A warehousing group's marketing coordinator finds a tool she likes, notes the monthly price and forwards the link to finance. What comes back is not a yes or a no. It is a request for a twelve-month total, broken into lines, with the variable part identified — because that is the only shape in which money gets approved in this trade.
Search subscriptions are advertised as a monthly figure per domain, which is the least useful unit for anybody who has to defend the spend. This article converts the two campaign tiers into an annual budget, states plainly which lines can move and which cannot, and shows a full worked example that adds up.
Why a monthly price fails the moment it leaves your desk
In a forwarding, terminal or customs business, an operating expense of this size passes through a procurement routine designed for services with contracts and cost drivers: a term, a total commitment, a fixed component, a variable component and a named internal owner. A price per month satisfies none of that.
The pattern repeats what happens on the sales side of the same company. Whoever discovers a supplier is almost never the person who signs, and the document that travels between them has to survive being read by somebody with no context and three comparable proposals on the desk. Your own internal budget request is that document, pointed inwards.
- A term, not a rolling arrangement. Twelve months is the natural unit, because it matches how tender and renewal cycles in the port cluster are budgeted and reviewed.
- A fixed line and a variable line. Subscriptions are predictable and can be committed. Placement slots are bought in discrete quantities and belong in a separate line with a ceiling on it.
- Per domain, if you run more than one. Groups in this sector frequently operate separate sites for forwarding, storage and customs representation, and each is licensed on its own.
- An internal owner with hours attached. Both tiers require somebody to approve or reject candidates and to answer questions. Leave that off the sheet and the first quarter goes badly.
Two levels, and the boundary is control rather than capability
The two tiers are often described as small and large, which misleads. Both run the same automation over the same data and reach the same placement network. What changes at the higher tier is who decides, and whether a person looks at an edit before it goes live on a page a regulator or a customer might read.
The engine and the data
Everything that reads, measures and proposes is the same, so the cheaper tier is not a reduced version of the analysis.
- Search Console and rank-tracking views in full
- Access to the same placement network
- The project assistant and its data feed
The right to decide first
Three points where a person is inserted ahead of the automation, plus the staff to act on what the review turns up.
- Keywords picked by hand, discovery still running
- Placements bought against a strength threshold
- On-site edits held until somebody approves them
AutoSEO
For a company where nobody's job description mentions search and the site is maintained between other duties.
- Keywords found and ordered without you. The pool draws on Search Console, live result pages and any seed phrases you add; the system proposes and prioritises, and each candidate is then approved, declined or deferred individually.
- Backlink building left to run. Placements are made across a partner network of more than 230,000 sites, without a target for donor strength and without you nominating the hosts.
- On-site suggestions generated automatically. Recommended edits are produced by the model and applied without an intermediate approval step, which is fine for a blog and less comfortable for a page carrying licence conditions.
- Full analytics and the live assistant. The Search Console and rank-tracking views come with the tier, as does the chat assistant bound to the project's own data.
One domain on the automated tier for a full year is 149 multiplied by twelve, which is 1,788 USD. That is the smallest honest commitment available, and for a single-site operator with a straightforward service page set it is frequently the right one.
FullSEO and the value of a human veto
FullSEO
For a site where a wrong sentence on a service page is a compliance problem rather than a typo.
- Keywords chosen by hand, with a fallback. Phrases are selected manually and the automatic discovery continues underneath, so the pipeline does not stall when nobody has time to review the queue.
- Placements against a domain-rating target. Backlinks are placed manually with a stated strength threshold, which is the difference between buying links and buying a count of links.
- Human review before on-site edits ship. Proposed changes wait for approval. On pages describing authorisations, acceptance rules or liability terms, that queue is the entire reason to be on this tier.
- People behind the automation. The tier includes SEO specialists, developers and writers, which matters when the fix is a template change rather than a wording change.
