To build an in-house SEO team, hire one hands-on head of SEO first. Then add people as bottlenecks appear: technical SEO or an SEO engineer when the site holds you back, content when pages are missing. Plan for two to four people plus developer time at most B2B and mid-size companies. Buy links, digital PR and migrations from outside. Salaries set the budget: Indeed puts the average Australian SEO manager at A$101,406 base, and the average US one at US$90,010.
I'm Brenden House. I run Searchmaxxed, an SEO and AI SEO agency, and we built our SEO consulting for in-house teams that can ship but need direction. So I'll tell you where we fit, and where you're better off hiring. Every salary below comes from the job sites' own pages, read on 27 October 2026 (AEST).
In summary
Start with one senior person who can do the work. Then hire to the bottleneck.
| Company stage | A team shape that works |
|---|---|
| One product, one or two markets | Head of SEO, plus a share of a developer and a writer |
| Scale-up in several markets | Head of SEO, technical SEO or SEO engineer, content lead |
| Enterprise, many brands or sites | Central SEO team setting standards, with SEO owners in each product or market |
- The first hire sets the direction for everyone after them. Hire a head of SEO who can fix a template, brief a page and read Search Console.
- Developer time is the hidden cost. Without it, SEO tickets just wait.
- By my sums, three people in Australia cost about A$300,000 a year in salary and super, before tools, recruiting or developer time.
- AI lets each person cover more ground, so 2026 teams are smaller and more senior.
- Buy what spikes. Digital PR, link building and site migrations suit outside specialists, even when you have a team.
What roles does an in-house SEO team need?
An in-house SEO team needs five jobs covered: strategy, technical SEO, content, measurement and off-page work. Small teams cover all five with two or three people. Big ones give each job its own person, and in 2026 they add someone who owns what AI answers say about the company.
| Role | What they own | When to hire |
|---|---|---|
| Head of SEO | Strategy, priorities, targets (OKRs), and getting product and engineering to ship | First hire, every time |
| SEO specialist or generalist | Hands-on work across technical fixes, on-page updates and content | Second hire at most companies |
| Technical SEO specialist | Crawling, indexing, site structure, redirects, Core Web Vitals and schema | Large, complex or JavaScript-heavy sites |
| SEO engineer | Templates, rendering, internal links and the scripts or agents that pull search data | When SEO fixes wait months for developers |
| Content lead or SEO writer | Page plans, briefs, writing and updating pages that answer buyer searches | When missing pages are the gap |
| SEO analyst | Search Console, GA4, conversion tracking, rankings and reporting | When leadership wants pipeline numbers |
| Digital PR and outreach | Links, press, mentions and the lists AI answers quote | Usually bought in; hire once it's constant |
| AI search owner | What ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews say about you | Often part of the head of SEO's job at first |
Some terms, defined plainly:
- Technical SEO is making sure search engines can crawl, render and index your pages.
- An SEO engineer is a search-focused developer.
- AEO (answer engine optimisation) means structuring pages so search engines and AI tools can lift a direct answer straight from them.
- GEO (generative engine optimisation) is getting named in AI-written answers.
- Digital PR is earning coverage and links from news sites, trade press and the industry lists people read.
You won't fill every row. The table shows which jobs someone must own, even if one person owns three.
Who should you hire first for in-house SEO?
Hire a hands-on head of SEO first. This person builds the strategy, decides what to skip and still does the work until the team grows. Hire a junior first and you tend to get audits nobody acts on. Why? They lose arguments with engineering.
Look for someone who has shipped results on a site like yours. A SaaS marketing site, a 20,000-page manufacturing catalogue and a government services site are three different jobs. In the interview, share your Search Console and ask them to talk you through what they see and what they'd fix first. Ten minutes in, you'll know.
Google publishes its own questions for hiring an SEO, and three of them carry straight over to an in-house hire like yours:
- Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
- What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
- What's your experience in my industry?
Those come from Google's guide to hiring an SEO, which calls a redesign or new launch a good time to hire: "the earlier, the better".
I learned what one hands-on person can carry in my own business first.
Before Searchmaxxed, I built Radiant Roof Repairs from zero to more than A$1 million a year in revenue using SEO as the only marketing channel. Three high-intent Gold Coast roofing searches reached number one within 90 days. I did the pages, research, competitor checks and updates manually.
