Vacancy
Sports is looking for a Head of SEO to grow search traffic.
The media outlet offers a hybrid schedule in a Moscow office, voluntary medical insurance (DMS), and a budget for sports. In return, they expect the candidate to have experience managing an SEO team and a strong technical foundation.
"Making sports better" – this is the most accurate definition of our core mission, which has remained unchanged for 27 years. We make sports more accessible, understandable, and interesting by creating 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 outlet 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 BE DOING
We have a department that focuses on attracting targeted traffic from various sources. We are now looking for a Head of SEO – an "active coach" who can build strategy and processes, while also being a strong technical specialist ready to work hands-on when necessary.
The project is high-load: legacy, SPA+SSR, many events, and close interaction with development and product teams.
With us, you will:
- Be responsible for SEO strategy and search traffic growth: form and prioritize the backlog, estimate the impact of implementations.
- Manage the team: build processes, distribute tasks, control quality, develop employees, participate in hiring.
- Personally handle some technical SEO tasks: audit and improve templates, microdata, indexing, duplicates, sitemaps, Core Web Vitals. Formulate SEO requirements for technical specifications and mockups, and participate in release acceptance.
- Oversee the launch of new projects within the product, design site structure and internal linking, including for automatically generated pages.
- Build interaction with development, product, editorial, marketing, and commercial teams – finding compromises between their interests and SEO.
- Analyze competitors, identify growth opportunities, test hypotheses.
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR IN CANDIDATES
- You have relevant SEO experience and confirmed cases of traffic growth and technical implementations on large projects – media, content websites, aggregators.
- You have managed an SEO team: you know how to set tasks, build processes, hire, develop, and motivate employees.
- You have a strong technical foundation in SEO: you know how Google and Yandex scan, render, and index JS sites (SSR/CSR, initial HTML). You know how to work with canonicalization, redirects, schema.org / JSON-LD, and Core Web Vitals.
- You understand microservice architecture and HTTP (headers, caching, conditional requests), as well as experience writing technical specifications for developers, webmasters, and copywriters.
- You know the specifics of news projects: Google News and Discover, content freshness, live pages, monetization.
- You know how to work with data: forecast impact, evaluate results, and justify priorities to product and business teams.
- It will be a plus if you are knowledgeable about sports.
WHAT WE OFFER IN RETURN
Comfort and care:
- We do not engage in micromanagement and do not track working hours, as we trust our people. Therefore, we have a flexible start and end to the workday, which you can determine yourself.
- Hybrid work schedule. We believe in meeting colleagues in person at our Moscow office (near Prospekt Mira/Rizhskaya metro stations), but remote work is possible sometimes.
- Voluntary medical insurance (DMS) with dental coverage throughout the Russian Federation from your first day of employment. 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 result in a financial loss.
- As a pleasant bonus, we have an employee loyalty program with hundreds of different discounts.
Training and development support:
- We have very supportive management that genuinely invests in its employees. More than half of them have grown within the company, and this is indicative for us.
- 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 our teams so that our employees stay up-to-date.
- We also don't forget about traditional learning methods, so we offer compensation for specialized courses.
Not just colleagues, but a community:
- We enjoy spending time together not only at work, which is why various interest groups have formed: a football team, a FIFA club, a film club. We love board games, practice random coffee chats, and simply have calls during the week to chat with colleagues about casual topics.
- Overall, we have sensible and genuinely "down-to-earth" people working here. No pretentiousness, snobbery, or showing off. No stuffiness or toxicity.
WHAT THE HIRING PROCESS LOOKS LIKE
We dislike formalities and drawn-out processes, and we approach hiring the same way. You can expect:
- A short 20-minute HR interview, where we will tell you more about us, and you – about yourself.
- An interview with your potential manager, where we will discuss your experience and our tasks.
- A test assignment to help us assess your practical skills.
- And a final interview with the Operational Director and HRD, where we will make sure we are a good fit for each other.
