Technical SEO + AEO Lead - AI-Native Cards & Invitations Startup

**Technical SEO + AEO Lead — AI-Native Cards & Invitations Startup (Long-Term Contract)** We are HeartStamp, an AI-native platform for personalized greeting **cards and invitations**, professionally printed and mailed to the door, plus digital and animated formats. We launched in the US in 2026 and are shipping fast: animated digital cards, direct mail, digital invitations with RSVP, physical invitations, and a mobile app. We are hiring one person to own our SEO and AI-search visibility end to end. This is a long-term, embedded contract, not a one-off task and not a vendor handoff. We want an operator who joins the team, works directly with our engineers, and owns the search function solo. **This is a deeply technical role first.** Plenty of people do content-and-keyword SEO. Far fewer can diagnose JavaScript rendering, work fluently with engineers, and own technical SEO plus AEO as one program. That technical depth is the filter. Content-only profiles are a lighter fit. **We are not starting from zero.** Our GA4 with server-side tagging, llms.txt, robots.txt, XML sitemap, structured data, canonical footer, Wikidata entity, and Grokipedia listing are already live. Your job is to audit, harden, and extend that foundation, and to build what does not yet exist. **What you will own** Technical SEO - Crawlability, indexation, site architecture, internal linking, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, and canonicalization across our marketing site and web app - JavaScript rendering on a modern JS stack (Next.js / React): diagnose issues, know when to push for SSR, SSG, or ISR, and explain the trade-offs to engineers - Ensuring critical content and structured data land in the initial HTML response, not trapped behind client-side JS - Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS), driving fixes with the dev team - Indexation of a large card and invitation catalog at scale - Structured data / JSON-LD: Product, Offer, Organization, BreadcrumbList, Article, Person Organic SEO & content architecture - Keyword and entity research, intent mapping, and topic clusters around occasions, relationships, gifting, weddings, and events - Subcategory site architecture to win the long tail (by recipient, occasion, relationship, tone) - On-page optimization and content briefs handed to our content team (you brief, they produce) - Seasonal and occasion content planned 30 to 60 days ahead of demand - E-E-A-T and brand-entity presence: Knowledge Panel signals, consistent entity data, sameAs profiles AEO / GEO (AI search visibility) - Structuring content to be extractable and citable by answer engines: direct answers, question-based headers, machine-parseable structure - Growing our AI citation share across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot - Optimizing our entity footprint so AI systems understand and recommend HeartStamp - robots.txt and llms.txt governance - AI-visibility and citation tracking (Profound, Peec AI, or similar) Analytics & developer collaboration - Audit and extend the stack: Google Search Console, GA4, Google Tag Manager, Bing Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs and/or Semrush, Screaming Frog or Sitebulb - Reporting tied to business outcomes (qualified traffic, signups, revenue), not vanity metrics - Writing clear technical specs and dev tickets, reviewing implementations, and being the search voice in product and engineering decisions **What this role is NOT** - Paid search and paid social are owned by our Paid Ads Manager. Google Ads, Shopping, and Merchant Center experience is a plus, and paid may migrate here later based on results, but it is not part of the first 90 days. - Reddit and community seeding, PR and newswire, article placement, and influencer work are owned elsewhere. This role is technical SEO plus AEO. **The first 90 days** - Days 1 to 30: full technical, on-page, and AI-visibility audit of the site and web app; verify every account and tracking setup; deliver a prioritized findings-and-roadmap doc. - Days 31 to 60: land high-impact technical fixes with dev; implement structured data; launch the keyword/entity and subcategory content architecture. - Days 61 to 90: establish reporting and baselines; begin AEO/GEO citation tracking; deliver a data-backed plan for the next quarter. **Must-have qualifications** - 4+ years hands-on SEO with demonstrable results (traffic, ranking, or revenue) - Deep technical SEO: JavaScript/SPA rendering, SSR/SSG/ISR, Core Web Vitals, structured data, crawl and index management, site migrations - Can read HTML/CSS and basic JavaScript well enough to diagnose issues and write precise developer tickets - Hands-on AEO/GEO experience, or strong evidence you are already deep in AI search - Proven ability to audit and extend a search stack, not just operate a pre-built one - Fluent with GSC, GA4, Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, and Ahrefs and/or Semrush - Self-directed operator who can own a function solo at an early-stage startup - Excellent communicator who can translate between search and engineering **Nice-to-have** - E-commerce / DTC or consumer-product experience; gifting, cards, invitations, or weddings a plus - Early-stage (pre-seed / seed) startup background - AI-visibility / citation-tracking tooling (Profound, Peec AI, or similar) - Data depth: Looker Studio, BigQuery, SQL, or Python for log-file analysis - Shipped SEO on a modern JS stack (React / Next.js) **Location & hours** Fully remote and international. Latin America, Eastern Europe, and South and Southeast Asia all welcome and considered on equal footing. The one firm requirement is a minimum of 4 hours of daily overlap with 9am to 5pm US Eastern Time for standups and dev collaboration. **Compensation** This is a geo-appropriate, skill-weighted rate, calibrated to your location and your demonstrated technical and AEO depth, not a flat number. Strong candidates from lower-cost markets are compensated fairly for their region; exceptional technical-plus-AEO experience earns the top of the range anywhere. Please include your expected hourly rate in your proposal. **Please include in your proposal** 1. How would you diagnose whether our JS web app's content is visible to Google and to AI crawlers? What do you check, and in what order? 2. Describe a specific technical SEO issue you found and fixed by working with developers. What was the fix, and what changed? 3. What have you actually done to get a brand cited by an AI answer engine, and how did you measure it? 4. With a partly-built but never-audited search foundation, what would you prioritize in your first two weeks? 5. Your current working hours (local time), the overlap you can hold with 9 to 5 US Eastern, and your expected hourly rate. Proposals that do not answer these questions will not be reviewed.