Roofing isn't B2B software. The lesson carries over anyway, because one operator who does the work beats a manager waiting to delegate it to people you haven't hired.
What does a head of SEO do, and how is it different from an SEO manager?
A head of SEO owns the channel's result: what organic search brings in, which work gets done, and how it lands with engineering. An SEO manager usually runs the work inside someone else's plan. Small companies merge the two.
In practice, a head of SEO's week goes on four things:
- Choosing the work. They rank pages, fixes and links by pipeline value, then cut the rest.
- Getting it shipped. They write tickets developers accept, and keep SEO inside the release cycle.
- Reporting in money. Leadership hears about enquiries and pipeline first, with rankings as the supporting detail.
- Owning AI search. They track what ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI answers say about the company.
Not ready to hire one? Our SEO consulting for in-house teams fills the gap. We set the 90-day plan, choose what to build next and review each release.
What is an SEO engineer, and do you need one?
An SEO engineer is a developer who owns the search side of your website: templates, rendering, structured data, internal links, redirects and page speed. You need one when SEO fixes wait months in an engineering backlog, or when your site runs on a JavaScript framework or a headless CMS.
Valuable SEO work lives in code. A schema fix across 4,000 product templates is one pull request. So is a React rendering fix. Without a developer of its own, every SEO change queues behind product features, sometimes for a whole quarter.
They also build the plumbing now. They connect Search Console and GA4 to scripts or AI agents that flag broken pages, missing schema and lost rankings every week. That's how small teams cover big sites.
A small marketing site on a sensible platform doesn't need one full-time, because a few developer days a month will do. For the checks this role runs, our technical SEO service sets out the crawl, render, index and schema work in detail.
How should you structure an SEO team?
Structure your SEO team around how your company ships. One site with one product team suits a centralised team, while several products or markets suit embedded SEO people and a small central team. Conductor's guide to enterprise SEO team structure names four common shapes: hierarchical, pods, by brand, product or market, and the adaptive triad.
| Structure | How it works | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Centralised | One SEO team serves the whole company | One site, one product, one or two markets |
| Embedded (pods) | SEO people sit inside product or market teams | Several products, each shipping on its own |
| Hub and spoke | A central team sets standards; spokes do the work | Enterprise, many brands, sites or countries |
| Lean core plus partners | One or two senior people direct outside help | Early stage, or SEO still proving itself |
Where should SEO sit: marketing or product?
SEO usually reports into marketing, because marketing owns pipeline and content. It still needs engineering. Put SEO in marketing with no developer time and technical fixes stall. Put it in product with no content budget and nobody writes the pages. Either way, budget the developer hours in writing, by name and by week, before the work starts.
Three worked examples
A Series B SaaS company, two markets. One product, one marketing site. Hire a head of SEO who can write and fix templates, then give them a writer and two developer days a week. Digital PR comes from outside. Two people plus partners can carry this for a year.
A manufacturer with a 20,000-page product catalogue. Here the bottleneck is technical: product templates, filters, duplicate URLs and specification data. Hire a head of SEO with a technical background, then an SEO engineer. Content comes third. Category pages beat a blog here.
A state government agency running dozens of service sites. The job here is consistency across many separate teams, each with its own content owners, release cycles and old habits. A small central team writes the rules for page structure, schema and plain-language answers. Each site owner applies them locally. An analyst earns their place early, because proving which services people find and complete is the whole case for the team's funding.
How much does an in-house SEO team cost?
A three-person in-house SEO team in Australia costs about A$300,000 a year in salary and super alone. In the US, a head of SEO plus one specialist comes to about US$280,000 a year in employer costs. Both totals are my sums, from the averages below.
| Role | Australia (average base) | United States (average base) |
|---|---|---|
| SEO manager | A$101,406; range A$77,517 to A$132,656 (Indeed AU) | US$90,010; range US$60,731 to US$133,405 (Indeed US) |
| Head of SEO | Not published separately | US$113,333 (ZipRecruiter) |
| Senior SEO manager | Not published separately | US$117,191; middle half US$90,008 to US$154,275 (Glassdoor) |
| SEO specialist | A$89,019 (Indeed AU) | US$82,721 (Indeed US) |
| Content writer | A$77,291 (Indeed AU) | Not checked for this article |
I read every figure on 27 October 2026 (AEST), and Indeed last refreshed its numbers between 14 and 18 October. These are averages from job ads and salary reports, and senior enterprise hires often sit near the top of each range.
