SEO Strategist, NZ Property Investment (Wix Studio)

We're a New Zealand property investment and financial management company, operating since 2001. Parts of our site already rank and drive enquiries. Other parts, including the page that matters most commercially, have never got traction. This is a hands-on role. You'd set the strategy and then do the work: content and on-page authority building, plus the technical implementation that goes with it. We have a Wix Studio developer in house for build work, but you'd be in the site yourself writing metas, deploying schema, fixing structure, and verifying it rendered. There is no link budget and no PR budget, and that is not changing. We're looking for someone who can build authority with content, structure, and on-page work, and who tells us honestly when something isn't achievable on that basis. Context -staircase.co.nz on Wix Studio, plus related sites in the group -A suite of property calculators and a live mortgage rates board that already rank -An info hub with a property investment guide, market analysis articles, and an investment glossary -A separate property management business on its own domain, with overlapping locations -New Zealand and Australian market -Financial services, so all copy is educational and factual, passes compliance review before publishing, and cannot make claims about future returns -Search Console bulk data exported to BigQuery, with weekly opportunity-ranked reporting already built What you'd own -Keyword and topic strategy, including which pages should exist, which should be merged, and which should not exist at all -The cluster and internal linking architecture that gets authority to the pages that need it, and implementing it -Content briefs our team can execute against, plus on-page work on live pages yourself -Technical SEO end to end: schema markup written and deployed, canonicals, indexation rules, redirects, crawl and rendering verification -Specifications for our developer where a build change is needed -Monthly reporting against agreed metrics, with a clear view on what's working, what isn't, and what you're changing as a result You should have -Demonstrable organic growth in competitive or authority-constrained situations, and the ability to explain specifically what caused it -Experience building topical authority through content and structure rather than links -Hands-on Wix Studio experience, including its SEO constraints: the structured data field, per-page markup exclusions, what renders in raw HTML and what doesn't -Ability to write and validate JSON-LD schema yourself, not just recommend it -Experience in a regulated or compliance-sensitive vertical, where what you can say is limited and competitors have fewer limits -Comfort working from raw Search Console data rather than third-party tool estimates -Direct communication, including telling us when something we want is a bad idea Nice to have -Property, finance, or professional services experience -NZ or AU market knowledge -BigQuery or Looker Studio -Experience building the conditions for Google Discover eligibility, understanding that placement is not something anyone can promise To apply, answer these Q1: We have a pillar page targeting "property investment NZ" that has never established a ranking. It isn't a drop, it just never got traction. We're up against competitors with years of domain authority on us. We have content and on page resource, no link budget, no PR. What's your read on why, and what would you do about it? Q2: Our strategy is to build topical authority through subtopic clusters rather than chasing the head term directly. Do you agree with that approach for a site in our position? If not, what would you do instead, and if so, how do you sequence it? Q3: What would you do in the first 90 days on staircase.co.nz, and what's the first thing you'd tell us to stop doing? Short and specific beats long and general. Answer in your own words rather than running them through an AI tool. Please also include two client examples, with the metric that improved and the timeframe. Let me know if you have any questions about the role or the business.