SEO Executive

Function: Customer & Sales

Purpose: Maximise organic search visibility and booking conversion by delivering the SEO roadmap and supporting day-to-day email, CRM, chatbot and web performance, ensuring demand for Go Ape is reliably found, understood and turned into confident bookings.

Reports to: Head of eCommerce & CRM

Locations: Remote

Salary: From £30,000

Background

Go Ape is a nationally recognised outdoor leisure brand, operating a diverse estate of forest adventure sites in forests and parks, delivering high-quality, experience-led activities rooted in challenge, connection, and time in nature. The brand benefits from strong awareness, advocacy, and sustained demand across families, adults, education, groups, and corporate audiences.

Strong organic demand is one of Go Ape's biggest advantages. Customers search for us by name, by activity and by the places they live near, and organic search is one of our largest sources of traffic and bookings across 36 UK locations. There is a significant opportunity to grow that further, and we have a clear plan to make the most of it.

That plan needs someone to deliver it. This role turns the SEO roadmap into live fixes, pages and reporting, and works alongside the eCommerce and CRM team on the email and web activity that turns visits into bookings. At the same time, Go Ape's transition to a Trust-led, employee ownership model has increased the importance of clarity of accountability and long-term value creation, and this role is a practical part of that.

Core Responsibilities

Deliver Go Ape's SEO roadmap and support the day-to-day performance of our email and website. Act as the hands-on executor of organic search improvements, working closely with the Head of eCommerce & CRM and our Email Marketing Manager.

This role exists to ensure:

• Organic search traffic recovers to pre-rebuild levels, then grows beyond them

• Customers searching for Go Ape, our activities and our locations find accurate, helpful pages they can book from

• Technical SEO issues are fixed quickly and stay fixed

• SEO is built into how we publish, with changes checked before they go live

• Email, CRM, chatbot and website tasks are executed accurately, on time and with tracking in place

SEO Roadmap Delivery

• Deliver the SEO roadmap in priority order, starting with technical fixes.

• Fix redirects for pages lost in the site rebuild, broken internal links and duplicate URLs.

• Keep a clean, up-to-date index so Google can see how the whole site fits together.

• Raise clear tickets for developers in monday.com, follow them through and check the work before sign-off.

• Keep track of Google updates and flag their impact early.

Content & On-Page SEO

• Write and improve page titles, meta descriptions, headings and body copy for location, activity and hub pages, working with the content team.

• Rebuild and extend content lost in the rebuild, including location, kids' birthday party and corporate pages.

• Write short, clear answers to common questions (for example age, weight and height limits) that work in Google results and AI search features.

Local & Rich Results

• Set up and maintain structured data so price and ratings show in Google results across location and activity pages.

• Support Google Business Profile optimisation across our locations with the local marketing team.

Web, Chatbot, Email & CRM Support

• Make website updates in our CMS (DatoCMS): pages, promotional panels, FAQs and landing pages.

• Help maintain and improve our AI chatbot: keeping answers accurate and up to date, adding new FAQs and flagging gaps from the questions customers ask.

• Help build, QA and send email campaigns alongside the CRM and email lead, including link, UTM and tracking checks.

• Support day-to-day CRM tasks, such as audience set-up and checking automated emails work as intended, as directed by the CRM and email lead.

• Pick up ad hoc eCommerce tasks, such as promotion set-up, page updates and checking offers display correctly.

• Suggest and help test small improvements to key web pages that make booking easier.

• Keep UTM and tracking conventions consistent across email, Google Business Profile and the website.

SEO Governance & Cross-Functional Working

• Run SEO checks on site and content changes before they go live, and help keep that process working.

• Partner with Product & Marketing, IT, content and local marketing so SEO is considered early rather than fixed afterwards.

SEO Reporting & Insight

• Produce a monthly SEO performance report from Google Search Console, GA4 and Funnel, explaining what changed and why in plain English.

• Track clicks, impressions, click-through rate, rankings, indexation and organic revenue, with brand and non-brand searches shown separately.

• Translate insight into prioritised actions rather than dashboards for their own sake.

• Keep the roadmap tracker up to date with owners, status and results.

Outcomes & Success (What Good Looks Like)

Success in 6 months:

• Technical fixes delivered: redirects live, duplicate URLs resolved and a clean list of pages for Google.

• Monthly SEO reporting running independently, with brand and non-brand shown separately.

