SEO & Merchandising Specialist

South Africas leading online retailer is looking for a highly talented SEO & Merchandising Specialist

to join our Marketing team in Cape Town.

We are a young dynamic hyper growth company looking for smart creative hard-working people with integrity to join us. We offer a market related Total Remuneration Package which allows full flexibility according to your needs a great work environment and a promise that you wont be bored as long as you are prepared for a challenge and want to build something great.

This position reports to the Senior SEO Specialist

Your responsibilities will include:

• Core Web Vitals & Page Experience: Act as the Performance Guardian for merchandising content. Audit and optimise heavy page assets (banners images scripts) to ensure they do not negatively impact LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) or CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift).
• Brief technical improvements to developers to ensure green scores across all page types.
• Category & Product Page Optimisation: Execute high-volume optimization of Category Landing Pages (PLPs) and Product Pages (PDPs). Ensure that H1s metadata and description copy perfectly align with user search intent and commercial goals.
• Search Intent & CR% Optimisation: Analyse high-traffic landing pages to ensure content satisfies user intent. Optimise page layout copy and Call-to-Actions (CTAs) to reduce bounce rate and drive Conversion Rate (CR%) from organic traffic.
• Offsite Discoverability & Rich Snippets: Manage the appearance of pages on Google.
• Implement and monitor Structured Data (Schema) for reviews price and stock to secure.
• Rich Snippets. Optimise Meta Titles/Descriptions to maximise CTR.
• Merchandising for SEO: Collaborate with Retail and Merchandising teams to ensure strategic products and promotions are surfaced via SEO. Manage Out of Stock and Discontinued product flows to retain authority and user trust.
• Image SEO & Asset Management: Optimise all visual assets (product images merchandising banners) for search discovery (Alt tags filenames) and performance (next-gen formats compression) to drive traffic from Google Images.
• Competitor Gap Analysis: Monitor competitor product and category pages to identify content feature or speed advantages they hold and implement agile fixes.

Qualification & Experience:

• Minimum bachelors degree Marketing.
• 3-5 years of SEO experience with a specific focus on E-commerce or Retail.
• Strong technical understanding of Core Web Vitals: XML sitemaps and on-site content (E-E-A-T principles).
• Proven experience in Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) principles.
• Experience working with large-scale Catalogue Management Systems (CMS).

Attributes Required:

• Strong technical understanding of Core Web Vitals: Knowledge of what causes poor LCP CLS and INP and how to fix it from a content/asset perspective.
• Proven experience in Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) principles.
• Experience working with large-scale Catalogue Management Systems (CMS).
• Technical Asset Optimisation: Ability to optimise images videos and HTML/CSS for speed without sacrificing quality.
• Persuasive Copywriting: Ability to write content that ranks and converts.
• Analytical Skills: Deep proficiency in Google Search Console (CWV reports) and PageSpeed Insights.
• Merchandising Eye: Ability to spot visual/product presentation issues that hurt sales.
• Structured Data: Proficiency with implementation (JSON-LD).

The Environment:

• employees are entrepreneurial and dynamic smart customer- centric fun and have the shared ambition of being the leading e- commerce company in Africa.
• We have fun work hard take ownership work in teams to create solutions and are always open to direct feedback/new ideas on where we can improve.
• We are short on ego and high on output.
• We are doers and not only thinkers its all in the execution after all.
• We love what we do and what we are creating.
• We seek to employ an Extra Ordinary Mind whois Smart has Integrityand is Hardworking.

If you meet the above you are an Extraordinary Mind so come and join us!

Takealot Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We encourage applicants from the previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities to apply.