Director of SEO to Recover Rankings

We're recovering from a Google algorithmic penalty that hit us hard late last year. We've fixed many aspects of our site, but rankings continue to fall. We need an experienced director-level SEO to come in, assess what's left to fix, and drive the recovery forward. This role consists of a 30-day trial period where you will conduct an audit, create a priority list of tasks that will lead to site recovery, and then start to work on those tasks. If the fit is right, this will turn into a long-term engagement. The right person should be able to perform an audit quickly with AI assistance, SEO tools, and drawing upon their many years of experience. What you'll do: Start with a full site audit — we need a prioritized task list fast Quarterback our dev team and junior SEO through Asana, keeping work moving and people focused on the right things Get hands dirty on complex work yourself while also assigning out what others can handle Consult on content strategy, page structure, and site architecture decisions on an ongoing basis Be consistently available for strategic questions and answer within 1 business day Own the SEO roadmap and keep the team focused on the highest-priority items at all times What we need: Proven experience recovering sites from Google algorithmic penalties — specific examples required Well-rounded SEO expertise across technical, on-page, and content — you can evaluate all of it Solid technical chops: Core Web Vitals, page speed, crawl budget, redirects, schema markup WordPress familiarity, ideally including Elementor, Kinsta, and Cloudflare Strong command of Ahrefs, GSC, and GA4 Experience managing developers and junior SEO staff — you write clear specs, not vague requests Real estate industry experience strongly preferred — especially cash home buying or motivated seller markets The right person: You see the full picture — technical issues, content gaps, site structure problems — and you know which levers to pull first. You've rescued sites before and know what real recovery looks like. You're available, direct, and comfortable telling us exactly what we're doing wrong. To apply, please answer the following: Describe a Google algorithmic penalty recovery you led — what caused it, what you fixed, what the outcome was. What's your experience with We Buy Houses type companies or marketing to motivated seller markets? Tell us about increases in traffic, traffic from LLMs, leads, backlinks, revenue etc. - the more specifics, the better