Summary
The posting describes Mahally, a marketplace for Saudi local businesses, and identifies Salla as the company. The SEO Manager will lead organic search strategy across technical SEO, content, scalable landing pages, and visibility in AI-powered search. The role includes managing crawlability and indexation, working with Engineering and Product on SEO improvements, and reporting on traffic, orders, and GMV. Candidates need at least four years of hands-on SEO experience, experience with high-volume websites, and professional proficiency in Arabic and English; the position is in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The posting
As published on salla.com. Pulled from the employer's site and shown as they wrote it.
About Mahally:
Mahally is Saudi Arabia’s home for local commerce. We bring thousands of Saudi stores — across beauty, fashion, home, food, gifting, electronics, and more — into one marketplace and one app, making it easier for customers to discover and buy from local brands.
We’re more than a catalogue. Mahally is a demand engine for Saudi merchants — helping great products get discovered and connecting shoppers with local businesses they may not have found otherwise.
About the Role:
We’re looking for an SEO Manager to own Mahally’s organic search strategy end-to-end, covering technical SEO, content and organic growth, and AI-driven discovery (GEO/AEO).
This is not a keyword-reporting role.
Mahally is a large, dynamic marketplace with millions of URLs, constantly changing stores and products, and significant opportunities to improve how search engines crawl, index, understand, and rank our content.
You’ll lead the work to strengthen our technical SEO foundation, improve indexation and discoverability, build scalable organic landing-page strategies, and create sustainable organic growth that isn’t dependent on individual merchants or products.
You’ll also help shape how Mahally appears across emerging AI and answer engines, including ChatGPT Search, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google’s AI-powered search experiences.
Working closely with Engineering, Product, Content, and Merchant teams, you’ll turn SEO opportunities into clear priorities and measurable business impact.
Success will be measured not only by rankings and visibility, but by qualified organic traffic, orders, and GMV.
What You'll Do
1- Fix the technical foundation
- Own technical SEO for a marketplace at scale: crawl budget, indexation, canonicalisation, pagination, faceted navigation, internal linking, sitemaps, Core Web Vitals, and JS rendering.
- Diagnose and resolve index bloat — decide which page types deserve to be indexed at all, and enforce it through robots directives, canonical strategy, and sitemap hygiene.
- Solve for churn: define what happens to a store or product URL when it disappears, so we stop leaking equity every time a merchant leaves.
- Partner with Engineering on an SEO backlog that actually ships — with clear specs, acceptance criteria, and measured impact after release.
2- Build organic surfaces that last
- Design and grow durable page types — category, collection, brand, city, intent, and comparison pages — that don't depend on any single merchant staying.
- Own the content roadmap for organic: Arabic-first keyword and intent research, briefs, publishing cadence, and refresh cycles.
- Optimise store and product templates: titles, meta, headings, structured data, on-page copy, and merchandising signals.
- Build internal linking as a system, not a one-off project.
3- Own AI and answer-engine visibility (GEO/AEO)
- Define and execute Mahally's strategy for generative and answer engines: crawler access policy, structured data, entity clarity, citable content, and brand presence in AI answers.
- Make deliberate decisions about which AI crawlers we allow and why — and be able to defend the trade-off between control and visibility.
- Track and report where Mahally appears in AI answers for commercial Saudi queries, and close the gaps.
4- Measure honestly
- Own Google Search Console, GA4, Ahrefs/Semrush, and log-file analysis. Build reporting that ties organic to sessions, orders, and GMV — not just impressions.
- Set up rank, indexation, and coverage monitoring with alerts, so we catch a drop in days rather than a quarter.
- Run structured tests on page templates and title/meta patterns and report the causal read where you can get one.
5- Work across the business
- Brief and influence Engineering, Product, and Content without owning their roadmaps.
- Guide merchants on the content and imagery that make their pages rank and convert.
- Present organic performance, risks, and opportunities to leadership with a clear point of view and a clear ask.
What Success Looks Like
- You’ll help Mahally build an organic acquisition engine that scales with the marketplace — improving how efficiently our pages are crawled and indexed, increasing qualified organic discovery, creating durable search surfaces, and strengthening Mahally’s presence across both traditional and AI-powered search.
- Ultimately, your work will translate organic visibility into more customers, more orders, and more growth for Saudi merchants.
Requirements
- 4+ years of hands-on SEO experience, with proven experience managing SEO for a large-scale e-commerce platform, marketplace, classifieds site, or other high-volume website.
- Strong technical SEO expertise, with hands-on experience diagnosing and resolving complex issues related to crawlability, indexation, rendering, canonicalisation, and site architecture.
- Proven experience managing SEO for websites with 100K+ indexable URLs/pages, including solving large-scale challenges such as index bloat, faceted navigation, duplicate or thin content, and crawl-budget optimisation.
- Advanced hands-on experience with Google Search Console, GA4, SEO crawling tools such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, and SEO platforms such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or equivalent tools.
- Practical experience implementing, auditing, and optimising structured data/schema markup, particularly for e-commerce, including Product, Offer, Breadcrumb, Organization, or similar schemas.
- Professional proficiency in both Arabic and English, with the ability to conduct Arabic keyword and search-intent research and assess the quality and relevance of Arabic SEO content.
- Strong analytical and commercial mindset, with the ability to quantify SEO opportunities, prioritise initiatives based on potential impact, and measure results across organic traffic, conversions, and business outcomes.
- Proven experience partnering directly with Engineering and Product teams to translate SEO findings into clear technical requirements and successfully deliver SEO improvements at scale.
Nice to Have
- Experience with GEO/AEO and AI-powered search discovery.
- SQL, Python, or scripting experience for log analysis, bulk SEO audits, or automated monitoring.
- Experience with multilingual SEO, including hreflang and Arabic/English content strategies.
- Experience with App Store Optimization (ASO) or web-to-app discovery.
- Experience working in Saudi Arabia or the GCC, with an understanding of local search and consumer behaviour.
- Digital PR, authority-building, or regional link-acquisition experience.