Hire Head of SEO — organic, worked every week

Full-time $100k–$150k. Contract heads suit companies that need strong organic execution without a permanent hire.

They can run lean with freelancers and agency support, or manage one to two specialists. The key requirement is their own technical depth.

Technical fixes can move the needle in weeks. Content and authority compound over months. A good head sets these expectations honestly in week one.

Organic traffic growth, keyword visibility trends, technical health scores, and — most importantly — organic-sourced pipeline. Activity metrics are reported but never confused with outcomes.

The head executes the program daily; the director owns the strategy and forecasts. If the plan exists and needs a relentless operator, hire the head.

If you have a mature, high-volume program that needs daily hands, hire full time. If you need senior direction and execution but not forty hours of it, a fractional arrangement is better value. When people hire a head of SEO fractionally, they get the seniority and engineering fluency of someone with fifteen-plus years without the salary, equity and ramp of a permanent exec. I usually recommend fractional until the workload clearly justifies a full desk.

It depends on the backlog, but most engagements run on a set number of days per month, booked in advance so you have reliable throughput. That time goes to diagnosis, writing and reviewing engineering tickets, content direction, and the weekly check against the plan. I keep a shared board so you always see what is in flight, shipped and queued. We review the commitment quarterly and adjust as the program matures.

Yes, and it is one of the main reasons teams hire me. I build the redirect map, run pre-launch parity checks on staging, validate rendering and structured data, and stage the cutover so we can roll back if metrics move the wrong way. Because I read code, I catch the issues pure SEO consultants miss, like a router returning 200s on missing pages or canonicals stripped at the edge. Most lost-traffic migrations were avoidable.

Nothing exotic. A rank tracker such as AccuRanker or STAT, one authority tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, and Screaming Frog for crawling cover most needs. Search Console and Analytics are free, and I pipe GSC into BigQuery via the bulk export, which costs pennies, so we are never throttled on data. I bring my own licences where I can and recommend only what earns its keep. I would rather spend budget shipping fixes than on dashboards.

An agency sells you hours and deliverables; I own the outcome. Agencies hand over recommendations and leave implementation to a team already over capacity, which is why their audits stall. When you hire a head of SEO like me, you get someone who sits inside your stack, writes the tickets your developers merge, and is accountable for the number rather than the report. For steady execution tied to real engineering, that ownership is the whole difference.

Yes. I have shipped across the UAE, US, UK, Canada, Pakistan and Malaysia, so I plan hreflang and canonical architecture, country targeting, and localisation that respects local intent rather than machine-translating one market into another. The common failure is hreflang return-tag errors and duplicate content across regions, which quietly suppress rankings. I audit the existing setup first, fix the structural errors, then scale into new markets deliberately rather than all at once.