Software-defined networking is a new network model proposed to solve the complexity of traditional network problems and facilitate dynamic network operation and management. The separation of the control plane from the data plane is the main idea of software-defined networks. Controllers are the operating system of software-defined networks and are responsible for managing the entire network. It is essential to locate controllers appropriately to have a balanced topology while guaranteeing low latency. In this work, a metaheuristic algorithm is used for controller placement. First, the problem is formulated, and the network is partitioned by a clustering algorithm. Then, the seagull optimization algorithm is used to determine a suitable place for the controller in each network partition dynamically. Simulations are performed on the standard network topology from the internet topology zoo dataset to evaluate the proposed method. Simulation results reveal that the proposed method performs well in case of delay and load balancing compared with the state-of-the-art optimization algorithms.