Salary is only the base, and on-costs come on top:
- Australia: employers pay superannuation on top of salary, and the ATO set that rate at 12% from 1 July 2025 onwards.
- United States: the Bureau of Labor Statistics says wages were 70.0% of private employers' compensation costs in June 2026. Benefits made up the other 30.0%.
The worked sums
| Team | Base salaries | With on-costs |
|---|---|---|
| Australia: SEO manager, SEO specialist, content writer | A$267,716 | About A$299,842 with 12% super |
| US: head of SEO, SEO specialist | US$196,054 | About US$280,077 if wages are 70% of cost |
My arithmetic. The US line uses the private-industry average, so your own benefits bill will differ.
Then add what the table leaves out. Recruiting fees, SEO software, payroll tax where it applies, management time and developer hours all sit on top, plus the ramp-up months. Our comparison of an SEO agency, a freelancer and an in-house hire puts those costs side by side.
Should you build an in-house SEO team or outsource?
Build in-house when organic search is a core channel you'll fund for years and the work is steady. Outsource what spikes or needs rare skills. That includes migrations, link building and digital PR, plus the first year while you learn what SEO is worth to you. Most companies end up doing both.
| Work | In-house | Outside help |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy and priorities | Yes, once you have a head of SEO | A consultant until then |
| Day-to-day page and content work | Yes, if the volume is steady | When volume spikes or the team is small |
| Technical fixes | Yes, with developer time | Audits and second opinions |
| Site migrations and replatforms | Rarely; it's a once-in-years job | Usually, from a specialist |
| Link building and digital PR | Only at large scale | Usually; it needs contacts and editors |
| AI search tracking | Yes, once it's part of reporting | Tools or a partner while you set it up |
It comes down to output. How many approved pages, fixes and links do you need shipped each month? Can the team you can afford ship that much?
How does AI change the in-house SEO team in 2026?
AI changes the headcount maths. It doesn't change what the team must get right, which is choosing the right work and trusting the numbers behind it. Research, drafting, data pulls and routine checks take hours instead of days, so lean senior teams now do far more than they did.
Three changes matter when you plan headcount:
- Fewer junior production roles. Drafting and research cost less, so the money moves to senior people who decide and review.
- An AI search owner. Someone tracks what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers say about you, then fixes the pages and sources behind it.
- Engineering moves closer. Agents and scripts need an owner who can build and run them.
Google keeps the fundamentals in place. Its guidance on AI features is blunt: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary."
So skip the separate AI department. You need strong SEO, with someone watching the AI answers.
Here's how we run it at Searchmaxxed, and it's a model you can copy in-house. AI agents pull each client's Search Console and GA4 data, read the Google results and check what AI answers say about them and their competitors. That feeds our Managed Search Loop, which shows which page, fix or link should bring that client the most enquiries next. On every account, I set the direction, read the weekly evidence, write the money pages and approve everything that ships. The agents gather; people decide.
How do you know your SEO team's numbers are right?
Check the tracking before trusting any report. An in-house SEO team lives or dies on its numbers, and broken analytics can hide a good team or flatter a weak one. That's the strongest case for an analyst, or for a head of SEO who audits GA4 personally.
Two things we found on an enterprise B2B client's account show why.
The first was conversions. A client's four enquiry types never counted as conversions. Their event names ran 41 to 50 characters; GA4 cuts at 40. The 40-character "career" event counted every time. Nobody had noticed, because the events still showed up.
The second was AI traffic. A client's GA4 showed AI-assistant visits jump from 354 to 6,050 in a month. Almost none of it was real. About 5,700 came in three one-hour bursts: same 1920x1080 desktop Chrome, all new users, no referrer, about 20 seconds each, landing on two pages. Real AI traffic was 385 sessions against 354 the month before, roughly flat.
Both would have misled leadership. Give your team four monthly checks to run before any report reaches leadership:
- Do GA4 enquiries match the CRM?
- Which pages and fixes shipped, and what moved on matched 28-day periods in Search Console?
- Which tracked buyer questions name us in AI answers, and which name a competitor?
- Has anyone checked AI traffic for bots?
