Two prices, two add-ons sold in fixed steps, and one question nobody selling this will answer honestly: what else would that money have done? For a family business in this city, that is the only comparison worth making.
The list is short. AutoSEO costs $149 per month per domain, FullSEO $500. Wikipedia placements are $10 a slot, in steps of 0, 1, 5 or 10; PBN placements are $1 a slot, in steps of 0, 20, 100 or 500. Everything else here is arithmetic and judgment.
The reader here has been pitched before — by an agency in Center City, by a platform offering a free audit, by a cousin's nephew who does websites. Those pitches end with a return figure. This one does not, because nobody quoting a return has seen your margins, and the honest test of a monthly line is what it displaces, not what it promises.
Price it against the rest of the year, not against a forecast
Run the annual figures first, because monthly prices flatter themselves. AutoSEO is $1,788 for a year on one domain; FullSEO is $6,000. Those are the numbers that belong in a budget conversation, held against everything else competing for the same money.
An owner in Northeast Philadelphia can price the alternatives from memory. One regional trade show, counting the space, the stand, the printing and two days off the schedule. A part-time person at the front desk for a few months. A second truck's insurance. The point is not that one of these is better; it is that they are the real comparison set, and a vendor's return figure is not.
| Line | One month | Twelve months | The familiar comparison |
|---|---|---|---|
| AutoSEO, one domain | $149 | $1,788 | Under a week of a full-time wage |
| FullSEO, one domain | $500 | $6,000 | A modest booth, or a used van payment |
| Wikipedia, top step | $100 | $1,200 | A month of print advertising nobody tracks |
| PBN, first step | $20 | $240 | Two tanks of diesel |
| PBN, top step | $500 | $6,000 | The same as a year of the upper tier |
AutoSEO at $149, FullSEO at $500
Both tiers run the same campaign machinery. What separates them is who decides inside it: the software alone, or the software with people behind it and switches you can reach.
AutoSEO — nobody has to be assigned to it
For a site that needs steady work from something other than an owner who is already up a ladder.
- Terms discovered and ranked for you. Candidates are found and put in order without anybody drafting a list on a Sunday night.
- Links built without you. The partner network behind the placements runs to more than 230,000 sites, at a pace no one-person marketing department reaches.
- Page suggestions from the model. What a given page of yours lacks, aimed at your URLs rather than websites in general.
- The analytics side stays open. Search Console views, rank tracking and a chat assistant wired to the project's data.
FullSEO — the switches come back to you
For a site where a badly chosen term, or a sentence published unchecked, costs money out in the field.
- Keywords chosen by hand, with automatic fallback. You pick the terms, and nothing stalls when a week goes by without anybody looking at the list.
- Links aimed at a rating you name. Rather than accepting whatever the queue produces, you state the domain rating placements should meet.
- Review mode for the site itself. Edits queue up and wait for somebody to sign them off before publication.
- Specialists, developers and writers. The people behind the automation are most of what the difference in price pays for.
Set out annually, the choice sharpens. Moving one domain up costs $4,212 more across a year — a real block of part-time hours — and it should be bought for a reason you can say out loud: somebody in the building will use the switches, and the pages carry language that cannot go live unread.
Wikipedia at $10 a slot, PBN at $1 a slot
Either tier can carry both add-ons, and neither is a free dial: you pick one of four counts and pay the multiple. Both are configured beside the campaign in the My SEO area of the panel.
Wikipedia placements
Sold in fixed counts: none, one, five or ten.
- Four settings, zero among them. A single slot costs $10, five cost $50, the largest count costs $100 — $1,200 a year if left running.
- Subject matter decides whether it applies. A firm with documented history in an old city has somewhere plausible to be mentioned. A service company founded two years ago has not.
PBN placements
Sold in fixed counts: none, twenty, a hundred or five hundred.
- A dollar each, four counts available. Twenty come to $20 a month, a hundred to $100, and the largest count to $500.
