The jump from SEO executive to SEO director looks tidy on a LinkedIn profile. In real agency life it is messier, slower in some places and quicker in others, and heavily dependent on which agency you happen to land in.
We list SEO roles on this board every week, from £23k juniors to director posts north of £90k. Here is what the path between those two points actually looks like, with the salary bands and rough timelines we see in UK agency job ads.
The SEO career path in agencies, level by level
Five rungs cover most agency structures: executive, senior executive, manager, head of, and director. Small agencies collapse a couple of these into a single job. Large network agencies bolt on extra layers, so you might pass through "senior manager" or "associate director" on the way up. The money and the responsibilities track roughly the same regardless of what the layer is called.
Treat the figures below as UK agency mid-points outside London. Add 10 to 20% for London, and a little more at the big brand-name shops. Recruiters such as Major Players and Propel publish annual salary guides that broadly agree on the shape, though every guide draws its own lines.
For context, the ONS puts the median full-time UK salary at just under £35,000 (ASHE, 2023). An SEO manager clears that comfortably. A director more than doubles it.
SEO Executive: £24,000 to £30,000 (years 0 to 2)
This is the doing job. You run crawls in Screaming Frog, pull keyword data from Ahrefs or Semrush, write meta descriptions, build monthly reports in Looker Studio, and raise dev tickets that then sit in a backlog for six weeks.
You will not set strategy. You execute someone else's and learn why it was set that way by watching what breaks. The executives who get promoted fastest are the ones who understand the reason behind a task, not only the method.
The trap at this level is staying too long. Two years of solid execution should earn you more responsibility. If it has not after two and a half, the agency is either too flat to promote you or too disorganised to notice, and both are good reasons to look elsewhere.
If you want the granular version of the day job, we broke down what an agency SEO role actually looks like in a separate piece.
Senior SEO Executive or Specialist: £30,000 to £40,000 (years 2 to 4)
The step up here is trust. You get handed accounts without someone checking every deliverable, and you join client calls rather than just feeding slides into them.
Two things separate a senior exec from a capable exec. You can diagnose a traffic drop without a manager holding your hand, and you can explain that drop to a client in plain English. The second skill is rarer and pays better.
Some people specialise at this stage. Technical SEO, digital PR for links, or content strategy each becomes a lane you can own. Specialists who go deep rather than broad often out-earn generalist managers a rung or two above them, which tends to surprise people who assumed management was the only way to raise your salary.
SEO Manager or SEO Account Manager: £40,000 to £52,000 (years 4 to 6)
Now you own outcomes rather than tasks. You are responsible for whether a client renews, whether the numbers move, and whether the junior on your account is learning anything from you.
This is the first real fork in the path. One track keeps you close to the craft as an SEO manager leading strategy across a portfolio. The other pulls you towards client services and commercial ownership, nearer an account director route where SEO becomes one channel you sell rather than the thing you do all day.
Plenty of good SEOs stall here because they never learn to manage people or defend a retainer to a nervous client. Delivery skill got you this far. It will not carry you further on its own.
Head of SEO: £55,000 to £75,000 (years 6 to 9)
Head of SEO is where the job stops being about rankings and starts being about the department. You own the methodology the whole team works to, you sit in new-business pitches, and you carry a number for the agency's SEO revenue.
You will still be technical enough to sanity-check a migration plan. Most of your week goes on hiring, pricing, process, and the occasional fire that an account manager could not put out.
At smaller agencies this is effectively the top of the tree, and the title sometimes carries director-level responsibility on a manager's salary. Read the job spec, not the headline. A "head of SEO" running a team of two is a different animal from one running fifteen.
SEO Director: £75,000 to £100,000 and up (years 9 plus)
Directors are measured on commercial outcomes: team utilisation, margin, client retention across the book, and how much new revenue the channel brings in. Ranking a page now sits three levels below your day-to-day.
Some directors keep a hand in the work because they enjoy it. The role does not require it. What it requires is that the SEO offering makes money, the team stays and grows, and clients keep signing.
At a large London agency, or on a partner track, total packages can pass £120k once bonus and share options are counted. Those seats are few, and people hold them for years, which is part of why the climb slows so much near the top.
The timeline is a guide, not a promise
The years attached to each level assume steady progress at a growing agency. Reality rarely runs that clean.
We have seen sharp operators reach manager in three years because a small agency needed someone to step up and they said yes. We have also seen people sit as a senior exec for five years at a large network because the layer above them never moved. Neither pace reflects raw talent. It reflects timing and headroom.
The fastest way to shave years off the climb is uncomfortable: change agencies. Internal promotions in this industry tend to lag the open market, so the person who moves every two to three years usually earns more and holds a bigger title than the one who stayed put. That is a criticism of how agencies handle retention, not a licence to job-hop for its own sake.
What actually earns the next title
Technical ability gets you the first two promotions. After that it quietly stops working as a differentiator, because most people at manager level can do the technical work in their sleep.
What moves you up the back half of the ladder is commercial rather than technical. Can you explain SEO to a sceptical marketing director without the jargon? Can you keep a team together and improving month on month? The people who answer yes to both, and who can tie a campaign to revenue the client actually banked, are the ones who make head of and director.
This is why some brilliant technical SEOs peak at senior manager and watch less-skilled communicators sail past them into director roles. It feels unfair, and in a craft sense it is. Agencies are businesses, though, and they promote the people who protect and grow the money, not the people with the cleanest audits.
Where the path forks away from agencies
Not everyone rides this ladder to the top, and plenty leave it on purpose.
In-house is the common exit. An agency senior exec often walks into an in-house SEO manager role on more money and calmer hours, because brands pay for the agency training without the agency pace. The trade is variety: one website instead of twelve.
Freelance and consultancy is the other route. A strong manager or head with a client list can bill more alone than a director earns on payroll, though they swap a steady salary for feast-and-famine income and their own admin. It suits some people and quietly grinds down others.
There is no shame in stepping off the agency ladder. The director title is one destination, not the only good one, and the happiest SEOs we speak to chose the version of the job that fit their life rather than the one with the biggest number attached.
A quick map of the whole journey
- SEO Executive: £24,000 to £30,000, years 0 to 2, learning the craft by doing it.
- Senior SEO Executive or Specialist: £30,000 to £40,000, years 2 to 4, trusted with accounts and diagnosis.
- SEO Manager or Account Manager: £40,000 to £52,000, years 4 to 6, owning outcomes and the first people.
- Head of SEO: £55,000 to £75,000, years 6 to 9, running the department and its revenue.
- SEO Director: £75,000 to £100,000 plus, years 9 onward, accountable for margin and growth.
How to plan your next move
Look at where you sit against these bands and be honest about the gap. If you are an executive on £26k doing genuine senior work, you are underpaid, and the fix is usually a conversation or a move rather than another year of quietly proving yourself.
If you are a manager eyeing head of SEO, put the technical certifications down and start collecting evidence that you grow revenue and keep people. That is the case you will have to make, and it is the one most SEOs forget to build.
To see what the market is paying right now, our live SEO jobs listings tell you more than any salary guide, because they are what agencies will commit to in writing this month.