Our guide to SEO reporting covers what belongs in the monthly report.
Where does Searchmaxxed fit?
Searchmaxxed is an SEO and AI SEO agency for enterprise, B2B SaaS, venture-backed, manufacturing and public-sector companies. We do technical SEO, content, link building, digital PR, GEO, AEO and LLM SEO. With in-house teams, we work in one of two ways, depending on whether your people can already ship pages.
Your team can ship but needs direction. Our SEO consulting becomes your head-of-SEO layer. We read your Search Console, GA4, competitors and AI answers, set a 90-day plan in page releases, and review each release before it goes live. Your developers and writers build it. We also run working sessions on live pages and write playbooks for your stack, so your team needs us less each quarter.
You need output, not only plans. Our managed packages do the build. A page release is an approved new page or a substantial rebuild of one.
| Package | Who it suits | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Growth System | A company growing in one or two markets | 30 page releases a month, work on up to 4 existing pages, one qualified link action a month, AI visibility tracking |
| Agentic Search Engineering | A competitive or national market | 50 page releases a month, comparison and industry pages, digital PR and link campaigns, AI answer tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews |
| Custom & Enterprise | Several brands, several markets or a large site | Multiple markets, dedicated engineering, custom reporting and original first-party research |
Every managed package includes ongoing audits, a 90-day plan in weekly releases, the build work itself and a monthly decision memo. You own the site, repository, content and data from day one, so nothing walks out the door if you hire in-house later.
Searchmaxxed's work has generated more than A$10 million in revenue through search for its clients.
Is Searchmaxxed right for you?
Searchmaxxed suits marketing and growth leaders who want SEO and AI search done properly. Some run us beside a small team. Others use us instead of hiring. Either way, you talk to me and the people doing the work, with no account managers in between.
| Good fit if | Look elsewhere if |
|---|---|
| You have a team that ships and need someone senior to choose the work | You want a full-time employee; hire a head of SEO instead |
| You need 30 or 50 page releases a month without hiring for them | You want strategy advice with no changes to your site |
| You want Google and AI search handled by one team | You want reports about the work more than the work |
| You want to own your site, repository, content and data | You're shopping for the cheapest retainer |
| You need links and digital PR your team can't run | You need search to fill this month's pipeline on its own |
If organic search is core and you can fund a senior hire, build the team. That's the right call.
Frequently asked questions
How many people should an in-house SEO team have?
Plan for two to four people plus developer time at most B2B and mid-size companies. Start with one head of SEO. Then add people as bottlenecks appear. Enterprises with many sites or markets need more, usually in a hub-and-spoke shape.
What should an SEO team's first hire be?
A senior, hands-on head of SEO. They set the strategy and still do the work, so results come before the team does. A junior first hire tends to produce audits nobody acts on.
How much does a head of SEO earn?
ZipRecruiter puts the average US head of SEO at US$113,333 a year, read 27 October 2026. In Australia, Indeed's average SEO manager salary is A$101,406, ranging from A$77,517 to A$132,656. Senior enterprise heads often earn more.
What does an SEO engineer do?
An SEO engineer is a developer who owns the search side of a website: templates, rendering, schema, internal links, redirects and speed. Many also build the scripts and AI agents that pull Search Console and GA4 data. Hire one when fixes keep stalling.
Should SEO sit in marketing or product?
Usually marketing. Marketing owns pipeline and content, and SEO feeds both, but it also needs developer time written into the plan wherever it sits. Without it, technical fixes stall.
Can one person run SEO in-house?
Yes, if they're senior, hands-on and have some developer and writing support. One person can own strategy and briefs. Link building, digital PR and migrations usually still come from outside.
Is an in-house SEO team cheaper than an agency?
It depends on the output you need. A three-person Australian team costs about A$300,000 a year in salary and super alone. Then compare it with what an agency would ship for the same money, counted in pages, fixes and links each month.
How does AI change SEO team structure?
AI lets each person cover more, so teams get smaller and more senior. Drafting and data pulls take less time. Judgement and engineering matter more.
What should you do next?
Write down the five searches that bring your best customers, and next to each, who on your team owns the fix. If the answer is "nobody yet", that's your first hire, or the gap our SEO consulting fills while you recruit someone. If you'd like us to scope it for your site, let's talk pricing.