Technical SEO Specialist — Site Migration & Strategy

**SEO SPECIALIST — B2B TECHNOLOGY SERVICES**
Ongoing retainer engagement — remote

Client: UK-based B2B technology services company
Engagement: Paid trial task, then ongoing monthly retainer
Location: Remote

**1. CONTEXT**

We sell a technical service to technical buyers — CTOs, VP Engineering and technical founders at software companies. This is a considered B2B purchase with a multi-week sales cycle and a substantial contract value.

Our website is currently being rebuilt. We want SEO built into the site from the start rather than retrofitted afterwards.

We operate in a sector adjacent to regulated industry. Certain words, claims and terminology are restricted for legal and commercial reasons. A terminology and claims guide will be provided on engagement and must be followed exactly. This is the most common reason we would reject work.

**2. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE**

We are not buying traffic. We are buying qualified enquiries from the right kind of visitor.

You will be measured on:

1. Organic sessions from UK-based, in-market visitors on target pages
2. Rankings for a defined high-intent keyword set — not vanity head terms
3. Enquiries and demo requests attributable to organic search
4. Referring domains from credible, relevant sites

A blog post that attracts high traffic from outside our market and produces zero enquiries is a failure. Please confirm in your proposal that you agree with this framing.

Expect many of our best commercial keywords to have low monthly search volume. That is normal for our market. Proposals that recommend chasing broad high-volume terms will not be considered.

**3. SCOPE OF WORK**

**A. Build-stage SEO — immediate priority**

Our site is in active development. Your first responsibility is making sure it is built correctly, and that we do not lose the existing search history attached to our domain during the migration.

- Review and sign off SEO build requirements before the developers ship
- Own the migration: baseline crawl, indexed-URL export, a complete one-to-one 301 redirect map, and post-launch indexation monitoring
- Sign off information architecture and URL structure before it is locked
- Verify rendering, structured data, sitemaps, robots directives, canonicals and Core Web Vitals on staging
- Establish a pre-launch baseline so we can measure whether the new site helped or hurt

You will work directly with our developers. You do not write production code. You write requirements they can implement without interpretation, and you verify the result.

If you have never run a site migration on a domain with existing rankings, please do not apply.

**B. Technical SEO — ongoing**

- Crawlability, indexation and index bloat management
- Rendering — the site must serve meaningful HTML without JavaScript execution
- Site architecture, hub-and-spoke structure, internal linking model
- URL conventions, canonicalisation, redirect hygiene
- Structured data (JSON-LD): Organization, Service, Article, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList
- XML sitemaps and robots.txt
- Core Web Vitals — measured on mobile under realistic network conditions, not desktop lab scores
- Image optimisation, font loading, third-party script management
- Staging environment protection
- Ongoing crawl monitoring, with a defined process for catching regressions after each deployment

**C. Page template and CMS requirements**

You will specify, and then verify, that every page template supports the following as fields editable by a non-developer:

- Title tag — editable, unique across the site
- Meta description — editable, unique across the site
- H1 — exactly one per page, correct heading hierarchy below it
- URL slug — editable at draft stage, locked after publish
- Canonical tag — self-referencing by default, overridable
- Open Graph / social fields — title, description, image
- Noindex toggle — per page, for utility and thank-you pages
- Image alt text — mandatory field on upload

Content must be publishable and editable without a developer. If publishing requires a code deployment, the content programme will not happen.

**D. Keyword and content strategy**

- Keyword research segmented by buyer intent stage, not search volume alone
- Mapping of keywords to existing and planned pages, with gap identification
- Content roadmap with prioritised briefs
- Landing page SEO for commercial pages
- Identification of new pages and topic clusters worth building
- Recommendations on which existing content to consolidate, update or remove

**E. Blog and content SEO**

- Blog architecture: crawlable pagination with real links — no infinite scroll, and no "load more" as the only route to older content
- Category and tag taxonomy, created only where there is enough content to justify it. Thin taxonomy pages are worse than none
- Author bio structure — our founder has significant demonstrable credentials in this field and they should be visible and marked up
- Content briefs specifying target keyword, intent, structure, internal links, length and required depth
- Writing or managing production of content against agreed briefs, at a cadence to be agreed
- On-page optimisation, internal linking, metadata, schema
- A defined refresh process for existing content, not just new publication

Content must be technically credible to a senior software engineer. We will fact-check it. Thin, generic or obviously AI-generated content will be rejected and not paid for.

**F. Off-site and links**

- Backlink acquisition strategy and execution
- Competitor backlink analysis
- Brand and entity consistency across the web

Acceptable: guest contributions to genuine industry publications; digital PR; expert commentary; partnership and community links; listings a real human would use.

Grounds for immediate termination: private blog networks; link farms; paid link marketplaces; comment spam; bulk directory submissions; purchased "high DA" packages.

**G. Conversion and measurement**

- Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools configured correctly
- GA4 with conversion events defined for each meaningful action on the site
- Reporting must split organic traffic by landing page and by country
- Rank tracking on a defined keyword set
- Regular reporting covering rankings, organic traffic with geographic split, referring domains gained and lost, conversions from organic, what you did, what you plan next, and what did not work
- One review call per reporting cycle

**4. REQUIRED EXPERIENCE**

Must have:

- Substantial B2B SaaS or B2B services SEO experience, with results you can evidence
- Demonstrable work in low-volume, high-intent niches — not e-commerce, not local SEO, not affiliate
- Genuine technical SEO capability: able to diagnose a rendering or indexation problem from Search Console, not just export a tool report
- Site migration experience on domains with existing rankings
- Ability to write requirements developers will actually implement, and to work alongside a development team mid-build
- Comfortable writing for a technical audience, or managing writers who can
- Fluent, native-standard written English

Strong advantage:

- Experience in regulated or compliance-sensitive sectors
- Developer tooling, DevOps or engineering-audience experience
- UK market experience
- Experience with early-stage companies where the site changes underneath you

Tools:

Tell us which you use — Ahrefs or Semrush, Search Console, GA4, Screaming Frog or equivalent — and who pays for the licences.