- The low unit price is the trap. Nothing about a dollar feels like a decision, so the top step gets bought by default and the count gets reported as progress.
| Step | Wikipedia | PBN | Yearly, if left on | When it makes sense |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zero | $0 | $0 | $0 | Correct for most local domains |
| First | 1 slot · $10 | 20 slots · $20 | $120 / $240 | Small enough to assess after three months |
| Middle | 5 slots · $50 | 100 slots · $100 | $600 / $1,200 | A site already earning, pushed harder |
| Largest | 10 slots · $100 | 500 slots · $500 | $1,200 / $6,000 | Seldom warranted by one local site |
How the keyword pool is filled and who signs it off
Three sources fill the pool at once, and the mix matters: what one misses, another supplies. On an old domain in this city, the third is where the money usually hides.
Search Console
Terms the site has already surfaced for. Precise about its own past, mute on everything beyond it.
- Counted impressions behind every term
- Cannot see a market you never entered
Live results pages
What the results page holds now, independent of your history. Where terms you own no page for come from.
- Shows the field and who stands in it
- Indifferent to what you actually earn
Your own seed terms
What customers actually say on the phone: township names, the old brand, the trade word rather than the industry word.
- No tool can supply these
- An hour with the office manager produces them
The approval flow
Every candidate is settled individually — approved, rejected or deferred. Nothing slips into the campaign unseen.
- A separate call on each word
- Deferring counts as an answer
Seed terms are the step people skip and the only one that knows the business. A contractor whose customers still ask for the family name from the oil-delivery days, or a food supplier whose buyers use a word the trade dropped twenty years ago, has given the campaign two outward-facing sources and nothing looking in.
Because the gate closes on single words rather than whole batches, review is slower and considerably safer. Long lists still move quickly: Stream, the assistant inside My SEO, accepts keyword and URL files a batch at a time, so a large pool does not become an evening of clicking.
What the mode switch actually changes
FullSEO's three controls are settings, not a separate product. Each can be left automatic, and on many domains most of them should be.
- Manual keyword selection, automatic fallback. You choose the terms; if nobody reviews the list during a busy month, the campaign keeps running on the automatic selection instead of going quiet. Worth switching on where terms map to margin — the high-value service, the emergency call, the work you want more of in February.
- Placement with a rating target. You name the standard. Useful when a particular branch of an old site needs strengthening — a services tree, a county page — rather than more weight landing on the page that already has the most.
- Sign-off on site edits. Changes publish only after somebody approves them. Worth having wherever a page carries licensing, insurance or warranty wording, or anything drafted by a lawyer. Pointless on pages nobody proofreads now.
Read as a list of switches, the tier question stops being about ambition. If none of the three would ever be moved on a given domain, the upper tier is $4,212 a year for controls nobody intends to touch. That can still be defensible — some owners want people on the other end of the account — but say the sentence out loud first.
A year priced for a third-generation contractor
Take a heating and mechanical contractor in the Northeast, third generation, working the city plus Bucks and Montgomery. The grandfather's fuel-oil name is still painted on two vans, and its domain still resolves; the current site trades under a shorter name adopted in 2007. Two domains, two different jobs.
The plan spends where a decision is being made. The main site takes the upper tier for the first half of the year, while service pages are rewritten and somebody checks the wording before it publishes, then drops to the entry tier once the writing is finished. The legacy domain runs on the entry tier for four months — long enough to learn whether the old name still earns — and is then folded into the main site. A small PBN count runs on the main domain all year, and no Wikipedia slots at all.
| Domain | Months 1–6 | Months 7–12 | Add-ons | Twelve-month total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Main site | FullSEO $500 | AutoSEO $149 | PBN 20 slots, $20 monthly | $4,134 |
| Legacy fuel-oil domain | AutoSEO $149, four months | Retired, redirected | None | $596 |
| Both domains | — | — | — | $4,730 |
The arithmetic runs like this. Six months of the upper tier is $3,000 and six of the entry tier is $894, so $3,894 on the main domain, plus $240 for a year of the smallest PBN count: $4,134. The legacy domain costs $149 for four months, or $596. Together, $4,730 for the year — about $394 a month.
