The price list takes four lines to write down. The hard part is not the money — it is that a business selling to visitors and to the trade at once needs two keyword lists, the automation will propose the wrong one first, and somebody in your building has to sit down and say no.

The numbers first. A domain on AutoSEO costs $149 monthly; the same domain on FullSEO costs $500. A Wikipedia slot is priced at $10, and you take 0, 1, 5 or 10 of them. A PBN slot is priced at $1, in counts of 0, 20, 100 or 500. What follows is arithmetic and staffing.

Nashville · The reason this is not a pricing question

Two audiences turn into two keyword pools

A staging company rents to a touring production and to a corporate awards night. A dental group treats families who have lived in Wilson County for thirty years and families who arrived last month for a job at the plant. A venue books a label showcase and a wedding. In every case there are two demand curves under one roof, described in two vocabularies that share almost no words.

An automated campaign discovers keywords and puts them in order. The ordering is driven by volume, and in this market volume belongs almost entirely to the visitor half. So the queue that arrives for approval is dominated by phrasing your professional customers would never type, and if nobody intervenes, that is the campaign you have bought.

Pool one

The high-volume pool

Plain-English phrasing from people describing an occasion. Plentiful, cheap to find, and the automation will surface it first every time.

  • Big numbers, wide intent
  • Often seasonal and easily won
  • Rarely the profitable half of the book
Pool two

The low-volume pool

Trade nouns, specifications, formats, classifications. Thin volume, ruinous to lose, and invisible in any list sorted by search count.

  • Dozens of searches, not thousands
  • Each one attached to a real quote
  • Only a practitioner recognizes them

That is why the honest way to compare $149 against $500 is not to read two feature lists. It is to ask which tier gives you the controls you will actually use, given who is available in your company on a Tuesday afternoon to make judgment calls about words.

Answer this before comparing tiers. Name the person who will approve keywords. If the name is real and the person knows what you sell, the upper tier earns its price. If there is no name, the extra $351 a month buys switches nobody will touch.
Price list · Without decoration

The four lines, and what they come to over a year

Monthly prices flatter themselves. The annual figure is the one an owner can hold up beside every other claim on the same budget, so both appear below.

LineUnitSteps availablePer monthTwelve months
AutoSEOPer domain—$149$1,788
FullSEOPer domain—$500$6,000
Wikipedia placements$10 per slot0 / 1 / 5 / 10$0 – $100$0 – $1,200
PBN placements$1 per slot0 / 20 / 100 / 500$0 – $500$0 – $6,000

Now put those against something a reader in these industries prices without thinking. A day in a good tracking room. One booked event with staff, rentals and a bar. A week of front-of-house cover at a mid-sized venue. The entry tier is roughly the cheapest of those; the upper tier is roughly one of the middling ones, repeated monthly.

$149
entry tier, per month
$500
upper tier, per month
$351
the monthly difference
$4,212
that difference over a year

Four thousand two hundred and twelve dollars is the whole decision. It is not a large number for a company that turns over a booked weekend in the same amount, and it is a serious number for a three-person trade business. What matters is whether it buys anything you will use.

Tier one · Autopilot

AutoSEO at $149 — everything runs, nothing waits for you

My SEO · Entry tier

AutoSEO — SEO that does not need a meeting

For a company where no one has a weekly slot free to adjudicate vocabulary.

$149 / month · per domain
  • Terms discovered and ordered by the software. Candidates surface week after week and arrive ranked, with nobody compiling a spreadsheet after hours.
  • Links accumulate unattended. The partner network behind the placements runs past 230,000 websites, worked at a pace no part-time marketing role keeps up with.
  • Page-level recommendations. What a given URL of yours is missing, rather than advice addressed to websites in general.
  • Nothing on the measurement side is withheld. The Search Console screens, rank tracking, the keyword-dynamics view and a chat assistant wired into this project's figures.
$149
per domain, per month
$1,788
one domain, twelve months
4–8
weeks to first movement

The candidate queue is present at this tier too, and every term still receives its individual verdict. What the entry price does not include is the right to hand the campaign a list and insist on it. You steer by editing proposals, never by making them.

For a business with one audience, that is often enough and occasionally better, since the software has no favorites and no memory of an argument from 2019. For a business with two audiences, it means the volume pool sets the agenda unless somebody works the queue every week.

Tier two · The switch that matters

FullSEO at $500 — and the mode change underneath it

My SEO · Upper tier

FullSEO — automation with the manual controls exposed

For a business where somebody who knows the trade can spend a quarter-hour a week deciding.

