At 149 or 500 US dollars a month, the price of an automated campaign is not what stalls the decision in a Calgary professional-services firm. What stalls it is the second half of the sentence: measured against what. This is an attempt to set out both halves honestly, including the part where the attribution line does not exist.
The cheapest line on the budget, and the hardest one to defend
Two numbers carry the whole price list. AutoSEO runs at 149 USD a month, FullSEO at 500 USD a month, and both are billed per domain rather than per account. Two add-ons sit beside them, sold in fixed blocks of slots: Wikipedia placements at 10 USD a slot, PBN placements at 1 USD a slot. That is the entire commercial surface of the two campaign tiers in the Semalt panel, and it takes about a minute to read.
Everything difficult happens after that minute. A firm that bills senior consultants by the hour can run its own comparison faster than any vendor can present one: take your charge-out rate and divide 500 into it. For most engineering, legal and accounting practices downtown, a full year of the top tier on one domain costs a few days of senior billed time. Nobody convenes a committee for that.
So the number is not the obstacle. The obstacle is that the finance director will reasonably ask what the money bought, and the honest answer in this market is harder than the invoice.
That reframing is worth more than any discount. A trial has a scope, a short list of things you agreed in advance to look at, and a date on which somebody decides whether to continue. A promised return has none of those, and it collapses the first quarter nobody credits a deal to search.
AutoSEO at 149 USD a month
The entry tier operates on its own schedule. You connect a domain; the system builds a keyword set, puts it in priority order, and starts placing backlinks. Nobody on your side approves anything for it to keep going.
AutoSEO — the campaign runs itself
For a domain that needs consistent activity rather than close supervision — a second site, a microsite, a brand you acquired.
- Keywords found and ranked for you. Candidates are discovered automatically and put in priority order without a human deciding what matters first.
- Backlinks placed automatically. Placements are drawn from a partner network of more than 230,000 websites, on the system's own cadence.
- On-site suggestions from the model. Recommended changes to your pages arrive as proposals; what you do with them is your business.
- The analytics are not cut down. Full Search Console and SERP reporting is included at this tier, not held back for the higher one.
- Stream is available. The live assistant answers against your actual project data and takes keyword and URL lists in batches.
Notice what is not reduced at the lower tier. The reporting surface is the one the higher tier uses. If you are buying mainly to see what happens around your own name and your practice-area queries, the 149 USD tier already shows it.
FullSEO at 500 USD a month
The higher tier keeps all of that and adds three points where a person can intervene, plus the people to do the intervening. FullSEO includes a team of SEO specialists, developers and writers alongside the automation — which is what explains the price gap, since the software layer is largely shared.
FullSEO — the same engine with hands on it
For the domain whose wording carries reputational weight, where an unreviewed edit is a problem in itself.
- Manual keyword selection, with automatic fallback. You choose from the pool; when nobody chooses, the system proceeds on its own rather than idling.
- Manual placement with a DR target. You can set the domain-rating threshold placements must meet instead of accepting whatever the queue offers.
- Human-review mode for on-site changes. Proposed edits wait for approval. For a firm whose page wording has been through counsel, this is often the whole reason to move up.
- A team, not only a queue. SEO specialists, developers and writers sit behind the tier in addition to the automation.
| Capability | AutoSEO | FullSEO |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword discovery and prioritisation | Automatic | Automatic, or chosen by you |
| Backlink placement | Automatic | Manual, with a DR threshold |
| On-site changes | Suggested to you | Held for human review |
| Search Console and SERP analytics | Full | Full |
| Stream assistant | Included | Included |
| Specialists, developers, writers | Not included | Included |
Read that table with one question in mind: does anyone at your firm actually intend to use the override rows? A partner who means to review keyword choices and never finds the hour is paying 351 USD a month for a feature that quietly falls back to the cheaper tier.
The two placement add-ons, and the one to be careful with
Both add-ons are priced per slot and sold in fixed blocks rather than as an open budget. You are not choosing an amount; you are choosing one of four rungs.
