Fractional SEO that connects organic to pipeline
Most B2B scaleups don't need a full-time SEO hire. They need someone senior, embedded, and focused on pipeline, not rankings. That's what fractional SEO is. Every engagement runs nine months and then ends by design.
Free 30-minute call. No pitch, no deck. You get a tailored offer within three business days.
Is This Your Situation?
Most of the scaleups I work with have a marketing team that executes well and nobody setting SEO direction. Usually it looks like one of these:
Marketing reports sessions. Sales doesn't see leads. Nobody can explain the gap.
Traffic went up. MQLs didn't. You're not sure what you're actually paying for.
You're between €1M–€15M ARR. You need expertise, not a junior execution layer.
The team executes fine. What is missing is someone senior deciding where SEO aims and owning the outcome, instead of it falling through the cracks between roles.
What is fractional SEO?
Fractional SEO is a model where a senior SEO leader works inside your company part-time, usually one or two days a week, and owns your search strategy end to end. Not a freelancer picking up tickets, and not an agency managing your account from a distance: one accountable person, sitting on your side of the table, connecting organic search to pipeline. You get head-of-SEO judgment without the full-time salary, the recruitment risk, or the six-month ramp-up.
The model borrows from fractional CMOs and CFOs: executive-level thinking, bought in the fraction you actually need. In practice that means search strategy stops falling through the cracks between your CMO, your content manager, and an agency, because one person is accountable for the result.
Who it's for
B2B SaaS and tech scaleups between €1M and €15M ARR. Big enough that organic should be producing pipeline, not yet big enough to justify a senior full-time hire. If your marketing team executes well but nobody owns search direction, that's the gap this model fills. It's the same thinking behind SEO for B2B companies more broadly, not just SaaS. I also lean toward companies that deliver a positive impact to society.
What it isn't
It isn't a pair of hands. I don't work a ticket queue, I don't fill a content calendar, and I'm not measured on deliverable counts. If what you need is production volume, an agency or a freelancer is the right shape and I'm not. A fractional Head of SEO is judged on one thing: whether organic search produces pipeline.
HOW I WORK AS YOUR FRACTIONAL SEO
Fractional SEO means you get a senior practitioner embedded in your team, without the full-time salary, recruitment cost, or ramp-up time.
Commercial SEO Strategy
I start with what drives revenue. That means mapping your ICP to search demand, identifying the pages that can produce MQLs, and connecting organic to your actual pipeline, not vanity metrics — the B2B SEO strategy run inside your team.
Content That Ranks and Converts
Use case pages, competitor comparisons, solution pages: content built around buyer intent, not keyword lists. Every piece has a job in your funnel.
Technical SEO & Site Architecture
If your site has crawl issues, poor internal linking, or structural problems blocking indexation, I find them and fix them. I also handle SEO migrations.
Embedded Team Collaboration
I work with your content manager, your CMO, your dev team. Slack, sprints, monthly calls. Real collaboration, not a monthly PDF.
Track Record
Built the organic strategy from the ground up, ran ABM SEO targeting Floryn's highest-value customer segments, and helped hire and onboard their in-house SEO. Leaving behind a team and a system that could operate independently.
Keyword strategy, ABM segment pages, and competitor comparison pages. Onboarded and trained the in-house content manager so the team could run quality SEO independently after the engagement.
Multi-market SEO for a SaaS company operating across NL, DE, and US. Global SEO Content Playbook, use case landing pages, and a commercial reporting setup connecting organic to pipeline metrics.
Fractional SEO vs agency vs in-house vs freelancer
Most founders weighing fractional SEO are really weighing four options. Here's the honest comparison for a scaleup that needs senior direction:
If you are still building the shortlist, I keep a comparison of fractional SEO consultants for B2B SaaS, including the ones I would send you to instead of me.
| Fractional SEO | SEO agency | In-house senior hire | Freelancer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year-one cost | From €7,500/month, 9 months, then it ends. From €67,500 total, known on day one | €60,000–€180,000 per year, open-ended | €70,000–€100,000 salary; €110,000–€150,000 fully loaded with tools and recruiting | Varies; billed per task or per hour |
| Who owns strategy | A senior practitioner, accountable to your pipeline | An account manager, shared across clients | Your hire, once ramped | You do; they execute |
| Seniority you actually get | 14+ years, working directly with your CMO | Senior sells the deal, junior delivers the work | Depends on who you can attract at this stage | Wide range, hard to verify |
| Ramp-up | Producing in week 1, strategy by end of month 1 | One to three months of onboarding decks | Three to six months to hire, three more to ramp | Fast on tasks, never on strategy |
| Embedded in your team | Yes. Slack, sprints, your meetings | No. Monthly calls and a PDF | Yes | Rarely |
| What happens when they leave | The exit is the plan: by month 9 your team runs it, documented | The knowledge leaves with the retainer | You restart recruiting | The context walks out the door |
The last row is the one nobody prices in. Agencies and freelancers are paid to stay. My engagements are built to end: nine months, then your team runs it. That's the 9-month exit strategy.
Each column deserves more than a table row. If you're weighing one seriously: the agency comparison in full, in-house hire vs consultant, and how to vet any SEO consultant, including me.
Investment
Fractional engagements start at €7,500/month depending on scope and days per week. Most are structured as 9-month engagements with a clear commercial goal and an end date, in three-month blocks: if it isn't working, you can exit at month 3 or month 6. That makes the shape of the total knowable on day one: from €67,500 for the whole engagement. A senior in-house hire costs €70,000–€100,000 in salary, €110,000–€150,000 fully loaded in year one, before they've shipped anything. An open-ended agency retainer costs whatever it grows into.