$500 / month · per domain
  • You pick the terms; the software picks when you do not. Choosing by hand is the point of this tier, and an automatic fallback sits beneath it so a silent week does not halt the campaign.
  • Placement by hand, against a DR figure you set. Links directed at a Domain Authority floor rather than taken in whatever sequence they happen to appear.
  • A review step in front of every on-site edit. No change goes live until a person signs it off, which is what you want on any page carrying prices, capacities or regulated wording.
  • Staff attached to the account. Specialists, developers and writers on the Semalt side, on top of everything the entry tier was already doing.
$500
per domain, per month
$6,000
one domain, twelve months
3
manual controls added

The automatic fallback deserves a paragraph of its own, because it is the mechanism that makes the upper tier either excellent value or a slow waste. It means the campaign never stalls waiting for a human. It also means nobody will ever chase you for a decision.

So a company that pays $500 and never opens the keyword queue receives, in practice, the automated behavior it could have had for $149, plus a review step nobody performs. The upper tier is priced for participation. Buy it when you have a participant.

Add-ons · Sold in fixed steps

Wikipedia and PBN slots, and what volume does not buy

Add-on · Fixed steps

Wikipedia placements

Small counts, priced per slot, taken in steps rather than by the unit.

$10 per slot · 0 / 1 / 5 / 10
$10
one slot, per month
$50
five slots, per month
$100
ten slots, per month
$1,200
top step over a year
Add-on · Fixed steps

PBN placements

Cheap per unit and sold in large steps, which is exactly where the judgment is required.

$1 per slot · 0 / 20 / 100 / 500
$20
twenty slots, per month
$100
one hundred slots, per month
$500
five hundred slots, per month
$6,000
top step over a year
Count does not stand in for calibre. Take five hundred of those slots and you have spent, across a year, what the upper campaign tier costs — for something that does a different job badly. Hundreds of weak placements never sum to a single strong one, and beyond a point they stop assisting and begin characterizing you. Where a professional audience already knows which publications count in its field, one placement those people respect outweighs a warehouse of names they have never encountered. Pick the step for what it should reinforce, not because a dollar sounds harmless.

The same logic applies to the DR target available at the upper tier. Aiming placements at a Domain Authority floor is a way of spending the same budget on fewer, better positions, and it is the reason directing links at a Domain Authority threshold matters more to a trade-facing business than any raw count.

Approval · The part with a person in it

Three sources feed the pool. One person empties it.

The candidate pool has three feeds. Search Console contributes the queries you were already shown for. Live results-page readings contribute what the market is fighting over. Your own seed terms contribute what you know and neither of the others could guess. Each candidate then gets one of three verdicts — approved, rejected, or held back — decided singly.

That last sentence is the whole product for a two-audience business. It is also the sentence most companies read past, because it describes work rather than a feature — and unowned work does not happen.

  • The queue arrives biased, by design. Ordering by volume is correct behavior for software with no opinion about margins. It is the wrong order for a business whose profitable half is the quiet half.
  • Rejection is the high-value action. Most of the value at this step comes from removing terms, not adding them. A pool cleaned of phrasing you would refuse to quote on is worth more than a pool twice its size.
  • Defer is the state that keeps the peace. Seasonal visitor phrasing is not wrong, it is early. Deferring it settles the argument between the person watching volume and the person watching margin without either of them losing.
  • Two campaigns beat one blended list. Keep the vocabularies apart at the campaign level, because a merged list produces pages that match neither and reporting that explains nothing.

Now the part that gets skipped: naming the person. A marketing coordinator can run the queue mechanically, but cannot know that two fixture names are not interchangeable, that one trade classification means a different insurance requirement, or that a phrase in the list describes work your shop stopped taking two years ago. Those are practitioner judgments.

Decision in the queueWho can actually make itWhy not somebody else
Is this a term we quote on?The person who writes quotesOnly they know what gets refused
Are these two terms the same thing?A practitioner in the tradeThe distinction is invisible from outside
Is this worth winning at our margin?Owner or operations leadVolume says nothing about profit
Can we service more of this?Whoever owns the scheduleWinning unservable work costs reviews
Does this belong to the other pool?Anyone, once the split is written downIt is a filing decision, not a judgment

The practical arrangement that works: one practitioner, fifteen minutes a week, with a written rule for the difficult case. That is a little over an hour a month of somebody billable, spent on the one decision the software cannot make, and it is the cheapest part of the whole line.

Make the rule before the first queue. Write down, in one line each, what you always accept, what you always reject and what always gets deferred. The reviewer then spends fifteen minutes applying a rule rather than an hour relitigating strategy. A queue where every candidate is judged separately only stays fast when the criteria were settled beforehand.
Arithmetic · One business, twelve months

A worked example, start to finish

Take a staging and lighting rental company in Middle Tennessee. One domain. Half the revenue from tours and production companies, half from corporate events and weddings. The head estimator agrees to review the keyword queue on Friday mornings.

