SEO Strategist (Consultant)

About the Role House Buyers of America is a national cash-home-buying company that has been in business since 2001. We are currently recovering from a significant algorithmic Google penalty and are looking for an experienced, director-level SEO consultant to lead our recovery efforts and own our ongoing SEO strategy. This is a freelance contract role — not a full-time position, and there is no path to full-time employment. We are looking for someone who is already operating as a full-time independent consultant and is comfortable in the freelance/consulting world. The engagement begins with a 3-month trial period, during which your performance will be evaluated against predetermined metrics. With demonstrated success, this role continues long-term. This is not a hands-on execution role. You will be the strategic lead — auditing, prioritizing, directing, and managing a small team of freelancers (Dev, Junior SEO, and Content). The rare exception is a highly complex technical task that only you can define and initiate before handing off clearly to a team member. What You'll Do - Conduct a thorough audit of our site, identify the root causes of our traffic decline, and build a fully prioritized task list in Asana within the first 30 days - Get the team immediately engaged in executing the highest-priority tasks — success in month one is both a complete priority list and a team actively working through it - Manage task assignments for our Dev, Junior SEO, and Content freelancers via Asana — writing clear, well-defined tickets and following up to keep work moving - Join two calls per month with our CEO, which require advance reporting and completion of a meeting document - Join two calls per month with the SEO team to coordinate and align priorities - Check in frequently with team members via Microsoft Teams to unblock assignments and push projects forward — this role requires consistent, proactive communication, not reactive availability - Review finished work before it is deployed to the live site - Participate in occasional ad hoc calls as needed - Submit a monthly invoice listing each task completed, the date it was performed, and the time committed What We're Looking For Experience: - Proven track record recovering sites from Google algorithmic penalties — we want specific case studies with before/after data and supporting screenshots from GSC or GA4 - Experience with national-scope sites, including sites with large numbers of templated, location-specific pages - Familiarity with the We Buy Houses, cash home buying, or similar real estate transaction space is a strong plus - Minimum one year operating as a full-time independent consultant Technical: - You don't need to be a senior developer, but you need to be someone who has routinely worked with, troubleshot, and feels comfortable quickly diagnosing issues in the following and handing off well-defined tasks to a team member: - WordPress (custom builds with lots of custom features and plugins) - Elementor - Kinsta - Cloudflare - RankMath - Google Tag Manager - Plugin conflicts, code-level troubleshooting - GSC, GA4, Screaming Frog, AHREFs, and/or other SEO tools Management & Communication: - Comfortable managing freelancers via Asana with clear, spec-level task definitions - Highly communicative — able to respond to questions and concerns quickly, check in with the team proactively, and avoid becoming a bottleneck - Experienced running structured reporting and presenting findings to a CEO-level stakeholder The Hiring Process Initial interview Paid 2-hour site audit — you will deliver a top-3 priority task list based on your findings Final interview to present and defend the audit results To Apply: Please provide up to 3 case studies of clients where you drove significant SEO results. Ideally, these will be from the past 2 years, involve national sites with many location-specific or templated pages, and be in the We Buy Houses, cash home buying, or similar space — though we understand that's specific, so please use your judgment about which case studies best demonstrate you can help a site like ours recover. For each, please include how long you worked with them, the before and after (traffic, keyword rankings, leads, or other relevant metrics), and screenshots from GSC or GA4 that corroborate the results.