Wikipedia placements
Sold as 0, 1, 5 or 10 slots. The smallest paid step is a rounding error on any professional-services budget.
- Four positions, not a slider. 0, 1, 5 or 10 slots — 0, 10, 50 or 100 USD a month.
- The constraint is eligibility, not cost. Whether a subject can be referenced at all is decided by the encyclopedia's own rules, and no spend changes that.
PBN placements
Sold as 0, 20, 100 or 500 slots. The cheapest per unit on the whole price list, and the one that deserves the most thought.
- Volume is what you are buying. 0, 20, 100 or 500 slots — 0, 20, 100 or 500 USD a month.
- Cheap per unit is not the same as low risk. The price per slot says nothing about the company your domain keeps once the links exist.
| Add-on | Slot blocks | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 0 / 1 / 5 / 10 | 0 / 10 / 50 / 100 USD | 0 / 120 / 600 / 1,200 USD |
| PBN | 0 / 20 / 100 / 500 | 0 / 20 / 100 / 500 USD | 0 / 240 / 1,200 / 6,000 USD |
None of that makes the add-on illegitimate. It makes it a decision with a different risk profile from the subscription beside it, to be taken deliberately rather than because a slot costs a dollar. The sourcing mechanics sit with the placement add-ons, not with the campaign tier.
Where the pool comes from, and how you empty it
Both tiers work from the same keyword pool, filled from three directions. Search Console supplies queries you already appear on. Live SERP data supplies what the market is typing. Your own seed keywords supply terms no dataset would surface — a practice area you are building, a discipline you just hired into.
Every candidate is then handled individually. There are three verdicts: accept it, reject it, or defer it. The middle one is the one most firms underuse.
Search Console
What you already surface on, including the queries you never wrote a page for.
- Grounded in real impressions
- Blind to terms you have never ranked for
Live SERP
What the market types, whether or not you currently appear for any of it.
- Shows the space you are absent from
- Includes terms you would never want
Your seed list
The terms your partners know matter, submitted in batches through Stream.
- The only source that knows your strategy
- Needs someone to actually write it
The reject verdict
Used properly, this is where a professional firm protects the shape of its own campaign.
- Recruitment terms off the client-facing domain
- Terms attached to a matter you will not discuss
Rejection deserves a moment. Much of the traffic around a firm's name here is not commercial at all — candidates, journalists, competitors, people checking whether a name in a news story is the firm they are about to hire. A keyword that pulls that traffic looks excellent in a click report and does nothing for the practice.
The mode switch, and why the fallback is the useful half
Inside FullSEO the keyword step runs in one of two modes. In manual mode you pick from the pool; in automatic mode the system picks. The point is that manual mode has an automatic fallback behind it.
That fallback is what makes the higher tier survivable where the only person qualified to approve a keyword list also has the fullest calendar. Manual selection rarely fails because people disagree; it fails because a proposal deadline lands and three weeks pass with nobody in the queue. Without a fallback that is three weeks of a paused campaign you are still paying for. With one, the campaign keeps moving and you resume control when the week clears.
Human-review mode for on-site changes works the other way, and should: there is no fallback. An edit to page wording ought to wait for a person. If that queue backs up, the correct outcome is that nothing changes.
An engineering consultancy, costed across a year
Take a Calgary engineering consultancy of roughly ninety staff: national client base, one address downtown, work won by referral and repeat engagement. It runs two properties — the main .ca site prospective clients read, and a recruiting domain built during a hiring push and never retired.