The plan is deliberately unheroic. Three months on the entry tier to build a record and see what the pool proposes. Then a switch to the upper tier once it is obvious that the trade vocabulary needs choosing rather than discovering. Add-ons taken at their smallest useful steps, late enough to be aimed at something.

PeriodWhat is runningMonthlyMonthsSubtotal
Months 1–3AutoSEO, one domain$1493$447
Months 4–12FullSEO, one domain$5009$4,500
Months 4–12PBN, first step (20 slots)$209$180
Months 5–12Wikipedia, one slot$108$80
TotalTwelve months, one domain—12$5,207
$5,207
twelve-month total
$434
average per month
13
review hours across the year
$793
under a straight year of FullSEO

Check the arithmetic yourself: three months at $149 is $447; nine at $500 is $4,500; nine at $20 is $180; eight at $10 is $80. Those four add to $5,207, an average of $433.92 a month. A straight twelve months of the upper tier with no add-ons would be $6,000, so the staged approach costs $793 less and spends three of those months learning what to buy.

Everything in that table was invented for this article. It shows one imagined company and one arrangement of the price lines across a year. Nothing in it forecasts anything, quotes anything, describes a typical customer or asserts a result. No return is implied anywhere, since returns turn on margins, capacity and rivals that no supplier has ever inspected. Rebuild the table with your own months and your own steps — and read every figure in it as money leaving, never money arriving.
Horizon · What twelve months really looks like

Time, and which tier fits which business

Expect the first thing you can measure somewhere between the fourth and the eighth week. It shows up in the data rather than the bank: impressions broadening, a few terms crossing into the top thirty. Because Search Console reports roughly two days in arrears, the tail of any window you open is still unsettled.

A realistic shape for a twelve-month run: the first quarter produces a record and a cleaned keyword pool, the second produces position movement on the terms you chose, and the second half is where the trade vocabulary starts converting, because low-volume terms take longer to accumulate the evidence that moves them. Anybody promising commercial results inside a quarter is describing a different business than yours.

Take the entry tier

AutoSEO at $149 suits you if

One domain, one dominant audience, and nobody who can reliably give the queue a quarter-hour a week.

  • Vocabulary is plain rather than technical
  • No compliance-sensitive page copy
  • You would rather buy motion than control
Take the upper tier

FullSEO at $500 suits you if

Two audiences, a practitioner willing to review, and pages carrying prices, capacities or regulated language.

  • Trade terms must be chosen, not inferred
  • Placement quality is judged by your buyers
  • Nothing should go live unreviewed

One panel carries both tiers, so the analytics, the rank tracking, the indexing tools and the generative research are identical either way. Only the controls differ. The two campaign tiers set out together is the quickest way to see which switches genuinely change, and an assistant that swallows keyword lists in batches is how your estimator's seed list reaches the pool without anyone retyping it.

We work through these decisions with businesses across Middle Tennessee, and we write up what we learn on our blog; the campaign side of it is covered under our services. Price both tiers against your own domain — then go and ask the person who writes your quotes whether they will spend a Friday morning on it, because that answer decides which line you buy.

Questions people ask before signing anything

Is it sensible to begin at $149 and upgrade afterwards?

Usually, yes — for a two-audience business it is the natural order. Those opening months on the lower tier assemble the record that the manual controls above need, so by the time you move up you know which terms to insist on rather than guessing at them.

Are the prices per domain or per company?

Per domain. Two domains on the entry tier are $298 a month, not $149. If you run a separate site for one part of the business — a venue and its restaurant, say — budget each one separately and decide whether both need the upper tier or only the one with the technical vocabulary.

Suppose the keyword queue never gets reviewed at all?

The campaign keeps running, because the fallback is automatic. What you get is the volume pool, since that is what ranks highest without an opinion applied. Traffic rises, the trade side stays flat, and the report looks better than the business feels. That gap is the single most common failure here.

A dollar a slot sounds trivial — why not take the biggest step?

No. The unit price is the least useful thing about that line. Five hundred slots is the same annual cost as the upper campaign tier, and a large count of weak placements does not equal a small number of respected ones. Start at the smallest step, aim it at something specific, and increase only if you can say what improved.

How long before I should expect this to pay for itself?

Nobody can tell you that honestly, because it depends on your margin per job and how much work you can absorb. What can be said is that first measurable movement usually appears at four to eight weeks, and low-volume trade terms move later than high-volume ones. Judge the first quarter on whether the keyword pool is right, not on revenue.