The prices are the easy part: $149 a month per domain, or $500. The hard part is that the cheaper tier works by reading your search history, and a company that opened in Broomfield two years ago has barely any.
That is not a defect in the software. It is arithmetic. Automatic keyword discovery is inference from evidence, and evidence accumulates at the speed of traffic. A firm with nine years of impressions hands the system a rich starting position. A firm with fourteen months hands it a thin one, and the campaign that comes out reflects the input.
So this article prices both tiers and both add-ons, explains where the keyword pool actually comes from, and works a single Front Range business through twelve months to a total you can check.
Automation with less to read
Corridor businesses skew young. In-migration built a lot of this economy inside a decade, which means the contractor, the co-packer and the equipment supplier competing for the same job frequently all incorporated after 2020. Nobody has the archive.
Three consequences follow, and each one changes what you should buy.
- Discovery has a smaller sample. Terms are proposed from what the property has already appeared for. Fourteen months of sparse impressions produce a narrower and noisier candidate list than nine years would.
- The list skews toward the obvious. What little history exists is concentrated in high-volume generic phrasing, because that is how newcomers type. Those are the terms a young domain is least able to win.
- Your trade vocabulary is missing. Nothing in the record tells the system you do glycol loops rather than rooftop units. If you never ranked for it, it was never observed, and it does not appear.
Where the pool comes from and who signs it off
The keyword pool feeding a campaign is assembled from three inputs, and they behave very differently depending on how old the domain is. Every candidate that emerges lands in an approval queue where it is cleared, rejected or deferred one at a time.
Search Console history
What the verified property has actually been served for. Precise, real, and proportional to how long you have existed.
- Strongest input for an old domain
- Nearly silent for a new one
- Rare terms are suppressed anyway
Live results readings
Readings taken from the results page itself, which is not limited to phrases you have appeared for.
- Sees the category, not just you
- Surfaces competitor territory
- Volume-led, so it favors generic wording
Your own seed terms
Phrases you supply. The only channel through which knowledge that exists nowhere online gets into the pool.
- Costs nothing but an hour
- Carries the trade vocabulary
- Decisive for a young domain
Candidate by candidate
Each proposal is cleared, refused or held back individually rather than accepted as a block.
- Deferred is not rejected
- Refusals teach the priority order
- Ten minutes a week is enough
Read those four together and the shape of the problem is clear. For a firm with a long record, source one dominates and the queue is a formality. For a firm three years old, source one is thin, source two pulls toward phrasing that national competitors already own, and source three is doing work nothing else can do.
Seeding is unglamorous and takes an afternoon. Sit down with whoever quotes the jobs and write out what customers say on the phone — the equipment names, the failure modes, the certifications they ask about, the towns they name. Twenty of those beat two hundred pulled from a volume tool, because volume tools rank by demand and you are trying to buy the terms nobody is bidding against yet.
What $149 a month actually buys
AutoSEO — the campaign decides for itself
For an owner who wants steady progress without adding it to anybody's job description.
- Terms found and prioritized without a brief. Discovery and ordering happen unattended, with the approval queue as your only touch point.
- Link building keeps its own calendar. Placements draw on a partner network exceeding 230,000 websites.
- On-site proposals generated against your pages. Suggestions come from the property itself rather than from a generic checklist.
- The full analytics stack sits beside it. Search Console views, rank tracking and a chat bound to that project's data, in the same panel.
The honest description of this tier is that it removes the excuse. Most small firms along the corridor do not have an SEO problem so much as an attention problem: something gets published in February, nothing happens again until the following winter, and the intervening ten months are the whole story. A campaign that runs whether or not anyone remembered it is worth more than most of what agencies sell at four times the price.
Its weakness is exactly the one described above. With little history to read, the automatic half of the work is guessing from a small sample, and unless somebody seeds and reviews, the guesses persist.
What the extra $351 changes
FullSEO — you take the wheel where it matters
For a site where a badly chosen term or a badly aimed page is expensive to be wrong about.
- You pick the terms, with automatic cover behind you. Selection is yours, and an unsigned list never freezes the campaign. For a young domain this is the most useful thing in the tier.
- Placement aimed at a Domain Rating you nominate. Rather than taking whatever comes up next, you name the DR band links should come from.
- A person reads on-site changes first. Review is a mode you switch on, with specialists, developers and writers standing behind the automation.
The fallback deserves emphasis because it settles the usual objection to manual control. The standard failure of a hands-on plan is that the hands go missing: a list sits unapproved through a busy quarter and the campaign idles. Here the automatic path resumes behind you, so the cost of being distracted is a less precise month rather than a lost one.
Human review is the other half of the difference. On a site with fourteen months of history, an on-site change is being proposed against thin evidence, and a person who knows the trade catches the proposal that reads well and is commercially wrong.
Two extras, and one of them tempts people
Wikipedia slots
Bought in fixed steps, and the cheapest line item on the invoice.
- Four settings, not a free number. Zero, one, five or ten. At ten slots the line is $100 a month, which is a rounding error next to either tier.
- Relevance is the constraint, not budget. A placement has to have somewhere sensible to sit, and most local service firms have fewer such places than they assume.
PBN slots
Priced low enough per unit that the volume settings look harmless.
- The steps are wide. Twenty slots is $20 a month. Five hundred is $500 a month, the same as the entire FullSEO tier.
