SEO & AEO consultant/advisor for a WordPress course platform

We run a UK-based online education website, built on WordPress. It is in the pet care sector. The technical foundations are in good shape and we get reasonable Google traffic.

We're looking for a freelance SEO who'll properly get into the project. Not someone to send a report and disappear, someone who'll work alongside us for the next 6-12 months, find what's broken, explain it, and help us fix it.

What we know we need help with:
- Working through Search Console and GA4 with us, finding the real issues (we know there are indexing problems among other things) and prioritising fixes
- Keyword strategy: which terms we should be targeting that we currently aren't, and how to actually rank for them
- Existing content: several of our top-performing pages are trending down, we want to understand why and reverse it
- Positioning the site for AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews), not just classic search
- A clean, genuine backlink strategy: digital PR, outreach, partnerships. Not bought links, not PBNs, not link farms

What we're not looking for:
- Agencies
- Tool-generated audits with no follow-through
- Anyone offering cheap link packages

About us:
Small, technical team. We can implement recommendations ourselves, so you don't need to do the dev work, but we want you involved enough to actually understand the site and explain things properly. WordPress site, Rank Math configured, structured data in place.

Practical:
- Freelancer only
- UK or EU preferred for timezone overlap, but strong proposals from elsewhere are welcome
- Open to either a one-off audit followed by ongoing retainer, or straight monthly retainer from the start. Tell us how you'd prefer to structure it and what it costs.
- Looking to start within the next few weeks

Generic proposals will be ignored.
Budget placed in project should be considered a placeholder. It's there because we have to set something.