One additional annual contract in this trade covers every configuration priced below, several times over. Which means the number is not really the question. The question is whether the activity is still running in twelve months, and whether anybody will have recorded enough to judge it.
Proposals here are reluctant to state a figure. There are packages, there is scoping, there is effort by arrangement. The twelve-month total appears nowhere — and that is precisely the line a principal needs before approving anything from an overseas office.
Neither figure is negotiable and both are on public record: AutoSEO at 149 dollars monthly per domain, FullSEO at 500 dollars for the same coverage. Two extras are ordered separately: Wikipedia placements at 10 dollars each in quantities of 0, 1, 5 or 10, and PBN placements at 1 dollar each in quantities of 0, 20, 100 or 500.
The difference is not what you can see
Everything visible is identical on both: the Google screens, the ranking data, the generative market analysis and the submission tooling all sit inside the same Semalt workspace regardless of which tier is bought. What separates them is how much proceeds without anyone's attention and at which point a person intervenes — a question that in an operator's office comes down to available hours rather than to features.
AutoSEO — nothing waits for a decision
Suits an office where the website is somebody's secondary responsibility, which describes most of them.
- Candidate terms appear and are ranked unattended. Three sources feed them: the Google reporting, live results, and terms you seed yourself. Each candidate can be accepted, rejected or deferred — and if nobody gets to it during peak season, nothing halts.
- Placements accumulate continuously. Through the partner network, with no case-by-case approval. For an office without a marketing function that is the decisive difference from a tool that waits.
- Advice aimed at the pages already published. What comes back is a named page and a specific change — extend this, link to that — instead of a proposal to rebuild the site, which nobody has the capacity to act on.
- No surcharge for reporting or the assistant. Google reporting, position tracking and the project timeline are inside the monthly figure rather than billed beside it.
FullSEO — a say, if somebody takes it
Suits where a named person can judge trade and procedure terms and has the time booked for it.
- Terms chosen by hand, with an automatic fallback. When the week gets away from everyone, control passes back to the automatic selection and the campaign carries on regardless. In a trade with pronounced peaks, that safety net is doing the work far more often than the buyer anticipated.
- Placement above a set threshold. Instead of accepting whatever the network produces, a minimum authority value is fixed and selection follows it.
- Human review before anything goes live. Proposed changes pass a person first — relevant wherever statements about authorisations or liability are involved.
- People come with it, not only software. Per the provider's own description, this level puts search specialists, developers and writers behind the automation.
For an office of sixty people with no marketing function, that distinction matters more than the price gap. Manual selection only pays where somebody actually performs it — and specifically somebody who knows which corridor carries which margin. Without that person the higher tier becomes a costlier version of the lower one, because the built-in fallback does the work regardless.
Two extras, sold only in steps
| Extra | Per placement | Quantities available | Monthly at the top |
|---|---|---|---|
| Placement on Wikipedia | 10 dollars apiece | none, one, five or ten | $100 |
| Placement in the network | 1 dollar apiece | none, twenty, a hundred or five hundred | $500 |
Quantities between those steps simply do not exist. Conclude that seven Wikipedia placements would suit and you must still pick five or ten: 50 dollars monthly or 100, which over twelve months separates two proposals by 600. Where a principal goes through spending line by line, the step needs to appear in the request itself, not in a later justification.
Four configurations, calculated through
| Configuration | Composition | Monthly | Twelve months |
|---|---|---|---|
| A · minimum | AutoSEO for one site, nothing added | $149 | $1,788 |
| B · two sites | AutoSEO for two domains, nothing added | $298 | $3,576 |
| C · full level, reinforced | FullSEO plus 1 Wikipedia ($10) and 100 PBN ($100) | $610 | $7,320 |
| D · three sites, one reinforced | AutoSEO on three domains plus 5 Wikipedia ($50) | $497 | $5,964 |
Configurations C and D are worth comparing because they cost broadly the same and represent opposite decisions: depth on one property against breadth across three. Which is right turns entirely on whether those three domains address genuinely different audiences or merely accumulated over the years. Strip the extras out and the gap between tiers is 351 dollars a month — the difference between 500 and 149 — or 4,212 dollars over the year.
The real question is not the amount
In an operator's office the constraint is rarely the monthly figure. It is whether the activity survives a rate downturn, a change of country manager, or a quarter in which the principal decides that overseas marketing budgets are a good place to economise.
A line below a few thousand a year
Small enough that a budget review does not stop on it, which is the property that decides outcomes between planning cycles.
- Reaches month twelve intact
- Answers the question it was bought for
A line that appears on a slide
Large enough to be noticed, and therefore large enough to be removed in a quarter when something has to go.
- Costs more than A run to completion
- Leaves nothing behind to build on
This is not an argument for spending less as a matter of principle. It is an observation about what happens to marketing lines in businesses that reforecast when freight rates move — which is most of them. Get to the twelfth month and you own a result. Stop in the seventh and you own an invoice. Picking the option most likely to outlast your own budgeting habits is a perfectly sound basis for choosing, and nobody ever states it as one.
A submission with a review date on it
States the annual figure, the assumption behind it, and when it gets judged. Reads as a trial with a stopping rule.
- A principal can model the downside
- Renewal becomes a decision, not a habit
A submission framed as building presence
No figure, no assumption, no date. Reads as an open commitment with no defined end.
- Nothing to evaluate
- Postponed to the next quarter
Nothing separates those two cards except how they are written, and that is what determines the outcome of most requests coming from an overseas office. Behind each sits the same work. The difference is a single sentence defining what an unsuccessful year would look like — and that sentence is precisely the one whoever drafts the request would rather leave out.
