SEO Specialist — UK Training & Standards Body (Damp & Mould Industry) — Ongoing

About us We're the Federation of Damp (trading as Certify Damp UK Ltd) — the independent UK training and standards body for damp, mould and waterproofing professionals. We certify surveyors, run a public register of vetted members, and sell online and classroom training courses. Our site runs on WordPress with Elementor, WooCommerce, LearnPress and Rank Math. We have two audiences: Professionals — damp contractors and surveyors who buy our certification courses and join as members. Homeowners and housing providers — who use our public register to find a vetted specialist. Their trust is what makes membership commercially valuable. What we need Ongoing SEO support from someone who can both plan and execute. Realistically, this is 10–20 hours a month to start, with scope to grow. Priority areas: Homeowner-facing local SEO — building out location landing pages that capture "damp survey [town]" style demand and route it to our member register. This is our biggest untapped lever. Technical health — crawl and index hygiene, site speed, internal linking, fixing what's broken across a site that has grown fast. Content strategy and briefs — keyword research, topic mapping, and briefs (or drafts) for blog and landing page content aimed at both audiences. Regulatory topics like Awaab's Law are a strong angle for us. Schema and structured data — we use JSON-LD (Organization, WebPage, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Course where relevant). You should be comfortable checking and correcting it. Reporting — a short monthly summary of what changed, what moved, and what's next. No 40-page automated PDFs. Be aware of the ceiling before you apply We want someone realistic, not someone who promises the world. Our professional market is roughly 10,000–15,000 UK damp contractors, and UK search volume for damp training keywords sits at around 700–900 searches a month. Search alone will never be the primary engine for course sales — email, paid social and B2B outreach do that work. Where SEO genuinely wins for us is homeowner and housing-provider demand, brand authority, and supporting the rest of the funnel. Non-negotiables We're a standards body, so accuracy and compliance matter more than they would for a normal client. Anyone working on our content must follow these rules — we'll give you a full one-page brief on day one: "City & Guilds Assured" applies only to three named courses. It must never be applied to packages, bundles or other courses. The words "accredited" and "accreditation" are banned across the site. No invented statistics, testimonials, reviews or case studies. Ever. If you can't verify it, we don't publish it. No naming competitors in body copy. Nothing may imply that damp surveying is a legally regulated profession, or that our certification is legally required. What we're not looking for PBNs, or anything that would put the domain at risk AI-generated content published without human editing and fact-checking Agencies reselling junior work — we want to work with the person doing the work Anyone who can't write in natural UK English Engagement We'd like to start with one paid trial task — a technical and content audit of our site with a prioritised 90-day action plan — before moving to an ongoing arrangement. We'll pay properly for that audit regardless of whether we continue. To apply Skip the templates. Answer the screening questions, and in your first line tell us one specific thing you'd look at first on federationofdamp.co.uk and why. SCREENING QUESTIONS Link us to two UK sites you've grown organically. For each, tell us what the situation was when you started, what you actually changed, and what moved — over what period. Our register is the route homeowners use to find a vetted damp specialist near them. How would you approach building local landing pages for this, and how would you avoid producing thin duplicate pages across dozens of towns? Which SEO tools do you use day to day, and do you hold your own licences for them? You're writing a page and you want to include a statistic about the damp industry, but you can't find a credible source for the figure you had in mind. What do you do? Have you worked with Rank Math, Elementor and WooCommerce together before? Have you hand-written or corrected JSON-LD schema, or do you rely on plugin output?