK’s Career Advice section grew from negligible organic traffic to over one million monthly clicks. The section became one of the most visited career resources in Australia — not because it was optimised for search engines, but because it was genuinely useful to job seekers. It even became central enough to the brand that it featured in SEEK’s national advertising, including the Napoleon Dynamite campaign.
This project is a highlight of my career. Not because of the numbers, but because of the team. Working with people that talented, building something from nothing, and watching it become a resource that genuinely helps people make better decisions about their careers.