As your business grows, more money, people and decisions are in play. You’re investing in product and service development, people, premises, technology, automation, research and marketing, often at the same time. Revenue might be increasing, but so are your costs, making experienced people who can help you make better decisions increasingly valuable. But you don’t necessarily need every senior specialist on the payroll for 38 hours a week.
That’s where consultants and fractional expertise starts to make commercial sense.
I spent 10 years as a CMO before founding Make Words Work, and one reality of growth is that it gets more expensive as you scale. Marketing is no exception. Reaching more customers, entering new markets and competing for market share requires greater investment in people, expertise, media, technology and content.
Every day, people tell Google and AI about the problems they’re trying to solve, questions they need answered, products and services they’re considering and alternatives they’re comparing. They do it in their own language, when they have a real need or decision in front of them.
Surveys, interviews, sales data and analytics all have their place, but search gives you something different. It tells you, point blank, what your customers have already decided matters. Understanding search behaviour gives you a strategic baseline for what your customers want, how they think and what they need to know before they choose. And that intelligence can inform much more than SEO.
SEO is often treated as a stand-alone channel. Research keywords, optimise the website, create content, improve rankings and generate organic traffic. That’s how search data is traditionally used in SEO, but it only captures part of what search can tell you about your customers and market.
Search behaviour can help you decide which questions your content needs to answer, sharpen messaging hierarchy using the language customers actually use, understand your competitors’ SEO and AEO strategies and identify objections that need addressing. It can inform paid campaigns with evidence about demand and intent, support your social and email campaigns with useful content topics and help your wider team understand what customers really care about.
This is what I mean by Search Intelligence. SEO and AEO help your business become visible when people search, but the research behind that visibility also gives you customer intelligence that can inform wider marketing decisions. For a growing business making increasingly expensive decisions, search becomes more than another channel competing for budget. It becomes part of the strategic baseline.
As marketing becomes more sophisticated, so does the expertise you need. Current Australian salary data puts an SEO Manager at an average base salary of around $116,000, while SEO Director roles can reach approximately $155,000 to $210,000. Add 12% superannuation, paid leave, workers’ compensation, recruitment, onboarding, software, equipment and professional development, and a senior search hire becomes a significant investment.
But going without senior expertise has a cost too. As a business grows, gaps in specialist knowledge and management capability can start to constrain growth, productivity and the quality of the decisions being made.
Australian businesses are already using more flexible models to access senior capability. Fractional and interim executive roles are becoming more visible, while interim leaders are increasingly being brought in for strategic work such as business transformation, rather than only filling temporary vacancies. Watermark's research also identifies demand for specialised skills as a factor behind longer interim assignments.
If your business needs a senior SEO leader five days a week, hire one. If it doesn’t, that doesn’t mean you have to go without senior search expertise.
Renee Mariette
SEO Director, Make Words Work
There isn't a particular revenue figure where a business suddenly needs a Fractional SEO Consultant. I think the better question is whether search has become important enough to your growth to need senior strategic attention.
That point might come when your marketing investment is increasing, SEO and AEO are becoming more commercially important, your team needs specialist direction, or you’ve outgrown occasional SEO projects. It can also come when Search Intelligence is starting to inform more of your marketing and needs ongoing strategic ownership.
Retainer-based SEO consulting gives growing businesses another way to access that expertise. Your existing marketing team, developers, writers and other specialists can remain part of the delivery model, while search gets the senior strategic attention and continuity it now needs.
The value isn’t in trying to replicate a full-time SEO Director for less. It’s having the right level of search expertise involved in the business at the right stage of growth.
