Founding Local SEO Strategist

Most people who call themselves local SEOs have never gotten a suspended profile back. They've never pulled a fake review. They've never reported a spammer off the map pack. They optimize a profile when it's healthy and disappear the second Google punches it in the face.

I'm hiring for the opposite of that person.

I run these campaigns myself. I know exactly what "good" looks like at the platform level, so I'm going to be blunt about who I want. I want the operator who treats a suspension as a Tuesday, not a crisis. Who reads a nasty competitor review and immediately knows whether it's removable. Who has actually clawed a profile back to verified and can tell me how, without googling it while we talk.

If that's you, keep reading. If it's not, no hard feelings.

## Who we are

We're an established SEO agency helping local businesses rank at the top of Google. Mostly US home-service contractors (roofing, HVAC, cleaning, window cleaning), plus a handful of e-commerce brands. US-based, US clients. We already have the structure: documented SOPs, proven processes, and results that keep clients coming back. Google Business Profile is the center of gravity for almost everything we do, and it's where campaigns are won or lost.

## The role

This is our founding local SEO strategist seat. You own the Google Business Profile battlefield across our client base. Ranking profiles into the map pack, yes, but more importantly keeping them alive and clean when Google, competitors, and angry one-star reviewers come for them.

You're the first dedicated local hire stepping into a machine that already works, not a mess you have to clean up. The systems are built and they produce. Your job is to run them at a high level, own delivery, and make the systems themselves stronger, especially the reinstatement, review-defense, and spam-takedown playbooks that most agencies don't even have. This is a long-term seat. I want someone I can grow with for years.

## What you'll own

- **Suspension reinstatement.** When a profile gets suspended, you run the recovery. You know the difference between "suspended" and "not verified," you know to stack every piece of proof into the first appeal because you can't add more later, and you know the escalation ladder when the first appeal gets denied: second appeal, support forum with the ticket number and profile ID, live video verification call with a real Google rep. Getting a client back to live in days instead of the three weeks a generalist would burn is the whole job on a bad day.
- **Video verification and reverification.** You've passed it. You know what to do when the upload dies at 99 percent for the tenth time, and you know the documentation angle (state registration, DBA, business license matching the address, Secretary of State lookup) that gets a human reviewer to approve.
- **Review defense and removal.** You know Google's review content policy cold, so you can look at a review and call whether it's removable before you waste a flag on it. You report policy-violating and competitor reviews through the right channel, you coordinate the team to submit reports from multiple accounts when a review genuinely violates policy, and you appeal legitimate reviews that got wrongly filtered or removed back onto the profile instead of shrugging and chasing new ones.
- **Competitor spam takedowns.** Keyword-stuffed business names, fake addresses, lead-gen listings with no real location. You spot them and you report them through the Business Redressal Complaint Form. This is a sanctioned tactic, not black hat, and used well it clears the map pack of the exact fakes that are outranking our clients.
- **Duplicate listing cleanup.** Finding, merging, and recovering reviews off duplicate and lost listings without nuking the review count on the surviving profile.
- **Ranking the map pack.** Primary category strategy (the single biggest lever, and you know it), proximity and service-area logic, review velocity systems that build without tripping the filter, and the engagement signals that actually hold a position once you've won it.
- **Review generation systems** that run themselves: QR at the truck and the job-completion email, service-plus-location seeding in the ask, response cadence inside 12 to 24 hours, warmed-up sending so you don't torch deliverability on day one.
- **Citations and NAP hygiene** as a floor, not a monthly deliverable we pretend is moving the needle. You know the consistency threshold that matters and you know when to stop.
- **On-page and technical support** for the money pages the profile feeds: local landing pages, schema, internal linking, indexing new pages with a real indexer instead of praying to GSC.
- **Documentation.** Every play you run, you turn into an SOP the next hire can follow.

## Who you are

- **Native-level English.** You'll talk to me constantly and sometimes to clients. Non-negotiable.
- **An over-communicator.** This is the one I care about most. I want too many updates, not too few. When a profile goes down I want to hear it from you before I notice it myself.
- **Calm when Google isn't.** A suspension is a puzzle, not a panic. You work the process, you document what worked, you tell me what you learned.
- **Fluent across the whole spectrum.** White hat, grey hat, and enough understanding of black hat to know exactly where the line is and why we don't drag client assets across it. You know the shortcuts other people use to fake addresses, spoof verifications, and buy reviews, and you know precisely why we don't do those on a client's real business. Knowing the dark playbook is how you recognize it in a competitor and how you defend against it. Running it on a client's profile is how you get them wiped.
- **Always sharpening.** Google changes the reinstatement flow, the review policy, and the verification process constantly. The day you stop keeping up is the day you stop being useful here.

## What you've actually done

- **Reinstated a real suspended profile.** Not read about it. Done it. You can walk me through an actual recovery: what got it suspended, what you submitted, how long it took, and what you'd do differently. This is the single biggest thing I'm screening for.
- **Removed a review that violated policy**, and recovered a legitimate review that got wrongly filtered. You know both directions of the review fight.
- **Reported a spam listing off the map pack** using the redressal form and watched a fake competitor drop.
- **Passed video verification** and handled the ugly edge cases (upload failures, reverification, home-address service-area profiles).
- **Ranked multiple local businesses** into the map pack and held them there. You knew the lever, you pulled it, the position moved.
- **Comfortable with AI and automation.** You automate the boring parts (review sequences, reporting, monitoring) instead of grinding them by hand. Comfortable with Claude, wiring up simple APIs, and spinning up local landing pages fast.
- **Expert in the core tools:** Semrush or Ahrefs, GSC, GA4, GBP itself, and bonus points for BrightLocal and an indexer.
- **Worked on a team before.** You know how to hand off, document, and collaborate.

## What I offer

- **Growth that's real.** As we add clients, the role grows and your pay grows with it. $2,000/mo to start, scaling toward $3,000+ as you take on more ownership, and higher over time as we grow together.
- **A real path to managing.** You're the founding local hire. As the team grows, the right person becomes the one who runs it.
- **Real ownership.** No bureaucracy, no ten layers of approval. You own local here and you'll feel it.

## Logistics

- **Full-time, remote.**
- **Overlap with US business hours.** I need at least 4 hours of daily overlap with US Eastern Time so we can collaborate in real time. Tell me your timezone and normal working hours.
- Start date: as soon as we find the right person.

## How to apply

Send me the following, and yes, I read every single one:

1. Your favorite vegetable and why. Put this at the very top of your application so I know you read the whole post. No vegetable, no reply.
2. Your name and age
3. What motivates you, be brutally honest. "Money" is a fine answer if it's the true one. I trust honest people more than polished ones.
4. Your local SEO experience, with a focus on GBP
5. The gnarliest GBP problem you've ever solved, and how you solved it
6. One technical answer: a client's Google Business Profile just got suspended right after you updated their business name. Walk me through your reinstatement play, step by step, in the order you'd actually do it.

Apply here: ----------