January 2, 2026
Author: Jason Faber
At some point, most growing companies reach the same uncomfortable realization: SEO matters—but no one really owns it.
The content team might be publishing blog posts. An agency may be sending templated monthly reports and buying some backlinks. An SEO freelancer made some technical fixes 2 years ago. Traffic might even be growing. And yet, SEO still feels disconnected from the rest of the business. It’s busy, but not strategic. Active, but not decisive.
This is usually the moment when founders and marketing leaders start looking for something different—not more execution, but leadership. That’s where a fractional SEO consultant comes in.
A fractional SEO consultant is an experienced SEO leader who works with your company on a part-time, embedded basis. The role isn’t about tasks or tactics, but about ownership, execution and impact.
Instead of asking, “What keywords should we target?” or “Can we get more backlinks?”, a fractional SEO consultant helps answer much harder questions:
In practice, this often looks like hiring someone with Head of SEO or SEO Director experience, without committing to a full-time role before the business truly needs it.
SEO has changed. It’s no longer a standalone channel that can be handed off to an agency and reviewed once a month. Today, effective SEO sits at the intersection of:
That makes it hard to outsource, and expensive to hire for.
A fractional model works because it gives companies access to senior-level thinking and pattern recognition at the exact stage where they need it most: when complexity is increasing, but clarity is missing.
Perhaps most importantly, as opposed to a typical agency or freelancer relationship where SEO is tacked on to the side of your overall strategy, arm's length away, a fractional SEO consultant plugs directly into your team. They get directly embedded, participating in prioritization meetings, engaged in Slack channels, and executing at speed and scale. They are the missing puzzle piece, not a round peg trying to squeeze into a round hole.
There are four common ways companies hire for SEO: agency, freelancer, in-house, or fractional SEO consultant. While these options are often grouped together, they’re designed to solve very different problems. The right choice depends less on cost and more on whether you need execution, leadership, or ownership.
SEO agencies are built to deliver execution at scale. They’re effective when priorities are already clear and the main bottleneck is output.
Freelancers are often the fastest and cheapest way to get SEO support. They can be valuable for well-scoped tasks, but are rarely positioned to lead strategy.
Hiring in-house offers focus and long-term ownership, but requires a clear mandate and patience. SEO roles are difficult to hire for and slow to ramp.
A fractional SEO consultant provides senior-level leadership without full-time overhead. This model works well when SEO is becoming critical, but the company isn’t ready for a full-time executive hire.
If you want to learn more about when you should go with an agency, freelancer, in-house role or fractional consultant, check out my brief: How To Hire for SEO.
Most companies don’t start here, they arrive here.
You’re likely at the right stage if:
In short, fractional SEO makes sense when the cost of getting SEO wrong is higher than the cost of investing in leadership.
While every engagement is different, most fractional SEO consultants focus on five core areas:
With a fractional SEO consultant, the goal is to turn SEO from a loose collection of tactics into a coherent, accountable function that is strategic, impactful and scalable.
It’s worth saying this plainly, because fractional SEO consulting is often misunderstood, especially by teams that have been burned by cheaper options in the past.
Fractional SEO consulting is not cheap SEO. While it may cost less than a full-time executive hire or SEO agency, it reflects senior-level experience, judgment, and accountability. The value isn’t in hours logged or tasks completed, it’s in shipping strategic, impactful work faster, and avoiding costly mistakes and making the right decisions earlier.
It’s also not a shortcut to rankings. There are no hacks, guarantees, or overnight wins. Fractional SEO focuses on building the foundations that compound over time: strong technical structure, credible topical authority, and alignment with how people actually search and make decisions.
And finally, it is not a replacement for execution. While a fractional SEO leader can certainly roll up their sleeves and execute, they don't do all of the execution. Rather they drive strategy and collaborate with internal or external teams to get shit done. Content still needs to be written. Pages still need to be built. Technical work still needs to be shipped. The role of fractional SEO leadership is to ensure that execution is focused, coordinated, and worth doing in the first place.
At its core, fractional SEO consulting is a leadership function. It exists to help companies build something durable—search visibility that compounds, survives algorithm shifts, and supports the business long after individual tactics change.
The most meaningful outcome of fractional SEO consulting usually isn’t a sudden spike in rankings or traffic. Those metrics matter, and they tend to improve over time, but they’re not the first signal that things are working.
The first real change is clarity.
Clarity about what SEO is actually responsible for.
Clarity about which initiatives deserve investment, and which ones don’t.
Clarity about how SEO fits into product, content, and growth decisions.
With that clarity comes momentum.
Teams stop spinning their wheels. Priorities become easier to defend. SEO decisions no longer stall launches, migrations, or campaigns because someone senior is accountable for making the call. Effort shifts from scattered activity to focused execution, and progress starts to compound instead of resetting every quarter.
Impact is what comes next.
Impact is when momentum starts producing tangible business outcomes that compound over time:
This phase doesn’t happen overnight. For most companies, meaningful impact emerges after clarity and momentum have had time to do their work, often within months, not weeks. But when it does, SEO stops feeling like an experiment and starts behaving like a real growth engine.
That’s the difference between activity, progress, and impact. Fractional SEO leadership is designed to move companies through all three—intentionally.
If you’re looking for someone to “do SEO tasks,” this probably isn’t the right model. There are plenty of capable freelancers and agencies who can execute defined work efficiently.
But if you’re looking for:
Then fractional SEO leadership may be exactly what your company needs next.
It’s especially well-suited for teams that are growing, changing, or rethinking how organic search fits into their future—without being ready to lock in a full-time executive hire.
Fractional SEO consulting isn’t about adding more activity. It’s about adding direction, accountability, and leverage at the moment when those things matter most.
If you’ve decided that fractional SEO leadership is the right model, the next question is who to trust with it. Not all fractional SEO consultants are the same, and the differences matter more than most teams expect.
Start by looking for someone who has operated at a leadership level, not just executed tactics. They should be comfortable making prioritization calls, saying no to low-impact work, and aligning SEO decisions with business goals, not just search metrics.
Next, look for pattern recognition. A strong fractional SEO consultant has seen multiple stages of growth, different business models, and a range of technical and content challenges. That experience shows up in how quickly they identify risk, opportunity, and tradeoffs.
Finally, look for ownership and accountability. Fractional SEO leadership only works when someone is willing to take responsibility for outcomes, not just recommendations. You want a partner who can guide execution, influence cross-functional teams, and communicate clearly with founders and executives.
This is the role I play for the companies I work with. I partner with founders and marketing leaders as a fractional SEO consultant, bringing senior-level strategy, clarity, and ownership, without the commitment of a full-time hire. If you’re evaluating fractional SEO leadership and want to understand whether this approach is the right fit for your team, I’m happy to have that conversation.
Some other great places to find top fractional talent:
