Two figures decide almost everything about how an automated campaign runs: $149 a month per domain, or $500 a month per domain. The interesting question is not which is cheaper. It is what each one is being weighed against inside a business whose contracts arrive twice a year and are worth six figures each.
Marketing spend in this part of the economy gets judged strangely. A fabrication shop will approve an exhibition stand at an industry show without a second meeting, renew a premium listing in a sourcing directory because it has always renewed it, and then spend six weeks deliberating over a recurring software line worth a fraction of either. The difference is not the money. It is that the booth and the listing are familiar and the software line is not.
So the comparison worth making is not against other SEO vendors. It is against the two things this reader already buys without blinking, and against the margin on one contract. If a campaign contributes to winning a single additional turnaround scope, a single freight account, a single equipment package in a year, the annual figure stops being a cost question and becomes an arithmetic one.
The right thing to compare it against
We are deliberately not going to tell you what a booth costs or what your margin is. You know both numbers and we do not. The exercise is to write them down before reading any further, because everything below reads differently depending on what is in those two boxes.
- One exhibition stand. Space, build, freight, staff time, travel, hospitality, and the follow-up that mostly does not happen. Annual, non-recurring in effect, and almost never measured after the fact.
- One premium directory or sourcing-platform listing. Renewed on schedule, rarely audited, and delivering enquiries nobody attributes back to it because attribution was never set up.
- The gross margin on one contract you would otherwise not have bid. The only number that actually settles the question, and the one most firms in this sector can produce within a minute.
AutoSEO at $149 per month per domain
The lower tier is a complete automated campaign rather than a trial version of the upper one. The distinction matters, because the temptation is to read $149 as a stripped-down offering that exists to sell the $500 one.
AutoSEO — campaign management on autopilot
For a business with a stable service list that wants the work running continuously without anyone owning it internally.
- Automatic keyword discovery and prioritization. Candidates are found, ranked and queued without anyone building a list by hand.
- Automatic backlink building. Placements drawn from a partner network of more than 230,000 websites.
- On-site AI suggestions. Recommendations for pages, structure and internal linking, delivered as they are generated.
- Full analytics. The complete Search Console and SERP view sets, with no reduced-data tier.
- Live AI chat. Bound to your own project data rather than to generic advice.
What you do not get at this tier is a person making judgment calls. The automation decides which keywords to pursue within the pool you approved, which placements to take, and what to suggest on-site. For a company whose services are clearly defined and whose geography is settled, that is frequently enough, and the money saved is real money.
FullSEO at $500 per month per domain, and the mode switch
The upper tier is the same automation with two additions: a working team of SEO specialists, developers and writers, and a set of switches that let a human take the wheel on any of three decisions the automation otherwise makes alone.
FullSEO — automation with manual override
For sites where a wrong automated decision is expensive to publish and awkward to retract.
- Manual keyword selection with automatic fallback. Choose the terms yourself; if the manual list runs thin the automation continues rather than stalling.
- Manual link placement with domain rating targets. Set a DR floor and place deliberately instead of accepting whatever the network offers first.
- Human review before on-site changes ship. Nothing reaches the live site until a person has read it.
- Specialists, developers and writers. Included alongside the automation rather than billed separately.
The third switch is the one that earns the difference for most industrial and technical firms. A page that states a capability states it to buyers who may hold you to it. Automated copy describing a service you deliver in a narrower form than the sentence implies is not a marketing problem — it is a scoping problem that arrives on a purchase order. Human review before publication removes that class of risk entirely.
| Decision | AutoSEO | FullSEO | Matters when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keyword selection | Automatic within the approved pool | Manual, with automatic fallback | Vocabulary differs by buyer type |
| Backlink placement | Automatic from the network | Manual with DR targets | Quality thresholds are policy |
| On-site changes | Suggested and applied | Held for human review | Copy carries technical claims |
| Staffing | Automation only | Specialists, developers, writers | Nobody internal owns the work |
| Analytics access | Complete | Complete | Never — it is the same at both tiers |
Where the keyword pool comes from and who approves it
Both tiers draw candidate keywords from the same three places, and the mechanism is worth understanding because it is where most of the useful control sits regardless of what you pay.
How candidates are found
Each source contributes something the other two cannot.
- Google Search Console — terms you already receive impressions for
- Live SERP data — terms competitors currently hold
- Your own seed keywords — the vocabulary only you know
How candidates are settled
Every candidate is handled individually. There is no bulk accept that quietly commits you to a list.
- Approved — enters the active campaign
- Rejected — removed from consideration
- Deferred — held for a later review
The seed input is the one most companies underuse. Search Console can only surface terms you already appear for, and SERP data can only surface terms someone else already targets. Neither will produce the phrase a Korean shipyard's procurement officer uses for the thing you make, or the internal shorthand a plant's maintenance planner types when the unit is already down. Those come from your estimators and your inside sales desk, and they cost nothing to supply.
Wikipedia and PBN placements, priced by the slot
Two optional lines sit on top of whichever tier you choose, both priced per slot and both selected from a fixed set of quantities rather than typed in freely.
Wikipedia placements
Sold in slots of 0, 1, 5 or 10, added to either tier.
- Four quantities, not a free field. Zero, one, five or ten slots — so the monthly cost is $0, $10, $50 or $100.
- Small absolute numbers. Even the maximum is a rounding error against either tier, which is why it is worth deciding on merit rather than on price.
PBN placements
Sold in slots of 0, 20, 100 or 500, added to either tier.
- Four quantities again. Zero, twenty, one hundred or five hundred slots — $0, $20, $100 or $500 per month.
