Two engagements.
Nothing else.
Pick the one that fits where you are. No tiers, no bundles, no add-ons. A fractional retainer for companies ready to build, and a standalone audit for those who need the truth first.
Sit inside your team as the organic growth lead.
Not a monthly package of deliverables. Fractional leadership. Owning the organic channel end to end, with a stack of agents doing the mechanical work so one operator can do what a team of eight usually does. Direct access, weekly cadence, shipped output.
You get an operator who shows up in your Slack, attends the standups that matter, and treats your organic channel like it's theirs. Strategy, execution, tooling, and accountability, owned end to end.
The agent stack handles the mechanical: monitoring, brief generation, internal linking, crawl analysis, rank tracking. Everything that needs a real call, a founder context, or a strategic read stays with me.
- Series A or B SaaS with organic traction that isn't compounding yet
- Founders who've tried agencies and found the ROI too slow and the ownership too thin
- Teams with an SEO hire in mind but no operator who can set the direction first
- Companies that need AEO and GEO visibility before a competitor locks it down
- Programmatic page systemsProduction pipelines that scale to thousands of pages, indexed and defensible.
- AEO + GEO strategyAnswer Engine Optimization for snippets and voice. Generative Engine Optimization for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Monitored, optimized, tracked against competitors.
- Editorial pipelineBriefs, drafts, edits, publishing cadence. A content machine, not a content calendar.
- Technical SEO ownershipIndexation, crawl budget, core web vitals, schema, internal link graph.
- Agent stack deploymentInternal tools your team keeps using after the engagement ends.
- Team enablementWriters, engineers, and PMs leveled up with the workflow and prompts.
- Competitive intelligenceWho's winning your queries, why, and what to do about it.
- Weekly readoutPlain English note: what moved, what didn't, what's shipping next week.
A standalone, honest read on your organic channel.
For founders who want the truth before committing to anyone. A paid deliverable, no retainer attached. A bound report, walked through live, acted on by whoever you want. Treat it like a product you're buying, not a sales call.
A complete external audit of your organic channel. Where it stands, what's broken, what's being left on the table, and exactly what to do about it. Every claim tied to a number.
Delivered as a structured report. Walked through live in a 90-minute recorded session. Ready to hand to a dev team, a new hire, or a future agency without translation.
- Founders who've heard conflicting SEO advice and want a neutral read
- Companies considering a first SEO hire and needing a benchmark to hire against
- Startups evaluating whether organic is a viable channel before investing in it
- Teams that want a 12-month roadmap they own, not a vendor lock-in
- State of the channelWhere traffic comes from, what it does, where it leaks.
- AEO + GEO visibility auditHow often your brand surfaces in featured snippets and voice (AEO) and in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews (GEO) vs competitors.
- Programmatic opportunity mapWhere production-driven pages would win. Sized, scoped, ranked.
- Competitive teardownTop 5 competitors, what's working, what to copy, what to ignore.
- Technical auditPrioritized blocker list with fix complexity and expected impact.
- 12-month blueprintExact roadmap. What to build, in what order, who's accountable.
- Agent stack recommendationsWhich agents and tools would 10× your in-house team.
- 90-minute walkthroughLive, recorded. Bring the team. Ask anything.
From first call to shipped work.
Three steps. No discovery sprints, no onboarding decks, no ramp time theatre.
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Intro call
Thirty minutes. You walk me through where you are. I ask the uncomfortable questions. We figure out if there is a fit and which engagement makes sense.
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Scoping & start
For retainers: agreement signed, access granted, a stack audit kicks off the engagement before any sprint planning. For reports: scope is locked in writing, then research begins on a date we set together.
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Shipped work
Retainer: continuous. Report: delivered in three to four weeks with a live walkthrough session. Both come with clear next steps and no ambiguity about what to do.
Questions I get a lot.
- How is a fractional SEO retainer different from an agency?
- An agency manages deliverables and reports to you. A fractional operator owns the channel. Sits inside your team, makes strategic decisions, ships output, and is accountable for results. One person with a purpose-built agent stack replaces what agencies route through account managers, junior staff, and handoffs.
- What is AI visibility and why does it matter for SEO?
- AI visibility is how often and how accurately your brand surfaces in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and other AI-powered answer engines. It splits into two disciplines. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) covers featured snippets, People Also Ask, and voice answers. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) covers being cited inside generative AI responses. As zero-click and AI-mediated search grows, ranking on page one is only half the job. I track, audit, and optimize for both.
- What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) targets systems that surface a direct answer, like Google featured snippets, People Also Ask, and voice assistants (Google Assistant, Siri). GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) targets systems that generate a synthesized response and cite their sources, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews. Both matter for a modern organic strategy. I optimize for both as part of every retainer and audit.
- What is programmatic SEO?
- Programmatic SEO is the practice of building systems that generate hundreds or thousands of high-quality, indexed pages from structured data, targeting long-tail keyword clusters at scale. Done well, it compounds over time and becomes one of the most defensible organic growth assets a startup can own.
- Does the audit come with a retainer attached?
- No. The audit report is a standalone paid engagement. You get the deliverable, the walkthrough, and the blueprint. What you do with it is your call. There is no pitch at the end.
- How many clients does Iron Index take on?
- The retainer is capped at two active seats. Any more than that and the quality slips. Reports run in sequence, not parallel, for the same reason.
Test the fit.
Tell me where you are, what's working, what isn't, and what organic compounding would look like for you. If there's a fit, we'll go from there.