Freelance Web Performance & Technical SEO/AEO Developer

Freelance Web Performance & Technical SEO/AEO Developer (Remote)

Productive Machine — digital agency | Remote | [20–30] hrs/week | [2–3 month] initial engagement, extension likely | [Rate/budget] | Overlap: [3+ hrs with US Eastern]

About the role

We're a digital agency running a measured, evidence-based site performance program across several client websites — currently including companies in digital health/wearables and healthcare technology, with more sectors onboarding. Each site gets a rigorous technical baseline (PageSpeed/CrUX, crawl analysis, structured-data and AI-discoverability audit) producing a prioritized remediation backlog — typically 40+ scoped items with documented evidence and acceptance criteria. We re-measure on a fixed cadence, so your work shows up in the numbers within weeks. You'll work with our SEO lead and content team across client sites; backlogs live in Asana.

What you'll do

Core Web Vitals remediation: eliminate CLS from lazy-load placeholder handling, reduce multi-MB media payloads via compression/responsive images, tune LCP-critical loading (fetchpriority, preload), clean up unused JavaScript

CMS template fixes: restore semantic heading hierarchy (missing H1s, heading tags used for styling), repair broken/raw media embeds, fix image markup defects (empty src attributes, missing dimensions), remediate accessibility-breaking patterns

Infrastructure & redirects: sitewide HTTP→HTTPS 301s, fix protocol-downgrading legacy redirects, standardize single-hop permanent redirects across host/protocol variants, configure security headers (HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options, etc.) across managed-host + CDN + optimizer stacks (WP Engine, Cloudflare, NitroPack or similar)

AEO / AI discoverability: implement and maintain llms.txt, robots.txt AI-crawler directives, and XML sitemaps; implement JSON-LD beyond plugin defaults (Product/Review, ScholarlyArticle, NewsArticle, Person, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage); structure on-page content for answer-engine extraction; validate via Rich Results Test

Verify your own work: before/after evidence (Lighthouse/PSI runs, view-source, crawl diffs) attached to each completed task

You have

5+ years of production web development, including deep WordPress experience (PHP, theme/template work, block editor and page-builder output, Yoast or Rank Math)

Demonstrated Core Web Vitals work — you can explain lab vs. field data and have moved p75 numbers on a real site

Prior AEO / AI-discoverability experience — you've implemented llms.txt and AI-crawler policies, built schema.org/JSON-LD for AI citation eligibility (not just rich results), and can speak to how answer engines ingest and cite site content

Comfort debugging a managed-host/CDN/optimizer chain — knowing which layer causes what
A habit of small, verifiable changes with evidence — this engagement is measured, literally

Nice to have

Technical SEO background (crawl analysis, redirect mapping, log-file analysis)
Accessibility remediation (WCAG, heading semantics, screen-reader behavior)
Experience on sites in regulated or high-trust sectors (health, finance) where E-E-A-T scrutiny is elevated

How we work

Prioritized backlog per client in Asana with evidence and acceptance criteria; async-first with [weekly] check-ins; monthly re-measurement against each site's day-one benchmark. You'll see exactly what your work changed.