Fractional SEO Leader, Head of SEO and Interim SEO Director

The same job a permanent Head of SEO would do, for an agreed number of days each month. I set the organic strategy, decide what gets prioritised, manage the agency or in-house team, work with Product and Engineering to get changes built, and report to leadership on what SEO is contributing commercially. What you do not pay for is a full-time salary, a long recruitment process or someone sitting in meetings that do not need them.

An agency delivers work. A fractional head decides which work is worth delivering and holds the agency to account for it. Most agencies are good at execution and understandably less willing to tell a client that half the recommended backlog will not move revenue. I sit on your side of the table, set the brief, challenge the recommendations and make sure the invoice matches the outcome. Clients usually keep their agency and get considerably more from it.

Above the team, as the senior lead they report to on SEO matters. Good practitioners often lack someone who can turn their work into budget cases, protect it in sprint planning and defend it in front of the board. I provide that cover, develop the team's capability and leave them stronger when I move on. I do not duplicate what they already do well.

Typically between two and eight days a month, agreed up front and reviewed each quarter. Early on, more time goes into diagnosis and setting direction. Once the plan is running, time shifts to steering: prioritisation, reviewing delivery, unblocking engineering and reporting upwards. I work in your tools and attend the meetings that matter rather than billing for presence.

Most fractional engagements run for six to twelve months, with an initial three-month period so both sides can judge fit. Interim cover during recruitment is usually three to six months. Advisory assignments are scoped to the question and can be a few weeks. None of it is designed to be permanent. The aim is to leave the organisation able to run organic search well without me.

It depends on where the problems are. Technical fixes on a large site can show within weeks of going live, though getting them built often takes longer than the fix itself. Content and authority work compounds over months rather than weeks. What I can commit to is that within 30 days you will know where the opportunity is, what is blocking it and what it will take to unblock. Within 90 days you will have prioritised work in delivery and a measurement baseline leadership can hold me to.

A permanent Head of SEO or SEO Director in the UK costs well into six figures once salary, on-costs, benefits and recruitment fees are counted, and typically takes three to six months to hire. A fractional arrangement costs a fraction of that, starts within weeks, carries no notice period beyond the agreed terms and can be scaled up or down as the need changes. The fee is agreed monthly on the basis of days, so there are no surprises.

Both, and the combination is the point. I have spent 15 years as a developer alongside leading SEO, and I still write Python, read crawl logs and check hreflang implementations myself. That means I can tell whether a recommendation is right and whether it has actually been built properly, rather than taking a report at face value. Strategy that cannot survive contact with the codebase is not worth much.

Yes, and I would insist on it. SEO work that lives only in marketing rarely gets built. I write requirements developers can act on, take part in backlog refinement and sprint planning where it helps, and make the trade-offs explicit so Product can prioritise with full information. At Iron Mountain this meant working with engineering and regional teams across more than 60 country sites.

In commercial terms. Branded and generic performance are separated, so the board can see what marketing is earning rather than what the brand earns on its own. Pipeline or revenue influenced is reported where attribution allows it. Delivery against the agreed roadmap is tracked, so leadership can see whether the constraint is SEO or engineering capacity. The reporting is short, consistent and free of vanity metrics.

It is a sensible way, because the main risk at the moment is spending on tools and content before the opportunity is understood. I measure where your brand appears in AI-generated answers, work out what is driving that and set realistic expectations with leadership. It then becomes part of the organic roadmap rather than a separate project with its own budget and its own panic.

A clean handover. The strategy, roadmap, measurement and operating standards are documented so a permanent hire, your team or your agency can carry on without me. If you are recruiting a permanent leader I can help define the role, assess candidates and overlap with them for a period. The measure of success is that the function runs well after I have gone.