Advisory Note · Fractional SEO
Fractional Is a Relationship Word, Not a Search Word
Six operators who sell fractional roles — a CCO, a CFO, a director of operations, two consultants — plus one CMO who flatly refuses to. Here is what they reveal about when the model works, and when it is the wrong answer.
“Fractional” went from nowhere to everywhere in about five years. As one host put it on the Unscripted podcast: nobody was fractional unless they were in their math class. Now there are fractional CMOs, CFOs, CTOs, COOs — and fractional SEO, which is what we do here.
That speed should make a buyer suspicious. So rather than argue our own case, we went back through a run of interviews with people who actually sell the model — and one senior marketer who refuses to — and read them from the advisory seat. The most useful finding is a warning, and it comes from an SEO problem.
The category has a demand problem
George Little runs Brand Zap, positioned deliberately between a freelancer and a full agency. He uses the word “fractional” — but only in conversation, never as the offer. He learned that the expensive way.
I had another version of this company that did not succeed a couple of years ago that was basically trying to push fractional creative director. No market for it, no search around it. Speaking of SEO, that’s really a good place to start. Is anyone even Googling this? And they weren’t.— George Little, Brand Zap
This is the whole lesson in one anecdote, and it is a search lesson before it is a positioning lesson. He had named his company after the shape of the contract rather than the problem being solved. Buyers were searching for agencies, for freelancers, and for the consultant in between — not for a staffing arrangement.
George now reserves the term for describing how the relationship feels once it has started: “I use the term only when like discussing the relationship, that sort of feel of the relationship for folks.” That is the correct use. Fractional is a good word for explaining an engagement and a bad word for winning one.
What it actually means, stated plainly
Joshua Altman runs Beltway Media as a fractional Chief Communications Officer, and gives the cleanest definition in the set:
Fractional means we’re contractual, we’re part time workers, we’re fully integrated into the client’s company and team. So instead of having a forty hour a week chief communications officer, you have someone twenty five percent of that, one quarter, fractional.— Joshua Altman, Beltway Media
Note the load-bearing phrase: fully integrated into the client’s company and team. That is what separates fractional from an agency retainer. An agency sits outside and reports in. A fractional executive sits inside and owns the function. If a proposal does not describe integration, it is a retainer wearing a better word.
The real trigger: somebody got stuck owning a function
The most useful thing Joshua said was not a definition — it was a description of who calls him:
One of the people we take over from the most are owners and founders or an early hire because they kind of just got stuck owning a function because they built the website, so now this is all on them. You have a lot of CTOs who built the website whenever it was built and now suddenly they’re in charge of all things digital. And they don’t want to. That’s not their job.— Joshua Altman
Any SEO advisor will recognise this immediately, because it is the single most common way SEO ends up owned inside a company. Nobody decides to own SEO. Somebody built the site, or ran one campaign that worked, or was in the room when the agency was fired — and it stuck to them. They are now responsible for a discipline they did not choose, cannot benchmark, and have no time to keep current in.
That is the honest trigger for fractional SEO. Not “we need more traffic.” It is “this function has an accidental owner.”
Why the outside seat gets listened to — and why that is a problem
Ash Nallawalla is a fractional enterprise SEO consultant and author of Accidental SEO Manager — the closest analogue in this group to what we do. He tells a story about one of Australia’s top four banks: hired as an outside consultant, given a four-hour audit presentation with a manager he “couldn’t normally get for a one-hour meeting,” promised a conservative 10% traffic lift in twelve months, and delivered it in eight days after implementation. Traffic doubled in eight months. Three years later it had tripled.
Then he says the part that should make every buyer of fractional services pause:
I’ve never had it since, because once you’re inside a company you’re no longer treated as the expert. So my lesson is: don’t reserve that trust for outside consultants. Give your internal expert the same weight.— Ash Nallawalla, author of Accidental SEO Manager
Read that carefully, because it cuts against our own commercial interest. Ash is saying his outside results came partly from a trust premium granted to outsiders — 100% acceptance of recommendations, no prioritisation fights — not purely from superior skill. The mechanism that makes fractional work is partly organisational psychology.