Two comparisons place that. Both domains on the upper tier for twelve months costs $12,000 in base fees before a slot is bought; both on the entry tier with nothing added costs $3,576. The plan sits near the cheaper end because it buys review capacity only in the months when somebody reviews, and stops paying for a domain once its question is answered.
What twelve months are actually for
First measurable movement typically shows after four to eight weeks. Movement here means impressions turning up where the site had none, terms crossing into the top thirty, a position curve beginning to bend. It does not mean the phone sounds different, and a campaign judged in week six is judged against the wrong thing.
An old domain carries one advantage worth naming. A site with fifteen years of pages, links from suppliers and associations, and a name the neighborhood already types usually moves sooner than a two-year-old competitor's, because the groundwork was laid by accident over two decades. Everything here works faster on that kind of domain.
Who each tier is actually for
The domain nobody has time to supervise
It earns, or might earn, but no one on staff will read a keyword list on a Tuesday in July.
- A single-location trade, shop or restaurant
- A legacy domain being evaluated before retirement
- Any site where the owner is the marketing department
The domain where mistakes are expensive
Somebody would genuinely overrule the automation, and the pages carry language that has to be checked.
- Regulated, licensed or contractual wording
- A rebuild happening while the campaign runs
- Terms that map directly to margin
Most of this region's business base sits between those two descriptions, and the useful habit is to price each site on its own merits instead of buying for the company as a whole. Because charges attach to a domain, the trading site and an inherited name need not match, and either can be cancelled without disturbing the other. Site tags gather them under one login and reports carry your branding, which is what lets two lines be reviewed in a single sitting. Campaigns and the analytics views share one workspace, so next year's tier question gets settled with figures rather than reopened as an argument.
Common questions
Can we put different tiers on different domains?
Yes. Charges attach to a domain, which makes every site its own decision with nothing forcing consistency between them. The trading site can sit on the upper tier while an old brand name sits on the entry tier — or on nothing at all.
We were burned by an SEO contract before. What is different about paying monthly?
Mainly what you can see, and when. The term list, the placements and the page suggestions are visible from the first weeks instead of summarized in a quarterly deck, so a decision to stop rests on evidence. That does not make the outcome certain; it makes the spend legible while it happens.
Should we buy the top PBN step to move faster?
No. The counts exist so one can be assessed before the next is bought, and the largest runs $500 a month — roughly what a second site costs for a full year on the entry tier. If twenty slots produced nothing you can point at, five hundred produce a great deal more of nothing.
What happens to the old brand domain after the four months?
That is what the four months buy you. If the old name still draws impressions and holds links, the domain earns its own line and keeps it. If not, redirect it into the main site and the cost stops. The example deliberately leaves that answer open.
Is there a minimum we should commit to before judging it?
Six months is the shortest honest window. The first four to eight weeks show whether anything moves; three months show what the automation chose to work on; the next three show whether that choice was right.
The price list fits in a line: two monthly tiers at $149 and $500 for each site, plus slots at $10 and at $1 in four fixed counts, zero always among them. Everything hard sits on your side of the table — how many sites you hold, what each brings in, whether anybody will touch the switches, and what else the money would have bought.
The pattern this region produces most often is an owner sold to badly twice who now declines to spend anything, while a fifteen-year-old domain with real standing in the neighborhood sits untouched. The opposite error costs more — every family domain on the top tier — but both treat the decision as belief rather than arithmetic. Our services overview works the same reasoning through by sector, and further walkthroughs sit in our blog archive.
If testing beats debating, begin with the site you already know brings in work, give it three months at $149, and write down in advance what you expect to see. Tier and slot counts are chosen per site on day one, and the terms the automation picks show up within the first weeks — not in a report at the end of a contract. To price your own two domains rather than an invented contractor's, open the campaign settings for a connected domain and run the arithmetic against figures only you hold.