Different jobs, different tiers. The main site carries wording reviewed by partners and, in places, by counsel — FullSEO, for the human-review mode. The recruiting site needs steady activity and no supervision — AutoSEO. Both are billed separately, because the unit is the domain.
| Period | Main site | Recruiting site | Add-ons | Monthly total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Months 1–3 | FullSEO, 500 USD | AutoSEO, 149 USD | None | 649 USD |
| Months 4–12 | FullSEO, 500 USD | AutoSEO, 149 USD | 1 Wikipedia slot, 10 USD | 659 USD |
| Twelve-month subtotal | 6,000 USD | 1,788 USD | 90 USD | — |
| Twelve-month total | 7,878 USD (approximately 10,600–11,000 CAD, depending on the rate applied) | |||
PBN slots stay at zero throughout, deliberately. This is a firm whose name appears on stamped drawings. The upside of five hundred cheap placements does not cover the downside of one awkward conversation about where its links come from.
Set that total beside what it competes with in the budget meeting. Not another SEO vendor: a conference booth, a sponsorship, the third revision of a brochure — none of which produce the continuous data record you can read in the campaign and analytics views.
Questions that come up in the review
How quickly should we expect to see anything at all?
First measurable movement typically appears after four to eight weeks. Movement means shifts in impressions, positions and the composition of the keyword set — not signed work. Where the committee takes months and the shortlist arrives by referral, expecting commercial evidence inside a quarter is expecting the wrong thing. Set the review at six months and judge the clarity of the picture, not the pipeline.
Can we start on the cheaper tier and move up later?
Yes, and for many firms that is the sensible order. The analytics are identical at both tiers, so the entry tier already answers the diagnostic question. Move up when you have identified something specific to control — usually the wording of on-site changes, or a domain-rating floor for placements.
We can't attribute a signed engagement to a keyword. Is this measurable at all?
Parts of it are, and you should be precise about which. Impressions, positions, entries and exits from the top ten, and the behaviour of queries containing your own name are measured directly. The path from any of that to a signature is not, and no tool reconstructs it honestly in a committee-driven sale. Treat the measured layer as the deliverable and the commercial layer as judgement.
If nobody has time to approve keywords, are we wasting the FullSEO premium?
Partly. The fallback means the campaign continues, but you are paying for an override you never exercise. The other two elements — human-reviewed on-site changes and the specialist team — do not depend on anyone clearing a queue. If those matter, the tier still earns its place. If none of the three do, the entry tier is the answer.
Should we run our recruiting or microsite domain on the same subscription?
You cannot — billing is per domain, so a second property is a second subscription. That is also a useful separation. A recruiting domain and a client-facing domain want different keywords, and keeping them apart stops candidate traffic inflating the numbers you report commercially.
A defined trial beats a promised return
Which tier suits whom comes down to a short test. AutoSEO fits any domain needing consistent activity and no supervision: second sites, acquired brands, recruiting properties, practice-specific microsites. FullSEO fits the one domain where wording is sensitive, where you want a floor under placement quality, and where someone will genuinely use the controls. Most firms end up with one of each.
When the domain runs unattended
Steady activity matters more than control, and nobody is going to review a queue.
- Recruiting sites and microsites
- Acquired brands still on their own domain
- Any diagnostic-first engagement
When the wording carries weight
Edits should wait for a person, placements should meet a threshold, and someone will actually look.
- The client-facing main site
- Firms where counsel reviews copy
- Teams wanting specialists behind the tool
Then set the trial properly, because this determines whether the spend survives its first budget review. Name the domains and the tiers. Write down the two or three things you will look at — keyword dynamics, the behaviour of your own name as a query, position history on the terms that matter to the practice. Put a date six months out in the calendar and decide now who is in the room. Anything not agreed in advance gets argued about afterwards.
What you are not buying, at either price, is a straight line from a query to a retainer. That line does not exist where three people from one organisation search your name over five weeks and the introduction finally comes from a former colleague. You are buying a continuous automated presence in the searches happening around your firm, and a record clear enough to argue about sensibly. That is a reasonable thing to pay 149 or 500 dollars a month for — and a poor thing to pretend is more.
To see the shape of it against your own domain before it reaches a budget line, open the panel, connect one domain and set your own review date. Start with the property that matters least. For how we structure a trial of this kind for Calgary firms, see our services overview; the rest of the series sits in the blog archive.