What the fractional SEO market costs in 2026
Published 2026 rates from fractional SEO providers cluster into three tiers. Strategy-only advisory, a roadmap and monthly check-ins while your team executes, runs €1,500–€2,500 per month. An embedded fractional Head of SEO, in your Slack and your meetings for 10–20 hours a month, owning direction but not production, runs €3,000–€6,000. Strategy plus full execution, where the consultant also produces the content and ships the fixes, runs €5,500–€10,000 and up.
I sit at the top of the embedded tier, from €7,500 per month at 1–2 days per week, and the comparison that justifies it isn't other fractionals. It's the alternatives: mid-market B2B SEO agency retainers run €2,500–€5,000 per month in Europe and $6,500–$15,000 in the US, open-ended, with strategy set once in the pitch and juniors delivering after. A senior in-house SEO hire in the Netherlands, Germany, or the UK costs €110,000–€150,000 fully loaded in year one, plus a 20–30% recruitment fee and three to six months of ramp-up before anything ships. Nine months of fractional, from €67,500 all-in with exit points at months 3 and 6, is the cost-effective way to buy senior ownership — if you actually need senior ownership.
If you're looking for affordable SEO for a startup
Honest answer: this probably isn't it, yet. If you're pre-€1M ARR, the cost-effective route for a startup or small business is a strategy sprint or advisory tier — the €1,500–€2,500 end of the market — with your own team doing the execution. Fractional SEO at this level pays for itself when a single MQL is worth €5,000 or more and organic is expected to carry pipeline, not just traffic. Below that, buy strategy once, execute yourselves, and come back when the math flips.
THE CASE FOR MOVING NOW
Every month without a working organic strategy is compounding opportunity cost. If a single MQL from your sales team is worth €5,000–€50,000 in pipeline, the math on fractional SEO is fast. The HealthTech client story shows that math playing out: monthly conversions doubled.
What you get:
- You get a senior SEO owner embedded in your team, not an agency contact
- Ruthless prioritisation: every sprint is built around what's most likely to produce pipeline in the next 90 days
- I handle strategy and oversee execution while your team builds the capability to run it after I'm gone
- Direct Slack access, weekly async updates, monthly strategy reviews
WHAT YOU GET
Keyword & opportunity map
Your ICP mapped to search demand. Which queries matter at each stage of the funnel, ranked by MQL potential, not traffic.
Content roadmap
Prioritised pages to build. Each one has a clear job: drive a specific type of buyer to take a specific action. No content for the sake of it.
Pipeline attribution setup
If organic isn't visible in your CRM, we fix that before anything else. You can't optimise what you can't measure.
Technical SEO audit & fixes
Crawlability, internal linking, site structure, indexation issues. Identified and resolved, not dumped in a spreadsheet for your team to interpret.
ABM SEO pages
Segment-specific landing pages targeting your highest-value verticals by industry, company type, or use case. Built for qualified traffic, not volume.
Embedded team collaboration
Slack, sprint check-ins, monthly strategy calls. I work with your content manager, CMO, and dev team, not in a separate lane.
Fractional SEO case studies and results for B2B SaaS and scaleups
The published fractional case study is a Series A B2B HealthTech scaleup selling to mental-health professionals. Organic conversions doubled in six months, from around 475 to 950 a month, and organic traffic doubled from 3,800 to 7,700 monthly visits. Two pages built during that engagement were still among the company's top traffic drivers after handover to their in-house team. Not by publishing more, but by cutting what didn't convert and building pages for the segments that do. The full numbers are in the client story.
Two more published case studies come from consulting engagements run on the same method. Comparison pages built at three B2B companies between October 2025 and June 2026 produced 29 leads attributed across two of them, took one page from 13 to 290 monthly clicks, and lifted its monthly impressions from 115 to 2,064 as AI assistants started retrieving it. At Bedrijfsfitness Nederland, a May 2025 platform migration finished the week after launch with weekly leads up 21%, against the usual advice to expect a dip.
At Floryn, a Dutch fintech scaleup, I built the organic strategy from the ground up, ran ABM SEO on their highest-value customer segments, and helped hire and onboard their in-house SEO. The engagement ended the way every fractional engagement should: with a team and a system that run without me.
At Aquablu, I deliberately reduced search traffic. What I cut was irrelevant. What remained converts, produces MQLs, and moves downstream into revenue. Their VP Marketing says it better than I can, in the quote further up this page.
What this looks like in practice
organic conversions in 6 months (475 → 950 a month)
Doubling organic conversions for a Series A HealthTechSeries A→B mental-health SaaS (US)
Common Questions About Fractional SEO
Who you are actually hiring
You are not hiring an agency pod, a junior, or a rotating account manager. You get me, in your standups, owning the number.
I’m Baba — an independent SEO consultant helping B2B and SaaS teams grow through strategy-driven, commercially focused SEO.
DE-RISK YOUR SEO
Stop reporting traffic, start reporting pipeline
Senior ownership without the full-time overhead
Proven on B2B SaaS, fintech, and scaleups
READY TO GROW ORGANICALLY?
If organic traffic exists but nobody on your team can tell you what it's producing in pipeline, let's talk.
Free 30-minute call. No pitch, no deck. You get a tailored offer within three business days.