• Content rebuild pages published, including locations, kids' birthday parties and corporate.

• Price and ratings showing in Google results across location and activity pages.

• SEO checks in place for site and content changes before they go live.

Success in 12 months:

• Organic clicks and sessions recovering towards pre-rebuild levels against the same period last year. [Target to agree]

• Non-brand search visibility growing, including activity and "near me" searches.

• SEO an established part of how email, web and content go live.

• Local listings consistent and performing across all locations.

• SEO reporting trusted and used by leadership to make decisions.

Success in 24 months:

• Organic search back at or above 2025 levels and still growing.

• An embedded SEO culture across content, web, email and local marketing.

• Go Ape visible in AI search results and answers, as well as traditional Google results.

• Predictable, resilient organic performance through peak trading periods.

Experience & Background (What You'll Likely Bring)

• Hands-on SEO experience, in-house or at an agency (typically 1–2 years), ideally in a consumer, leisure, travel, hospitality or eCommerce business,

• Working knowledge of technical SEO: redirects, canonical tags, indexation, sitemaps, site structure and structured data.

• Confident with Google Search Console and GA4, and data-literate, with the ability to translate insight into prioritised action rather than dashboards for their own sake.

• Clear, accurate writing for the web, including titles, meta descriptions and page copy.

• Comfortable working in a CMS and making website updates. Experience with DatoCMS or a similar CMS is advantageous.

• Comfortable working with developers: able to write a clear ticket, prioritise, test and sign off, without needing to be the technical implementer.

• Strong attention to detail, for example when checking links, redirects and tracking.

• Experience operating in peak-led, seasonal or operationally constrained environments is highly advantageous.

• Experience with email or CRM platforms, or with writing and maintaining chatbot content, is advantageous.

• Experience with Ahrefs or Semrush, Screaming Frog, Cloudflare, local SEO and Google Business Profile across multiple sites is advantageous.

• Awareness of how AI search features, such as Google AI Overviews, change how people find content.

Tools you will use

• Google Search Console, GA4 and Funnel dashboards

• SEO tools such as BrightEdge, Ahrefs or Semrush, and Screaming Frog

• DatoCMS, our AI chatbot, Google Business Profile, our email and CRM platform and monday.com

Full training will be given, so you do not need experience of all of them.

Role Is For You If

• You enjoy fixing things and seeing the effect in the numbers.

• You are accountable for outcomes, such as organic traffic and bookings, not just activity.

• You are comfortable influencing across Marketing, IT, content and local teams without line ownership.

• You enjoy variety: mainly SEO, plus hands-on website, chatbot, email and CRM work alongside the wider team.

• You like balancing customer experience, operational reality and commercial performance.

Role Is Not For You If

• You want to build or engineer the website yourself rather than partner with developers.

• You want to work only on SEO strategy, without hands-on delivery.

• You prefer roles with narrow functional ownership and limited cross-functional dependency.

• You are uncomfortable being measured against commercial outcomes.

COMPANY ETHOS

Our Values

Keeping the adventure in adventure Encouraging ‘I can’t’ to become ‘I can’ Always seeking to be two steps better Zero risk equals zero development To challenge, surprise and excite Build in customer delight Be socially and environmentally responsible Create worthwhile, rewarding jobs Do the right thing

Our Mission

To be the best Adventure Leisure company on the planet (where you can be home in time for tea)

Our Vision

“Creating adventures; encouraging everyone to live life adventurously”

If you feel as strongly as we do about encouraging everyone to live life more adventurously then this could be the perfect environment for you to work in!

At Go Ape we are committed to our 'Working together to Safeguard Children' obligation for safeguarding and in this role you will be working in a position of trust.

Diversity, equity and inclusion matters at Go Ape. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our co-owners to thrive and achieve their full potential.

Our Glassdoor rating for Diversity & Inclusion is 4.8 out of 5, this is above the average for our industry and a company of our size.

As well as providing training, we issue a survey to our new co-owners at Go Ape to support us in monitoring equality, diversity and inclusion in the recruitment and onboarding process. We are pleased to hold a score of 4.88 out of 5 in response to the following question ‘On a scale of 1 – 5, how accurate would you say the following statement is ‘I feel welcome at Go Ape’ (5 being very accurate)’.

As the above illustrates, we are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief.

We will consider reasonable adjustments for all our roles.

Please note that all offers are subject to acceptable Right to Work documents being provided.