WordPress SEO/AEO Audit & Schema Implementation — 30+ Hub & Spoke Pages

Over the past several months I've published 30+ long-form hub-and-spoke content pages (blog posts and landing pages) that were custom-coded in HTML and added to WordPress by my developer. The implementation has several issues that need correcting across the entire library. I have a complete written brief (Word document, ~8 pages) that I'll share with the selected candidate. It defines the exact scope, the technical issues, the required SEO/AEO additions, the required performance fixes, and a 21-item per-post checklist for sign-off. This is a clearly defined, well-scoped engagement. I'm looking for someone senior enough to execute it without hand-holding. What's Wrong (High Level) Shared design-system CSS is being shipped in the head of every page on the site via PixelYourSite, instead of being consolidated into the theme stylesheet and loaded once. This is hurting Core Web Vitals site-wide. Body HTML lives in the WordPress Classic Editor for every post — fragile, mangles markup on save. Missing structured data: every post has FAQPage schema but no BlogPosting, BreadcrumbList, or HowTo schema. Missing performance basics: image width/height attributes, lazy loading on below-fold images, YouTube facade pattern instead of full iframe loads. Author entity needs strengthening for E-E-A-T and AEO (LLM-based answer engines). Scope of Work For each previously-published hub/spoke page (roughly 30 posts), the contractor will: Migrate body HTML out of Classic Editor into Gutenberg Custom HTML blocks (or equivalent reliable container). Remove shared design-system CSS from per-post PixelYourSite blocks. Consolidate shared CSS into the theme stylesheet (loaded once, cached). Restrict any genuinely per-post CSS/schema to that post only — never site-wide. Add BlogPosting / Article JSON-LD schema with full author, publisher, and date properties. Add BreadcrumbList JSON-LD schema (visible breadcrumbs already exist on every page). Add HowTo JSON-LD schema to posts with explicit step-by-step blocks. Verify Open Graph, Twitter Card, canonical, title, and meta description tags exist and are unique per post. Add width and height attributes to all images. Add loading="lazy" to below-the-fold images. Replace YouTube iframes with a facade (lite-youtube-embed or similar). Add a TL;DR / summary block at the top of each post for AEO extraction. Strengthen the author entity page with full Person schema and sameAs links. Plus a final spreadsheet listing every post audited with pass/fail status against the 21-item checklist, before/after PageSpeed Insights scores on a representative page, and Google Rich Results Test confirmation that all schema validates. Required Skills: -WordPress (5+ years). Must be comfortable with theme stylesheets, wp_enqueue_style, child themes, custom post templates, and the difference between Classic Editor and Gutenberg behavior with raw HTML. -Technical SEO. Must understand canonical URLs, meta tags, sitemaps, and how to diagnose crawl/indexation issues in Google Search Console. -Structured data / Schema.org. Hands-on experience implementing BlogPosting, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, HowTo, Person, and Organization schema. Must validate every page in Google's Rich Results Test before sign-off. -AEO awareness. Familiarity with how LLM-based answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) extract content — author entities, sameAs links, TL;DR positioning, FAQPage schema. -Core Web Vitals. Comfortable reading PageSpeed Insights / Lighthouse reports and addressing LCP, CLS, and INP issues. Must know what unused-CSS bloat does to scores. -HTML/CSS strong enough to cleanly separate shared template code from per-post overrides without breaking visual rendering. -PixelYourSite Head & Footer Scripts experience preferred but not required — the principles transfer. Deliverables Audit spreadsheet covering every hub/spoke post with pass/fail status against the 21-item checklist in the brief. All shared CSS consolidated into the theme stylesheet, with per-post inline CSS removed. All required schema (BlogPosting, BreadcrumbList, HowTo where applicable) added and validated. All performance fixes implemented (image dimensions, lazy loading, YouTube facade). Body HTML migrated out of Classic Editor for every post. Before/after PageSpeed Insights scores on one representative hub page. Before/after visual screenshots confirming no rendering regression. A short written report listing any pages that need follow-up and why. PS I have about 50 new pages that I have not published yet as I doubted the original developer's implementation. This task done well would certainly lead to a future task and continued work if you should desire it.