Senior SEO Data Analyst

About the position

Hearst Newspapers is looking for a sharp, curious, and highly skilled Senior SEO Data Analyst to join our Business Intelligence team and help power the next generation of organic search growth across our wide portfolio of media brands. If you’re passionate about SEO, data, and the future of digital journalism, this is your chance to make an outsized impact. You’ll be embedded in our Business Intelligence team, and in lock step with the Performance Content Team, you will guide with editorial, product, and analytics stakeholders to drive meaningful results. Your insights will directly influence the content, strategy, and technical foundation of news, lifestyle, and data journalism coverage that reaches millions of readers. The candidate best fit for this role is someone who is a data ace, has a solid understanding of SEO — including best practices and technical understanding — and has a track record of translating data into actionable insights. This position is hybrid with 3 days in our New York office.

Responsibilities

• Partner closely with our Performance Content Team, editorial leads, and product partners to uncover insights and opportunities that grow SEO traffic across our network.
• Design, maintain, and improve KPI tracking systems and dashboards to measure search performance and guide decision-making.
• Use cutting edge tools like topic modelling algorithms, LLMs, and other machine learning tools to scale SEO analysis across a wide range of sites and content.
• Use your technical and analytical skills to audit content, identify SEO gaps, and surface actionable recommendations.
• Lead the analytics strategy for SEO tests and initiatives — ensuring experiments are well-instrumented, results are clear, and next steps are data-driven.
• Monitor organic search performance using tools like GSC, Botify, and SEMRush, and spot issues before they become problems.
• Translate complex findings into clear, compelling stories for stakeholders across editorial, product, and executive teams.

Requirements

• 2+ years of dedicated SEO analysis experience, focusing on data.
• Experience working in a digital media environment is preferred.
• Strong understanding of technical SEO, including the ability to recognize and identify indexing and crawl issues.
• Deep understanding of key search performance metrics.
• Fluency with SEO data tools such as Google Search Console, Botify, Screaming Frog, SEMRush, or similar.
• Fluency with analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Chartbeat, Parse.ly.
• Fluency with BI/Visualization tools such Looker, PowerBI, or similar.
• Proficiency with SQL for data analysis.
• Experience with Python or R for data analysis.
• Experience preparing reports and sharing data insights with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to develop and test hypotheses based on findings from prior analyses.
• Proven fluency in translating search data into actionable recommendations, be it presentations and strategic guidance for editorial teams, or technical specs for product and engineering.
• Strong communication & collaboration skills.

Benefits

• The reasonable estimate for compensation if hired in New York is $100,000-$120,000.