Twelve months of the managed tier on one domain is 500 multiplied by twelve, or 6,000 USD. The gap against the automated tier is 6,000 minus 1,788, which is 4,212 USD a year per domain — the price of the veto, the manual placement targeting and the team.
| Element | AutoSEO | FullSEO | Matters most when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly licence per domain | 149 USD | 500 USD | Always; it is the committed line |
| Keyword selection | Automatic discovery and ranking | Manual, with automatic fallback | Demand is phrased in regulatory vocabulary |
| Placement targeting | Network placement, no strength target | Manual, against a domain-rating target | Your sector has few credible donors |
| On-site changes | Applied automatically | Held for human review | Pages state licences, limits or liabilities |
| People available | Automation and the assistant | Specialists, developers, writers | The fix is structural, not editorial |
| Twelve months, one domain | 1,788 USD | 6,000 USD | The figure finance will compare |
Placement slots, priced per unit and bought in fixed quantities
Alongside the subscription sit two purchasable placement types, and both are bought as slots in preset quantities rather than as an open budget. Encyclopaedia placements cost 10 USD a slot and are offered in quantities of none, one, five or ten. Network placements cost 1 USD a slot and come in quantities of none, twenty, one hundred or five hundred.
The unit prices make the arithmetic simple and the temptation obvious. Five hundred network slots is 500 USD, which next to a managed subscription looks like a rounding error and reads, to somebody scanning an invoice, like the best value on the page.
Treat the slot lines as a ceiling rather than a plan. A budget that names a maximum and spends less is easy to defend at the next review; a budget with an open variable line is the one that gets frozen halfway through the year.
A full year costed line by line
Take a group with two sites: a forwarding domain, which is the commercial front door, and a smaller warehousing and customs domain. The plan below is deliberately ordinary. Both sites start on the automated tier while the reporting is being cleaned up, and the forwarding domain moves to the managed tier at the start of the fourth month, once there is something worth reviewing.
Placements begin modestly and only after the pages are worth linking to. Twenty network slots in each of months two and three; from month four onwards, one hundred network slots a month; and two encyclopaedia purchases of five slots each, one in month four and one in month eight.
| Period | Forwarding domain | Warehousing domain | Placement slots | Period total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Months 1–3 | AutoSEO, 3 × 149 = 447 USD | AutoSEO, 3 × 149 = 447 USD | 40 network slots = 40 USD | 934 USD |
| Months 4–12 | FullSEO, 9 × 500 = 4,500 USD | AutoSEO, 9 × 149 = 1,341 USD | 900 network + 10 encyclopaedia = 1,000 USD | 6,841 USD |
| Twelve months | 4,947 USD | 1,788 USD | 1,040 USD | 7,775 USD |
Every figure in that table is checkable by hand. The forwarding domain is 447 for the first quarter plus 4,500 for the remaining nine months, giving 4,947. The warehousing domain runs on the automated tier all year: 149 multiplied by twelve is 1,788, which splits as 447 plus 1,341. Subscriptions together come to 4,947 plus 1,788, which is 6,735.
The slots: twenty at one dollar in each of two months is 40 USD; one hundred a month for nine months is 900 slots and 900 USD; two purchases of five encyclopaedia slots is ten slots at ten dollars, or 100 USD. Those three lines are 40 plus 900 plus 100, which is 1,040 USD across 950 individual slots.
The year totals 6,735 plus 1,040, which is 7,775 USD. Read down the period column instead and it is 934 plus 6,841, which is also 7,775. Divided across twelve months that is a shade under 648 USD a month, and the variable half is 1,040 out of 7,775, or a little over thirteen per cent of the spend.
The costs that never reach the subscription
A budget built only from the licence and the slots understates the year, and the understatement is not small. Both tiers assume somebody on your side is present.
Deciding on candidates
Keyword suggestions arrive individually and want approving, declining or deferring by somebody who knows what the company actually accepts.
- Perhaps an hour a week once the queue is flowing
- Best done by an operations person, not a marketer
Producing what is missing
Where the analysis identifies a gap, the explanation still has to be written, and the facts in it can only come from inside the business.
- Licence numbers, capacities, acceptance rules
- Approval by whoever owns the compliance risk
Fixing the site itself
Template problems, slow pages and address changes sit with whoever maintains the site, and no subscription reaches into your codebase.
