As Head of Digital, your primary objective is patient acquisition at scale. You will lead the digital function that helps Hakim Group practices attract new patients, convert them through compelling online experiences, and deliver a seamless handover into practice.
You will do this across two interconnected channels. The first is the individual practice estate: 500+ independently branded websites that need to rank locally, look and feel distinctive, and convert visitors into bookings. The second is a growing set of central platforms, including a consumer-facing destination that champions the independent optical category and routes patients to their nearest practice based on location, service need or specialist requirement.
The digital surfaces you shape will be the first thing most new patients see. How those experiences are designed, how they perform in search, how they guide someone from discovery to booking, and how consistently that works across hundreds of sites will directly determine how many new patients walk through the door.
This means you need to be equally strong on the front-end experience (UX, UI, information architecture, content, accessibility) and the systems that drive discovery (SEO, AEO, paid media, measurement). You will set the vision for how all of this works together, and you will lead the team that delivers it at a pace of 10-20 new practices joining every month.
Key Responsibilities
Patient Acquisition & Booking Journey
- Own the end-to-end digital acquisition journey: from a patient searching for eye care, through to landing on a practice site or central platform, engaging with the experience, and completing a booking.
- Oversee implementation and optimisation of modular booking flows across both the practice estate and the central platform, improving conversion rates, reducing drop-off and ensuring the journey sets the right expectations before a patient walks into a practice.
- Design and run a structured testing and improvement programme across hundreds of sites, identifying what drives conversion, standardising what works and continuously improving the pathway from discovery to booking.
- Partner with Marketing, CRM/Data and Practice Operations to ensure the digital journey aligns with what happens in practice, so that patient expectations set online are met in person.
Digital Experience, UX & Front-End Quality
- Shape the front-end experience across the entire digital estate, ensuring every practice website and central platform surface is well-designed, intuitive, accessible and built to convert.
- Own the UX and UI standards that govern how practice sites look, feel and function, balancing the need for local individuality with group-level consistency, performance and quality.
- Lead the architecture of a federated ecosystem where central modules (design system, shared components, booking flows, content structures) power locally configurable sites that still feel genuinely individual to each practice.
- Maintain performance, accessibility and QA standards across the estate, with structured workflows, automated checks and playbooks that support high-volume output without bottlenecking delivery.
- Own the digital onboarding process for new practice acquisitions: standing up new sites, migrating domains, configuring booking journeys and analytics, at pace.
SEO, AEO & Content Strategy
- Lead the technical and strategic SEO/AEO approach across hundreds of practices to drive local search dominance and make sure patients can find us when they need eye care.
- Architect scalable multi-location search structures including entity-first foundations, local schema, Google Business Profile governance, internal linking logic and content templates that work across clustered practices without cannibalisation.
- Oversee organic content strategy across both the practice estate and the central platform, in partnership with Creative and specialist partners, focused on demand capture, service-led journeys and building authority for AI-driven search.
- Stay ahead of the shift from traditional search to answer engine optimisation, ensuring practice sites and central content are structured for citation, featured snippets and conversational discovery.
Paid Media & Acquisition
- Provide strategic oversight of paid acquisition across Google and Meta, ensuring campaigns complement organic discovery and drive efficient, measurable bookings for practices.
- Lead the transition from hyper-local micro-campaigns to a more scalable centralised model that drives traffic into the central booking flow and routes patients to their nearest practice, while maintaining local relevance and partner confidence.
- Set scalable governance including account structure, naming conventions, budget allocation, tracking/attribution and landing page standards.
- Work with the paid media team and agency partners to run a disciplined optimisation cadence, testing creative, messaging and audience strategies to understand what drives patients to book.
Data, Analytics & Measurement
- Own the digital measurement framework that connects discovery to bookings, ensuring you can see clearly what is working, where patients are dropping off and which channels are driving real commercial outcomes.
- Ensure consistent analytics instrumentation and data quality standards (GA4/GTM, event models, naming conventions) across the practice estate and central platforms.
- Ensure accurate, governed data flows from digital channels into the CRM/CDP (Bloomreach), working closely with the CRM team and Solutions Architecture to close the loop between online activity and in-practice outcomes.
