The comparison is usually framed as salary versus retainer, which gets it wrong twice: it understates the cost of the hire and ignores what each option actually covers. Here is the version with the real numbers in it.
What a full-time hire costs
Take a mid-level in-house SEO at a £70,000 salary. The fully-loaded cost is not £70,000.
- Salary: £70,000
- Employer national insurance and pension: roughly £11,000
- Tooling (Ahrefs or Semrush, crawler, rank tracking): £3,000–£6,000
- Equipment, software, training, conference budget: £2,500
- Recruitment fee, amortised over an expected two-year tenure: £5,000
Roughly £92,000 a year, or £7,700 a month.
Then subtract the ramp. A new hire produces very little for the first month, partial output through months two and three, and reaches full effectiveness somewhere around month four. That is effectively two to three months of salary before meaningful work lands — call it £15,000–£23,000 of the first year buying orientation.
What a fractional consultant costs
Two senior days a month at typical rates is £2,000–£3,000 a month, or £24,000–£36,000 a year. No employer taxes, no tooling budget, no recruitment fee, no ramp — a good fractional consultant is useful in week one because they have done this on twenty other sites.
Roughly a third of the cost of the hire.
The catch is real and worth stating plainly: you are buying direction, not execution. Two days a month is enough to set strategy, review work and unblock decisions. It is nowhere near enough to write your content, build your links and fix your technical debt.
The comparison that actually matters
| Fractional | Full-time hire | Agency retainer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | £1,200–£3,500 | ~£7,700 loaded | £2,000–£6,000 |
| Time to useful output | Week one | Month three or four | Month one or two |
| Execution capacity | None | One person’s | A team’s |
| Breadth of skill | High | Narrow — nobody is strong at technical, content and outreach | High |
| Continuity risk | Medium | High — one person, one notice period | Low |
| Institutional knowledge | Partial | Full | Partial |
The row that decides most cases is execution capacity. If you have a content writer and a developer who can act on a roadmap, fractional is dramatically better value. If you have nobody, it produces an excellent plan and no movement.
When each one is right
Fractional is right when: you have execution capacity but no SEO judgment; SEO matters but is not yet your primary channel; you have been burned by an agency and want oversight before committing again; or you are preparing to hire and want someone to write the job description and sit on interviews.
A full-time hire is right when: SEO is a primary acquisition channel; you have enough sustained work to keep someone busy for a year; the work needs deep product knowledge that is expensive to transfer; or compliance means external contractors are difficult.
An agency retainer is right when: you need execution across technical, content and outreach simultaneously; you want a team rather than a person, with holiday and illness covered; or you would rather buy an outcome than manage a function. Our pricing benchmarks cover what that should cost.
The pattern that works well
Fractional first, hire later. Six to twelve months of fractional direction establishes what the work actually requires, produces a roadmap, and generates enough evidence to write a job description that describes the real role rather than a wishlist.
Then the fractional consultant helps you hire and hands over. Ending the engagement because you no longer need it is the intended outcome, not a failure — and it is a materially cheaper path than hiring first and discovering in month five that you needed a different skill set.
If that shape fits, our fractional SEO service is built around exactly this. If you need execution rather than direction, full SEO services is the right door instead.