- Usually an agency or a developer already retained
- Concentrated in the first quarter, then sporadic
Reading the results
Someone has to look at the reporting monthly, decide what it means, and say so in a sentence a director can act on.
- Half a day a month, including the write-up
- Exports run to 10,000 rows in CSV or JSON
None of these is a reason to hesitate. They are reasons to name an owner before the first invoice, because an unowned subscription in an operations-led company quietly becomes a line nobody can explain at renewal.
A decision rule that holds up under questioning
The upgrade decision is usually presented as a matter of ambition. It is better treated as a matter of risk and of vocabulary, both of which can be argued in a budget meeting without appealing to anybody's optimism.
| Situation | Sensible tier | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|
| One site, service pages, no compliance text | Automated | Nothing on the page carries a legal consequence if reworded |
| Pages stating licences, classes or liability terms | Managed | The review queue is the product; automatic edits are the risk |
| Several domains, one commercially critical | Mixed | Upgrade the front door, leave the others on the automated tier |
| Demand phrased in regulatory language | Managed | Manual selection beats discovery on rare specialist phrasing |
| Few credible donor sites in the sector | Managed | A strength target matters more than placement volume |
| Budget approved but no internal owner | Neither, yet | Both tiers stall without somebody clearing the queue |
Timing is worth as much as tier. First measurable movement generally appears somewhere between four and eight weeks, and on the thin specialist volumes typical of the port cluster it tends towards the later end. Against buyers who award on annual cycles, a gain in March may not convert until the following tender opens, so the year you are budgeting rarely contains the revenue it produces.
That gap is an argument for starting earlier, not for spending more. The comparison of the two tiers is worth reading alongside your own renewal calendar rather than in isolation, and the project stream gives you a dated record of what was published and placed, which is the evidence you will want when somebody asks in month eleven what the money bought.
Questions this raises
Can we run one domain on the managed tier and another on the automated one?
Yes, and for most groups in this sector that is the sensible arrangement. Both prices are per domain, so the mix is a straightforward addition. The worked example above does exactly this: 500 USD a month for the commercial front door and 149 USD for the second site, which is 649 USD a month while both run.
Are the placement slots compulsory?
No. Both quantities include a zero option, and a campaign can run on the subscription alone. Starting at zero for the first couple of months is often wise, since placements pointing at pages you are about to rewrite are placements bought twice.
Is the largest network quantity better value than the smallest?
It is better value per slot, which is a different claim. Five hundred slots cost 500 USD and twenty cost 20 USD, so the unit price is identical at one dollar; what changes is the total exposure. The relevant question is whether the campaign has a use for that much placement, not whether the line looks affordable.
What happens if we approve nothing in the keyword queue for a month?
On the managed tier the automatic fallback keeps discovery running, so the campaign does not stop. On the automated tier the system continues proposing and prioritising regardless. In both cases the work proceeds without your judgement in it, which is the outcome the queue exists to prevent.
How should we present this to a finance committee?
One page: the twelve-month total, the split between committed subscription and capped variable spend, the named internal owner with an hours estimate, and one sentence on the expected delay before movement. Committees reject open-ended commitments far more readily than they reject large ones.
Replace the assumptions and keep the method
Start with the count that decides everything else: how many domains you genuinely need to promote. Groups in this trade often carry more sites than they can justify, and retiring one is a larger saving than any discount, because the licence is per domain and so is the attention it consumes.
Then place the upgrade month rather than assuming it. There is little sense in paying for a review queue before there is anything in the queue worth reviewing, and equally little in leaving a compliance-heavy page under automatic edits once the campaign is producing them at volume. In the example above that boundary fell at month four; on your site it may fall at month two or month seven.
Set the slot ceiling last and keep it deliberately low for the first quarter. Then write the three lines out — committed subscription, capped placements, internal hours — and add them once by hand before anyone else does. The groundwork those figures depend on is described under our services, and the reporting side of the same question is covered in the English article index.
If you would rather price it against your own site than against a worked example, open the panel and configure a campaign for one domain, set the slot quantities to zero and read the committed figure on its own. Add the variable line afterwards, once you can say out loud what the placements are for. The published price list will not change; only your assumptions will, and those are the part worth arguing about.
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