What this is actually weighed against
- One more conference, two more stand visits. This is what the money is actually being weighed against in most offices, and against that benchmark the whole year barely registers as a cost. Putting it that bluntly ends the discussion faster than any argument about value.
- Doing nothing and relying on the network. Free on paper. The cost shows up as German shippers who never started a qualification process, and no ledger records those.
- A local agency on retainer. Works while the person handling you understands the trade. An agency that has to learn Incoterms and cargo types first generates more work internally than it removes.
- Separate tool subscriptions. Data then sits in disconnected interfaces and a measurable share of a small team's time goes into reconciling exports rather than acting on them.
That fourth point bites hardest wherever marketing occupies half of one person's week. Keep the reporting in one product, the ranking data in a second and the submission queue in a third, and about eight hours a month vanish into making three sets of column headings agree. A shared workspace deletes that step rather than performing magic; behind one login sit upwards of thirty-five screens and eleven connected services, with a single Google authorisation covering mailbox, search reporting and analytics together.
What happens across the twelve months
Billing begins in month one; results do not follow that schedule. This gap accounts for most early cancellations and is the most expensive way to stop, because the money has gone before anything could have shown.
Which number is worth reading also shifts month by month. Weeks one to six: only index coverage moves fast enough to say anything at all. From roughly the eighth week onward, the terms entering and leaving the leading positions begin to mean something. Somewhere past the hundredth day, traffic and enquiry counts stop being pure noise. And a figure suitable for a principal's review does not exist until the year is nearly over. An office unaware of that sequence will spend four months reporting on whichever line happened to twitch — the surest way to make a perfectly functional campaign look pointless. At minimum, the timestamped record in My SEO Stream keeps the order of events intact for whoever takes over.
The first month, hour by hour
| Period | What happens | Local effort |
|---|---|---|
| First week | Authorising Google, taking stock of what is published | roughly an hour, one time only |
| Weeks two and three | Term suggestions come in from the three sources | a single review lower down, weekly review higher up |
| Third and fourth | Placement begins, page suggestions appear | reading rather than deciding |
| From the fifth | Reports tailored per recipient | machine-readable to 10,000 rows, printable to 250 |
Look at the second line: that is where the tiers genuinely part company. A full month on the entry tier costs somebody about two hours, once. On the tier above, once term selection and sign-off are involved, that same two hours recurs weekly. Leave that out of the plan and what follows is entirely foreseeable: approvals pile up unread, the fallback resumes control without comment, and the premium purchases nothing at all.
There is a further wrinkle that applies specifically where the office sits far from wherever the decisions get made. Left to itself, the cheaper tier keeps re-examining its own candidate list every cycle, so a poor choice does not survive long. Buy the tier above and that self-correction stops: whatever a person selected remains in force until the same person looks again. If looking again happens once a quarter from another continent, the expensive option has the slower feedback loop of the two — which is not what the price tag suggests. Fifteen minutes is genuinely enough for the review, because the selection screen in My SEO puts volume, current ranking and the reason for each suggestion next to the candidate itself.
One check that precedes all of this
Committing to a tier before the pages are reliably held by the index wastes half a year. The check takes a morning and answers three things: does the server deliver the trade and procedure pages, has the index accepted them, and do they differ from one another enough not to be consolidated?
Substituting your own contract values for the ones in the table above is done from the same screen the reporting appears on. Three separate matters have to be settled before any of the money question applies. Can the site be indexed at all — that is technical SEO. Which German wordings correspond to business worth winning — that is keyword research. And which material belongs in which language — that is what our content strategy sets out.
Model the annual figure in the dashboard
Questions from principals and country managers
Is it charged per domain or per account?
Per domain. An office running a main site and a separate market site pays for both — 298 dollars a month and 3,576 across the year at entry level, which is configuration B. Administration stays in a single workspace regardless, with tags applied per site so that every screen can be filtered — no fragmented reporting and no second set of credentials.
Why does configuration D cost less than C despite covering three sites?
Because three domains at entry level come to 447 dollars a month, and five Wikipedia placements add 50 — 497 in total. One domain at the full level with a modest set of extras comes to 610. The two are close enough that the decision should be made on substance rather than on price: breadth across three properties, or the ability to select terms by hand on one.
Do 500 PBN placements deliver five times what 100 deliver?
They do not. What the number reports is how many placements exist, not how good they are, and each larger band admits a greater share of weak sources rather than a smaller one. Where trade and procedure terms attract little competition — and they generally do not — the middle band suffices and leaves budget for writing the pages, which is usually where the real constraint sits.
Three sites or one site done properly?
The price barely separates them, so decide on whether the three domains genuinely address different audiences. If they do not, they compete for the same terms and breadth is the worse option. That question can only be answered by putting all three side by side, and in many offices nobody has ever done so — which makes it worth doing before any purchase rather than after.
Can we stop after six months?
Nothing prevents it, and it tends to be the least useful of the available choices. Half a year gives you movement in the rankings and almost never anything solid on enquiries — least of all in a trade where a shipper needs two quarters to qualify a new agent. Where only six months of commitment is realistic, take the cheapest line and run the full twelve instead: less money out, and a conclusion at the end of it.
What goes into the report to the principal?
Enquiries recorded as originating from the website, against the same period last year, alongside the average contribution per signed contract. Rankings, visitor counts and impression totals go at the back, where they can at most account for the shape of the two headline numbers. Open with impressions and somebody will ask what those impressions were worth — a question with no satisfactory reply.