- A dollar per slot invites bad reasoning. Low unit price says nothing about unit value, and the top setting costs more than most corridor firms spend on everything else combined.
| Setting | Wikipedia at $10 a slot | PBN at $1 a slot | Combined monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Lowest paid step | $10 · 1 slot | $20 · 20 slots | $30 |
| Middle step | $50 · 5 slots | $100 · 100 slots | $150 |
| Top step | $100 · 10 slots | $500 · 500 slots | $600 |
A worked year for a Longmont contractor
Take a refrigeration and process-cooling contractor in Longmont. Opened in 2023, one domain, eleven employees, work concentrated on breweries and food producers between Fort Collins and Broomfield. Roughly fourteen months of usable search history, no in-house marketing, and an owner who can give the campaign forty minutes a week.
The plan below starts cheap deliberately. Months one to four buy discovery and a baseline; the upgrade happens once there is enough evidence for manual selection to be worth paying for.
| Months | Tier | Add-ons | Monthly | Subtotal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | AutoSEO | None | $149 | $298 |
| 3–4 | AutoSEO | PBN 20 slots | $169 | $338 |
| 5–12 | FullSEO | PBN 20, Wikipedia 1 | $530 | $4,240 |
| Total | — | — | — | $4,876 |
The arithmetic, so you can check it. Base tiers: four months of AutoSEO at $149 is $596, eight months of FullSEO at $500 is $4,000, giving $4,596. Add-ons: PBN at 20 slots costs $20 a month and runs from month three to month twelve, which is ten months and $200; one Wikipedia slot at $10 runs from month five to month twelve, eight months and $80. Total $4,876, or $406 a month averaged across the year.
For scale, three other shapes of the same year. Staying on AutoSEO with no add-ons for twelve months is $1,788. Running FullSEO all year with five Wikipedia slots and 100 PBN slots is $650 a month, or $7,800. Every setting at maximum is $1,100 a month, or $13,200, and there is no version of this contractor for whom that is the right answer.
Time, and who each tier is for
The first measurable movement usually shows up somewhere between four and eight weeks. Movement is not revenue: a term crossing into the top thirty, impressions where the row was previously blank, a page beginning to be served. The gap between that and a phone call is a further stretch nobody can price for you, and for a young domain in a competitive corridor it is usually longer than for an old one.
Which means a three-month trial is not a test of anything. It is a test of the first stage of a process whose second stage has not started. Budget four quarters or do not start.
AutoSEO suits you if
One domain, a modest service area, and the real problem is that nothing gets done between busy seasons.
- You will seed terms once and review weekly
- No page changes need sign-off
- Budget under $200 a month
FullSEO suits you if
Job values are high, the vocabulary is specialized, or a wrong page going live has consequences.
- Regulated or technical trade
- Corridor-wide service area
- You want a person in the loop
Begin with tier one if
The domain is under two years old and there is genuinely nothing yet for manual selection to select from.
- Upgrade once terms are ranking
- Spend the difference on the site
- Revisit at month four
Wait if
The site cannot take a conversion, the phone is unanswered at four o'clock, or nobody can name what you sell.
- Traffic magnifies what exists
- Fix the basics first
- Two months, not two years
Questions asked at the quote stage
Is it sensible to begin on the lower tier and upgrade?
Yes, and for a young domain that is frequently the sensible order. The first months are largely discovery, which the automatic tier does perfectly well. Upgrade when you have enough ranking terms that choosing among them is a real decision rather than a guess.
We have almost no Search Console history. Does the automation still work?
It works, with a smaller sample. Live results readings cover part of the gap, but they lean toward high-volume generic phrasing. Your seed terms are what make up the rest, which is why the seeding hour matters more for a three-year-old business than for a thirty-year-old one.
Is the PBN add-on safe?
It is a lever with a wide range and no automatic judgment attached. The low settings are one input among several; the top setting is a large, uniform pattern applied to a domain that may have nothing else supporting it. Treat the price per slot as irrelevant and the total volume as the decision.
Do the add-ons make sense without the paid tier underneath?
They are slots attached to a running campaign, not a standalone purchase. More usefully: references pointing at pages nobody has finished writing are wasted, so the order is content, then campaign, then placements.
How much of our time does this take each month?
On the cheaper tier, an hour of seeding at the start and roughly ten minutes a week in the approval queue. On the more expensive tier, more, because you are choosing terms and reviewing changes. Budget an hour a week and treat anything less as accepting the automatic path by default.
How to reach your own number
Start with a count rather than a tier. How many domains, which of them earn anything, and how much history each has. A firm with three domains and one that matters is making a $149 decision, not a $447 one, and that clarification usually happens in ten minutes.
Then look at the history honestly. Under about two years of steady impressions and the manual selection in the upper tier has a thin list to select from, which argues for starting lower and upgrading. Over that, and the extra $351 buys control you can actually exercise. The keyword dynamics view settles it faster than any argument: if terms are entering and leaving the top thirty, there is something to steer. If nothing is moving, there is not yet.
Add-ons come last and stay small. One Wikipedia slot and the lowest PBN step add $30 a month to either tier, which is a defensible experiment. The top settings are not an experiment; they are a second subscription.
Between the numbers and the work sits Stream, the project feed, where placements arrive with their donor figures attached, reports appear on schedule and open tasks stay visible — the practical way to see what a month of spending produced. Related walkthroughs sit on our blog, and the campaign side is set out under what we do for clients. Wider platform notes sit in the overview of the panel, while placements are drawn from a network of 230,000-plus partner sites.
The version of this decision that goes wrong is always the same: the top tier bought in month one, the maximum add-ons switched on because they looked cheap per unit, and cancellation in month five because nothing had happened yet. Nothing was ever going to have happened by month five. Connect the domain and read the keyword pool before choosing a tier. If the pool comes back thin, that is not a reason to spend more. It is the reason to spend an afternoon writing down what your customers actually say on the phone.