Digital Estate Operations & WebOps
- Lead the ongoing migration and management of 500+ websites on Webflow Enterprise, ensuring scalability, quality, speed of delivery and a consistent patient experience.
- Manage internal web design teams (UK and offshore) and external agency partners with clear scopes, SLAs, QA gates and predictable delivery at scale.
- Standardise briefs, workflows and documentation to achieve right-first-time delivery and reduce the operational burden of managing an estate of this size.
- Partner with IT and Solutions Architecture on domains, DNS, hosting, integration patterns and the technical elements of practice onboarding.
Team Leadership & Development
- Lead a multidisciplinary digital function spanning UX/UI, web design, WebOps, SEO/AEO and paid media, with both UK-based and offshore team members.
- Support and develop team members with clear expectations, structured 1:1s, performance standards and genuine growth pathways.
- Create a culture of collaboration, documentation, operational discipline and continuous improvement.
- Make smart decisions about what stays in-house and what goes to agency, and manage those relationships with clear governance.
Innovation & Future Capability
- Explore and test emerging approaches including modular/headless patterns, DevLink component systems, AI-assisted QA and content generation, and workflow automation.
- Contribute to the longer-term digital roadmap including the evolution of central platforms and omnichannel patient experience.
Skills, Knowledge & Experience
Essential
- Proven experience leading large-scale, multi-site digital estates with strong operational governance. This is not a single-brand or single-site role. You must have managed complexity at volume and delivered at pace.
- A strong eye for UX and UI with the ability to shape compelling, conversion-focused digital experiences. You should understand what makes someone trust a website, engage with it and take action.
- Experience owning conversion and user journey optimisation, ideally across booking, appointment or other high-intent service funnels. You should be comfortable diagnosing where journeys break and designing programmes to fix them at scale.
- Strong grounding in technical SEO, Core Web Vitals, structured data and scalable multi-location search. Experience with local SEO and multi-location cannibalisation challenges is strongly preferred.
- Understanding of paid media strategy and governance at a level where you can credibly lead a paid function, overseeing team members and agencies who execute day to day.
- Deep understanding of analytics (GA4/GTM), tagging and event structures, naming conventions and data flows into CRM/CDP platforms. You need to be able to connect digital activity to real commercial outcomes.
- Successful track record managing multidisciplinary teams of 10+ people including offshore or distributed team members, with structured governance and clear development pathways.
- Experience managing agencies and production partners with SLAs, QA gates and scalable brief/delivery workflows.
- Strong process mindset: capable of designing scalable workflows and improving delivery quality at volume without creating bureaucratic bottlenecks.
- Excellent communication skills. Able to simplify complex digital topics for board-level stakeholders, practice partners and cross-functional teams.
Desirable
- Experience in healthcare, optical, dental, veterinary or other service-led multi-location organisations where local trust and patient experience are central to acquisition.
- Experience with Webflow Enterprise or equivalent modern web platforms at scale.
- Familiarity with headless architectures, component-based design systems or DevLink-style approaches.
- Working knowledge of accessibility standards (WCAG), particularly in contexts where users may have visual impairments.
- Exposure to booking or diary systems and complex patient/customer journey mapping.
- Experience of digital within a joint venture, franchise or multi-brand portfolio model where individual partners retain significant autonomy.
- Understanding of how central demand platforms and local brand sites can work together to drive acquisition without undermining individual identity.
Attributes & Behaviours
- Commercially minded and outcome-focused. You think about digital surfaces in terms of the patients they bring through the door, not just the metrics on a dashboard.
- Strategic thinker with strong architectural intuition and the operational discipline to execute at pace.
- Patient-first and practice-first mindset: reduces friction, improves clarity and strengthens in-practice outcomes.
- Calm, clear and structured, especially under pressure or during change. Comfortable navigating ambiguity in a fast-scaling business.
- Highly collaborative. Able to bridge digital, IT, marketing, creative, CRM and practice operations without creating silos.
- A leader who builds confidence, clarity and accountability within the team while genuinely investing in people's growth.
