Sports media Sports.ru is looking for a Head of SEO.
"Making sports better" has been the company's core mission for 27 years. They make sports more accessible, understandable, and engaging by creating high-quality content and distributing it across all possible platforms.
Sports.ru is not just a sports news website. It is the leading Russian-language sports media with a multi-million audience, where you can read longreads, news, and blogger posts, follow matches, and be part of the community.
What you will do:
- The team has a department responsible for attracting targeted traffic from various sources. They are now looking for a Head of SEO – a "player-coach" who can build strategy and processes, while also being a strong technical specialist ready to work hands-on when needed.
- The project is high-load: legacy, SPA+SSR, many events, and close collaboration with development and product teams.
You will be:
- Responsible for SEO strategy and search traffic growth: forming and prioritizing the backlog, evaluating the impact of implementations.
- Managing the team: establishing processes, distributing tasks, controlling quality, developing employees, participating in hiring.
- Personally handling some technical SEO tasks: audits and template improvements, microdata, indexing, duplicates, sitemap, Core Web Vitals. Forming SEO requirements for technical specifications and mockups, and participating in release acceptance.
- Overseeing the launch of new projects within the product, designing site structure and internal linking, including for automatically generated pages.
- Building collaboration with development, product, editorial, marketing, and sales teams – finding compromises between their interests and SEO.
- Analyzing competitors, identifying growth opportunities, testing hypotheses.
What we are looking for in a candidate:
- Relevant SEO experience and proven case studies of traffic growth and technical implementations on large projects – media, content websites, aggregators.
- Experience managing an SEO team: ability to set tasks, build processes, hire, develop, and motivate employees.
- Strong technical SEO foundation: understanding how Google and Yandex crawl, render, and index JS-based sites (SSR/CSR, raw HTML). Proficiency in canonicalization, redirects, schema.org / JSON-LD, and Core Web Vitals.
- Understanding of microservices architecture and HTTP (headers, caching, conditional requests), as well as experience writing technical specifications for developers, webmasters, and copywriters.
- Knowledge of news project specifics: Google News and Discover, content freshness, live pages, monetization.
- Ability to work with data: forecasting impact, evaluating results, and justifying priorities to product and business teams.
- Bonus if you are knowledgeable about sports.
What we offer in return:
Comfort and care:
- We don't micromanage or monitor working hours because we trust our people. Therefore, the company offers flexible start and end times for your workday, which you can determine yourself.
- Hybrid work schedule. The team values in-person meetings with colleagues at our Moscow office (near Prospekt Mira/Rizhskaya metro stations), but remote work is possible sometimes.
- Voluntary Medical Insurance (DMS) with dental coverage across Russia from your first working day. A personal annual budget for sports activities.
- If you need vacation, we will always grant it. As well as sick leave, which in most cases does not lead to a loss of income.
- As a pleasant bonus, there is an employee loyalty program with hundreds of different discounts.
Training and development support:
- Very supportive management that genuinely invests in its employees. More than half of our employees have grown within the company, which is a testament to our commitment.
- We value feedback, so we actively use practices that help us improve: one-to-one meetings, performance reviews.
- We regularly purchase access to popular conferences for teams to ensure they stay up-to-date.
- We also don't forget about traditional learning tools, so we offer compensation for professional courses.
Not just colleagues, but a community:
- It's not just comfortable to work together; various interest-based communities have formed: a football team, a FIFA club, a film club. We enjoy board games, practice random coffee chats, and simply have informal calls during the week to chat with colleagues on non-work-related topics.
- Overall, we have adequate and genuinely "down-to-earth" people. No pretentiousness, snobbery, or showing off. No stuffiness or toxicity.
Selection stages:
- Short HR interview (20 minutes) where we'll tell you more about the company, and you'll tell us about yourself.
- Interview with your potential manager to discuss your experience and the tasks.
- A test assignment to assess your practical skills.
- Final interview with the Operations Director and HR Director to ensure we are a good mutual fit.