The advisory reading: if you hire fractional expertise and then treat it like internal staff to be overruled, you have bought the cost without the mechanism. And if you already have a capable internal person you routinely overrule, your first move is not to hire us. It is to stop doing that.
The seniority argument
Ash’s standing complaint is about where the function sits:
My soapbox is that the SEO, or the SEO manager, needs to sit higher in the hierarchy. I’d call the role something like a chief webmaster, or, if you don’t like that term, a chief web success officer — because web success spells company success.— Ash Nallawalla
His example is mundane and devastating: a security team bought a firewall to stop scrapers, whitelisted Google, and unknowingly throttled their own SEO’s crawling from five million URLs a day to five million over two or three weeks. Nobody was wrong. The SEO was simply too far down the org chart to be in the conversation.
He also offers a real number on the trend. When he wrote the first edition of his book, roughly one person on LinkedIn held a chief-webmaster-style title. By the second edition this year, around 300 did.
This is the structural case for the fractional model in SEO specifically. Most companies cannot justify a full-time senior SEO leader, but the decisions that wreck organic performance — domain strategy, subdomain-versus-folder, replatforming, a firewall purchase — are all made at a level the junior owner never attends. Fractional buys seniority at the tier where the damage happens.
The operator in the middle
Lloyd Thompson runs Virtual DOO, a fractional director of operations practice, and describes the role in one line:
The operator is that person who sits between the founder and the team.— Lloyd Thompson, Virtual DOO
The same geometry applies to SEO. The valuable fractional SEO is not the one producing more deliverables; it is the one standing between the owner’s intent and whoever executes — the agency, the developers, the content team — translating in both directions. Lloyd’s other observation transfers cleanly too: teams keep believing the next tool will solve the problem, when the fix is to simplify. That is as true of an SEO stack as an ops stack.
Meaghan Wall runs the same pattern in finance as a fractional CFO, and Grant Simmons arrived at the model the way many senior practitioners do — agency, then brand, then consultant. The shape recurs across every function. That is a signal, not a fashion.
The honest counterargument
Matt Tyner is CMO at Bone Dry Roofing, one of the largest residential family-owned roofing contractors in the US, with fifteen-plus years in home services. Asked directly whether he was a fractional CMO, he was blunt:
My experience has been completely internal. So I have not been a freelancer. I have not been a fractional CMO. When I’ve worked somewhere, it’s been you get 100% of my time.— Matt Tyner, CMO, Bone Dry Roofing
He is right for his situation, and it is worth being precise about why. His core argument elsewhere in that conversation is that marketing makes the promise and operations keeps it — which requires walking hand in hand with operations daily. Where marketing success depends on continuous, deep coupling with how the work actually gets delivered, a quarter of someone’s attention genuinely will not do it.
Matt also identifies the failure mode that gives every outsourced model a bad name: layers. A marketing person hires the agency, the agency has an ops team, the ops team briefs the SEO — and by then the specialist has no route to propose anything meaningful. Fractional is defensible only insofar as it removes those layers. If it adds one, it is worse than an agency.
The advisory read
Taken together, these conversations produce a fairly strict test. Fractional is the right structure when the function has an accidental owner, when the damaging decisions happen above that owner’s level, and when the work is advisory and directional rather than continuous and operational. It is the wrong structure when the function must be coupled to daily delivery, when you would not extend the same trust you would give an outside consultant, or when it inserts one more layer between intent and execution.
And whatever you call it, do not build the offer around the word. Ask what George asked: is anyone even Googling this?
If the description of an accidental owner sounded like your company, that is the conversation we have on fractional SEO management — and if you are not sure the model fits at all, SEO advisory is the cheaper place to start.