SEO + GEO Technical Diagnostic

We run an EdTech discovery platform for students aged 13 to 18, covering academic competitions, scholarships and summer programmes. Our content strategy is index-led: a large inventory of individual opportunity pages, plus guides and hub pages. Our front end is a client-rendered Vite React single-page application hosted on Vercel, with Supabase behind it. There is no server-side rendering. We use Prerender.io to serve rendered HTML to search and AI crawlers. We launched new templates for opportunity pages, guides and hubs approximately eight weeks ago. We have seen no measurable improvement in organic performance since. We want to know why. Our specific difficulty is that we cannot adjudicate conflicting advice. We currently get findings from automated audit tools, from LLM-based analysis, and from our own lead engineer, and they contradict each other. Our engineer is strong technically but not an SEO specialist. We want a broad audit that surfaces a small number of high-impact findings, each one evidenced well enough that our engineer can independently reproduce the check and either confirm it or kill it. SCOPE OF WORK A full site audit, prioritised by impact. We do not want an exhaustive list of every minor issue. We want the things actually costing us organic traffic, in order. Cover at minimum: Crawlability and rendering - What crawlers actually receive across each page template - Whether pre-rendered output is complete, current, and consistent across user agents Content that renders only on interaction (accordions, tabs, lazy-loaded sections) and is therefore missing from served HTML robots.txt, meta robots, and any conditional noindex behaviour Status codes and site responses - Correctness of response codes across live, deprecated, redirected and non-existent URLs - Soft 404s and any mismatch between rendered page state and HTTP status - Redirect chains, loops, and whether parameters survive redirects Index state and site architecture - What is indexed versus what should be indexed - Deprecated and orphaned pages still in the index, and the correct handling for each class - Sitemap accuracy, freshness, submission state and consistency with canonical tags - Duplication and cannibalisation across similar page types, particularly between hub pages and guides Performance data - Interpretation of our Google Search Console and analytics data: impressions, clicks, position and coverage trends, with attention to what changed at the template launch eight weeks ago - Whether the flat performance is a discovery problem, a rendering problem, a relevance problem, or a timing problem - Which queries and page types show any traction, and what that implies about where to invest GEO / AI search visibility - Whether our content is retrievable and citable by AI answer engines - Practical changes that would improve citation likelihood - Core Web Vitals and page experience HOW FINDINGS MUST BE PRESENTED This is the most important part of the brief. Every finding must include: - What the issue is, in plain language - The evidence: the actual response, header, HTML snippet, log line, GSC screenshot or query used - A reproducible check our engineer can run himself to verify it, stated as a specific command, URL or tool step - Expected impact if fixed, and your confidence level If you are not confident about a finding, say so and mark it as such. We would rather have six certain findings than thirty hedged ones. We will not action anything we cannot independently verify. CONSTRAINTS Prerender.io is a deliberate choice and is staying for now. Server-side rendering is already on our roadmap and does not need recommending. Work within the current stack. If you find something genuinely unfixable at the configuration layer, flag it as a constraint rather than a recommendation. DELIVERABLES - A written audit (document, no slide deck) - A prioritised fix list, ordered by expected impact, with owner and reproducible check against each item - A separate short list of strategic recommendations for our commercial team, distinct from the technical fixes - A short section on what you checked and found to be fine, so we stop re-investigating it WHAT WE WILL PROVIDE - Read-only Google Search Console access - Google Analytics access - Sitemap and site URLs - Prerender.io dashboard access if required - A short call with our lead engineer if required We will not provide repository or production access. You diagnose, our engineer implements. REQUIREMENTS Demonstrable experience auditing client-rendered JavaScript sites. This is the core requirement. Comfortable working from raw evidence rather than tool output. We have plenty of tool output already. Experience with large templated content inventories, not just small brochure sites Practical experience with GEO / AI search visibility, not theoretical interest Able to write for a non-technical reader and a technical reader in the same document BUDGET AND TIMELINE $150 fixed price. Delivered within 7 days of start. If you believe the scope cannot be done properly at that price, say so in your proposal and quote what you think it takes. We would rather hear that than receive a rushed report. Strong work here leads to ongoing engagement. TO APPLY Start your proposal with the word SIGNAL on its own line. Proposals that do not begin this way will not be read. Then answer these four questions directly. Generic or template proposals will not be reviewed. 1) Give us one example of an SEO issue on a client-rendered SPA that looks fine in a browser but is broken for crawlers. Explain how you would prove it. 2) What is the first thing you check to determine whether an indexing problem is a discovery failure or a rendering failure? 3) Link to one client-rendered JavaScript site you have audited and describe what the root cause turned out to be. 4) Describe one previous SEO project you consider a success. What the problem was, what you diagnosed as the cause, what you changed, and what moved as a result. Give real numbers with a timeframe, tell us which metrics you tracked, and explain how you attributed the change to your work rather than to seasonality or an algorithm update. If under NDA, say so and describe it without naming the client.