- The top option costs as much as the upper tier. Five hundred slots is a $500 line, which is a decision, not a checkbox.
| Configuration | Tier | Wikipedia | PBN | Monthly total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | $149 | 0 | 0 | $149 |
| Entry plus modest add-ons | $149 | 1 · $10 | 20 · $20 | $179 |
| Upper tier, no add-ons | $500 | 0 | 0 | $500 |
| Upper tier, measured add-ons | $500 | 1 · $10 | 100 · $100 | $610 |
| Everything at maximum | $500 | 10 · $100 | 500 · $500 | $1,100 |
Per domain, and why that phrase matters in this market
Both tiers are priced per domain. In most businesses that is a formality, because most businesses have one website and will always have one website. In a Houston company serving buyers abroad it is genuinely a decision, and it deserves to be made deliberately rather than discovered at renewal.
Three situations turn one domain into two. A separate trading entity acquired and never merged, still holding its own listings and its own inbound links. A dedicated site for an export or trade arm aimed at a different buyer entirely. And a second-language presence — Spanish most often, given the volume of enquiry from Mexico and Latin America, though the same logic applies to any market that sends you serious work.
The mixed configuration in that third tile is the one most multi-domain firms end up in: the upper tier on the domain that carries the revenue, the lower tier on the secondary property. The panel handles both under one account, with site tags acting as a global filter and individual sites shareable with specific email addresses, so a second domain does not mean a second login or a second report.
A twelve-month example for a Pasadena valve and actuation shop
Take a mid-sized valve repair and actuation service company on the east side of the county. One main English domain, an established customer base in petrochemical maintenance, and a growing volume of enquiry from Mexican operators that currently lands on English pages nobody wrote for them. They decide to run a full year and review it once.
The plan is phased rather than flat, which is how most of these actually run. Three months on the lower tier to establish a baseline and let the keyword pool fill. From month four, the upper tier on the main domain — capability copy carries technical claims, so human review before publication is the reason for the step up — plus a second domain for the Spanish-language trade site on the lower tier, plus a measured PBN allocation. From month six, one Wikipedia slot.
| Months | Main domain | Second domain | Wikipedia | PBN | Block cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1–3 (3 months) | AutoSEO $149 | — | — | — | $447 |
| 4–5 (2 months) | FullSEO $500 | AutoSEO $149 | — | 100 · $100 | $1,498 |
| 6–12 (7 months) | FullSEO $500 | AutoSEO $149 | 1 · $10 | 100 · $100 | $5,313 |
| Twelve-month total | $7,258 | ||||
The arithmetic closes as follows. Months one to three run at $149, giving $447. Months four and five run at $500 plus $149 plus $100, which is $749 a month, giving $1,498. Months six to twelve run at $500 plus $149 plus $10 plus $100, which is $759 a month across seven months, giving $5,313. The three blocks sum to $7,258, an average of roughly $605 a month across the year.
Now put $7,258 beside the two numbers you wrote down at the start. Against one exhibition stand it is a comparison most firms in this sector find uncomfortable, because the stand is larger and less measurable. Against the gross margin on one recovered turnaround scope it usually disappears. Neither comparison proves the campaign will work. Both establish whether the question is worth your attention at all.
Common questions
Can we start on the lower tier and move up later?
That is the normal path and the one used in the example above. Running the lower tier first lets the keyword pool fill from Search Console and SERP data before anyone spends time selecting manually, which makes the manual selection at the upper tier better informed. Starting at $500 with an empty pool means paying for override capability you cannot yet use well.
How long before we can judge whether it is working?
First measurable movement typically appears at four to eight weeks. Judging the campaign requires longer — two quarters is a fair minimum, and in a sector where the buying cycle itself runs months, the honest horizon for a commercial verdict is closer to a year. Anyone who reads a six-week report as a verdict will cancel campaigns that were working and continue ones that were not.
Do the add-ons make sense on the lower tier, or only the upper one?
They attach to either. The difference is who decides how they are used. At the upper tier placements can be directed with domain rating targets; at the lower tier the automation places them. A modest allocation on the lower tier is a reasonable experiment. A large allocation on the lower tier is volume without direction.
We already have someone doing SEO internally. Does either tier still fit?
The lower tier tends to fit better in that case, because the expensive part of the upper tier is people, and you already have one. The internal person gets the analytics, the keyword pool and the automated placement, and keeps the judgment work they were hired for. The upper tier makes more sense when nobody internally owns the work at all.
Is the Spanish site really worth a second subscription?
Only if the enquiries exist. Check the country breakdown in your analytics first: if non-US impressions concentrate on specific capability pages and repeat month over month, there is demand to serve. If they are scattered and change countries each month, build the language section as a subfolder on the existing domain instead and keep it to one subscription.
Choosing, and what to expect afterwards
Settled scope, one domain
A large share of contracting and trade businesses in this county, and there is nothing second-class about it.
- Service list stable, geography not disputed internally
- No marketing staff, or one person needing instruments not headcount
- Copy that makes no claim anyone could invoice against
Claims, vocabularies, policy
Industrial services, freight forwarding and customs brokerage usually land here for the review switch rather than the staffing.
- Published copy carries contractual weight
- Buyers in different markets use different vocabularies
- Link quality is a policy question, not a volume one
- Nobody internal owns the work at all
The honest expectation is this: first movement in the analytics at four to eight weeks, a defensible read on direction after two quarters, and a commercial verdict at a year. Budget for the year or do not start, because a campaign cancelled at month four has cost you the money and returned none of the information.
If you want to see the configuration priced against your own domain before committing to any of it, set up a campaign for your domain and start at the lower tier with no add-ons. The My SEO campaign area holds the tier switches and the slot selectors in one place, the keyword approval queue is where the pool gets settled, and the Stream feed logs each new placement with its donor rating and traffic so the add-on lines can be audited rather than trusted. How we phase this for industrial clients is set out across our service pages, with related material on the blog.