Digital Merchandising & SEO Specialist

About the role

takealot.com, South Africa's leading online retailer, is seeking a Digital Merchandising & SEO Specialist to join its Marketing team in Cape Town. You will be the performance guardian for merchandising content, ensuring pages load quickly and rank highly while driving conversions.

Key responsibilities

• Audit and optimise heavy page assets (banners, images, scripts) to protect Core Web Vitals such as LCP and CLS.
• Execute high‑volume optimisation of category landing pages (PLPs) and product pages (PDPs), aligning H1s, metadata and copy with user intent and commercial goals.
• Analyse high‑traffic pages, refine layout, copy and CTAs to reduce bounce and improve organic conversion rates.
• Implement and monitor Structured Data (Schema) for reviews, price and stock, and optimise meta titles/descriptions for rich snippets and CTR.
• Collaborate with Retail and Merchandising teams to surface strategic products via SEO and manage out‑of‑stock or discontinued flows.
• Optimise visual assets for Google Images through alt tags, filenames, next‑gen formats and compression.
• Conduct competitor gap analysis on product and category pages and apply agile fixes.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Marketing.
• 3‑5 years of SEO experience focused on e‑commerce or retail.
• Strong technical understanding of Core Web Vitals, XML sitemaps and E‑E‑A‑T principles.
• Proven experience in Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).
• Experience with large‑scale Catalogue Management Systems (CMS).

Required skills

• Core Web Vitals optimisation (LCP, CLS, INP)
• XML sitemaps
• Structured Data (Schema)
• Google Search Console
• Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
• Catalogue Management Systems (CMS)
• Image optimisation, next‑gen formats and compression
• HTML/CSS for performance tuning

What we offer

• Dynamic work environment with challenging projects.
• Opportunity to shape SEO strategy for the largest online retailer in South Africa.
• Collaboration with cross‑functional retail and merchandising teams.