Fractional SEO is senior search expertise bought in the amount a company actually needs. A strategist diagnoses why you are not being found, decides which pages to build first, writes the specification, and reviews what gets published. The people you already have do the building.
Our version has a defined end. A diagnosis, a specification, the first pages written, and then nothing to cancel.
Fractional SEO is senior search expertise bought part-time rather than as a full-time hire or an agency retainer. A fractional SEO lead diagnoses, prioritizes and specifies, while the company's own team or vendor does the building. It exists because most companies between five and fifty million in revenue need a strategist a few days a quarter and cannot justify one every day.
The term borrows from fractional CFO and fractional CMO arrangements, where a company gets a senior operator for a fraction of their time and a fraction of the cost. The logic is the same for search. The decisions that matter in SEO, which pages to build, in what order, against which competitors, and when to stop, take experience and not much time. The execution takes time and not much experience. Paying a senior person a full salary to do the second is wasteful. Paying an agency a retainer to do the first means paying a firm to advise you on how much of its own work to buy.
Our version is narrower than the usual fractional arrangement. Rather than an ongoing part-time role, it is a fixed engagement with a defined end: a diagnosis, a specification, and the first pages written. The independence is the same. The difference is that nobody has to remember to cancel.
A fractional SEO consultant does four things: establishes why the company is not being found, decides which pages to build first and against whom, writes the specification the builders work from, and reviews what gets published against it. The rest, content volume, link building, reporting, is either done by the people you already have or does not need doing.
The reason this works at a fraction of the time is that the judgment calls are front-loaded. The strategist page sets out the role in more detail. Once the specification exists, a competent web developer or content writer can build from it without a strategist standing over them. The review step at the end catches the drift, and the measurement afterward tells everyone whether it worked. Between those points, a fractional lead is not needed, which is the whole point of the arrangement.
From our own measurement: most SEO specifications are never executed, not because they were wrong but because nobody was assigned to write the pages. Ours includes the pages for that reason.
Fractional SEO is better than an agency when the company already has someone who can build and what it lacks is someone who can decide. That describes most owner-run B2B companies. They have a web developer, a marketing coordinator, or an agency doing design and content. What nobody is doing is the competitive diagnosis, because it is a different discipline and most creative firms do not practice it.
The agency model is structurally sound for companies with no internal capacity and a need for continuous output. It is structurally wrong for a company that needs a plan more than it needs production. An agency is paid monthly, which creates an incentive to find work monthly. The findings in a free agency audit are shaped to justify a retainer, because that is what the audit exists to sell. None of this makes agencies dishonest. It makes them agencies.
A fractional or fixed-scope arrangement removes the incentive. We are paid once for the diagnosis and once for the specification. If the market turns out to be too small to be worth pursuing, the correct advice is to spend nothing further, and we give it.
A firm that sells implementation cannot credibly tell you that a market has a finite number of pages worth building. An independent one can, and frequently does.
Why the independence mattersFractional SEO consultant rates run $2,000 to $6,000 a month for a few days of a senior person's time, open-ended. Independent SEO consultant rates run $150 to $300 an hour. Ours is $25,000 for a fixed engagement that includes the audit, the specification for a first cluster of four pages, and the pages written. One number, and it ends.
| Arrangement | Typical cost | Commitment | You own afterward |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agency retainer | $3,000 to $10,000 / mo | Open-ended | Reports |
| In-house SEO lead | $90,000+ / yr | Permanent | The person, while they stay |
| Fractional SEO, monthly | $2,000 to $6,000 / mo | Open-ended, part-time | Advice |
| Independent consultant, hourly | $150 to $300 / hr | As used | Advice |
| Fixed-scope strategist | $25,000 once | Ends at delivery | Audit, specification, four pages |
The first analysis, two to three pages naming your competitors and stating where you stand, is free. Nobody is asked to pay for a diagnosis before reading one. Full detail on the pricing page, and the audit page describes what the free analysis contains.
A company should hire a fractional SEO lead when it has a website someone maintains, a market it can name three competitors in, and no one responsible for deciding what the website should do next. Typically owner-run, five to fifty million in revenue, B2B or industrial, with real credentials and a site that reflects none of them.
It is the wrong fit for a company with no one to build. A specification nobody executes is a stored PDF. It is also the wrong fit for a business that is content to run on referral and has no interest in search as a channel. Both situations are common and neither is a criticism.
Send your company and your market. We will run the analysis and send back a summary naming your competitors, the terms they are winning, and where you sit against them.
No call required and no obligation. Read it, check it yourself, and decide. If the findings are worth discussing after that, we can talk then.
Prepared for your company against the competitors you name. Written by the person who would run the paid work.
Or email contact@searchstanding.com directly.