The Opportunity:
Morningstar’s mission is to empower investor success. We strive to illuminate investing in support of this mission, so we can reach, inspire, and enable current and aspiring investors. Our Marketing and Communications team plays an important part in achieving this goal. We are looking for a Senior SEO Manager to join the Audience Marketing team to build on our existing SEO practices and drive rapid growth in our audience through search.

The Role:
We are looking for an entrepreneurial, hands-on, and analytical marketer. This role provides an excellent opportunity to drive SEO strategy across all of Morningstar’s audiences. Make your mark as Morningstar’s in-house expert on all things SEO. You will partner with the experience management, editorial, audience marketing and creative teams to set and drive our SEO strategy, driving increased organic search traffic across all our public experiences.

Responsibilities:

• You’ll develop, manage, and evolve our SEO strategy, roadmap and vision to meaningfully grow the Morningstar audience.
  • Craft and drive SEO strategy through in-depth content gap analyses, competitive and audience analysis, keyword research, and SERP landscape analysis.
  • Improve our keyword research process to better optimize existing content, and drive new traffic opportunities while conducting SEO analysis and recommending a content strategy.
  • Analyze data to understand consumer insights; help develop target audiences, keyword lists, or SEO content; provide clear direction to our content and marketing teams to optimize campaigns, and evaluate media or content performance.
  • Identify content theme opportunities based on keyword research and competitive analysis, and partner closely with the content team to ensure SEO intent is met across web copy.
  • Develop and facilitate implementation of our SEO strategy internationally.
     
• You’ll provide reporting and analysis on SEO initiatives across the organization.
  • Establish a framework to measure the effectiveness of SEO strategy in increasing traffic and rankings on the website.
  • Constantly track, analyze and report on overall SEO success with regards to traffic, rankings, content, backlinks and business performance
  • Provide monthly reporting on our search performance in Google News carousels, Google News and desktop news results
  • Regularly benchmarks our performance against competitors
  • Measure results of campaigns in Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and external tools like Moz and SEMrush, using detailed performance metrics, behavioral data, and market trends.
     
• You’ll be Morningstar’s in house expert, teacher, and advocate on all things organic search and SEO
  • Keep a pulse on the ever-changing Search landscape. Stay ahead of emerging trends, tools, technologies, and data sets.
  • Bring fresh ideas to the table, making data-driven, actionable recommendations to drive value.
  • Recommend new SEO technologies
  • Improve our current SEO process to drive better capitalization of our investments
     
• You’ll empower the editorial, demand generation, and broader marketing organization with SEO best practices
  • Conduct SEO trainings for content writers
  • Provide recommendations for content optimization to authors during the content production process
  • Collaborate with editorial team to create high-quality content around important, relevant terms and events
     
• You’ll work closely with our product and editorial teams to manage our SEO roadmap
  • Responsible for recommending and explaining technical SEO projects; executing on-page optimizations
  • You’ll share responsibility for developing SEO product and technical priorities, working with our content and product teams to prioritize the product roadmap and balance organic growth with user experience
  • Inform technical requirements for initiatives such as site audits, redesigns or relaunches to ensure best-in-class SEO design and coding
  • Work cross-functionally with web development and design, web engineering, content, analytics, product, and product marketing teams to push priority SEO projects through to completion
     
• You’ll work across the organization to find and capitalize on link-building opportunities
  • Develop and implement link building strategies in partnership with the corporate communications team
  • Identify and secure link building opportunities across digital media platforms
  • Analyze Morningstar’s backlink profile and suggest ways to strengthen it at both sitewide and page levels
     
• You’ll build relationships within the Audience Marketing team and across the whole organization
  • Forge strong relationships with marketing leads and senior management key stakeholders
  • Take an integrated approach to Search, collaborating closely with the paid marketing and web development teams.

Requirements:

• Five to seven years of SEO experience
• A proven track record of driving growth in organic search traffic
• Deep understanding of web analytics, and SEO
• Experience optimizing Web sites and campaigns
• Experience working within a content management system, analytics tool, A/B testing tool, and marketing automation tool. Technologies available are Adobe Experience Manager, Google Analytics, and Google Optimize. Eloqua; experience with both is preferred.
• A deep appreciation for the role of creative and design in marketing effectiveness
• Familiarity and experience with reporting tools and methodologies
• Data-driven approach to marketing challenges
• Experience working in financial services, publishing/media, or research organizations preferred
• Experience working in large or enterprise organizations preferred