SEO is a multi-disciplinary function. A one-person SEO team can succeed at small scale, but growing requires specialization. Here's who you need and in what order.
Fine for sites under 1,000 pages or early-stage startups. The person does everything: keyword research, content briefs, technical audits, link building, tracking. Expect breadth over depth.
Typical structure:
Roles split further:
Owns overall strategy, budget, team. Reports to CMO or CRO.
Owns the content roadmap, editorial calendar, topic clusters. Works closely with the content team.
Assigns and reviews content. Ensures quality, consistency, on-brief execution.
Subject-matter writers. Often specialized by topic (legal, finance, product).
Crawling, indexing, site architecture, Core Web Vitals, schema, migrations. Often overlaps with engineering.
Earns backlinks through relationships, guest posts, press, data studies.
Reporting, tracking, competitive intel, hypothesis testing, analytics integration.
For multi-market sites: manages translation, hreflang, local competitive strategy.
In-house builds domain expertise and long-term ownership, best when SEO is a strategic channel. Agency is faster to spin up, wider tool access, but higher turnover on accounts. Common pattern: in-house strategist + agency for execution volume.