Costing an Automated Campaign: AutoSEO, FullSEO and a Budget Line That Holds

A committee will approve this, not a buyer. That single fact changes what a costing has to contain: not a persuasive monthly figure, but a set of lines each of which somebody can query without being asked to take the supplier's word for it.

The pricing itself is short. Two campaign tiers, charged per domain per month: 149 USD for the automated level and 500 USD for the level that adds people to it. Two add-ons, charged per slot: 10 USD for a Wikipedia placement and 1 USD for a PBN placement, each chosen from a small set of tiers. Nothing here is hard to read.

The difficulty is elsewhere. In a federation, an advocacy office or a consultancy, this expenditure passes a finance committee, a director or a board, against a written note, inside an annual cycle. What follows is built for that note. The two campaign tiers are described by what they change about who decides what, and the twelve-month calculation at the end is set out line by line so that every figure in it can be recomputed by the person reading it.

What a committee actually asks

Four questions come up in almost every approval conversation, and a costing that answers them in advance moves faster than one that does not.

The third question deserves more weight than it usually gets. An organisation that publishes positions on regulated subjects cannot have sentences appear on its website without a named person having read them. That is not a preference; in several of the sectors this readership works in, it is a compliance requirement — and it decides the tier before any budget discussion begins.

The two levels, described by who holds the decisions

Feature lists make the two tiers look like a long menu against a longer one. The honest summary is shorter: they differ in where the decisions sit. At the lower tier the system chooses and you observe. At the higher tier you choose, a team executes, and nothing reaches your site unread.

The keyword pool and the right to reject a term

Candidate terms come from three sources: what Search Console already records for the property, what live results pages show for the subject area, and seed terms you supply yourself. Each candidate is then handled individually — approved, rejected, or deferred for later — rather than accepted as a block.

For most businesses that queue is a convenience. For an organisation with formal positions it is closer to a control. Being visible for a phrase that misstates your remit is not a neutral outcome: it produces enquiries you must decline, and it teaches the search engine to associate you with a subject your members have not mandated you to speak on.

• Reject terms that overstate your standing. Anything implying an official, regulatory or representative role you do not hold belongs in the rejected column, whatever its volume.
• Defer rather than reject where a file is moving. A subject you may take a position on next year is a deferral, not a refusal. The queue is designed to hold it.
• Keep the seed list close to your statutes. The terms you supply yourself are the cheapest way to steer the pool, and the ones you can justify most easily.
• Record who approved what. The keyword approval queue is an audit trail if you treat it as one, and it costs nothing extra to use it that way.

Slots: what they cost, and what they say about you

Both tiers can be extended with placement slots, priced individually and chosen from fixed tiers. The costs are small enough that the decision is never really financial.

Read the bottom right cell carefully. Five hundred private-network placements cost 500 USD a month — the same as one month of the higher campaign tier, and 6,000 USD if you keep it running for a year. Volume is cheap here, and that is exactly what makes the line worth a written policy rather than a default setting.

The Wikipedia line deserves a separate remark of the same kind. Whether a page or a reference is appropriate is decided by that project's editors and its own sourcing rules, not by a budget decision on your side. Treat any placement slot as an attempt subject to external judgement, and never as a purchased outcome.

The broader point about links holds regardless of tier. Placements are made across a partner network of more than 230,000 websites, and the useful question is never how many were made. It is which ones a person in your field would recognise if they looked.

Line by line, at 149 and at 500

The last three rows are worth pointing out to a committee, because they answer a suspicion that arrives unprompted: that the cheaper tier is a demonstration version with the measurement withheld. It is not. The analytics layer is the same at both levels, and so is Stream, the project assistant, which takes keyword and URL lists in batches and keeps campaign activity, reports and new placements in one chronological feed.

What the higher tier adds is decision rights and human capacity. If nobody in your organisation is going to exercise those rights — if there is no one to select terms, set a quality threshold and review copy before it goes live — then you are paying 351 USD a month for controls that will sit unused, and the lower tier is the more honest purchase.

One domain, twelve months, every line shown

The staging is deliberate. Three months at the automated tier establish a baseline and produce the first keyword pool cheaply; the switch to the higher tier happens once there is something to exercise judgement on.

Two independent checks on that total, because a committee is entitled to one. Running the automated tier for the whole year would be 12 × 149 = 1,788 USD; upgrading for nine of those months adds 9 × 351 = 3,159 USD, and 1,788 + 3,159 = 4,947 USD, which is exactly lines 1 and 2 added together. Add the 90 USD of Wikipedia slots and nothing for the private network, and the total is 5,037 USD. Divided across the year that is 419.75 USD a month, and 419.75 × 12 returns 5,037 USD.

One line is missing from the table on purpose, and its absence should be explained rather than hidden: your own time. Budget six hours a month for the approval queue, the review of on-site changes and the reading of the reports, which is 72 hours across the year. Price those hours at whatever your organisation uses internally. A costing that shows 5,037 USD and no staff time is not wrong, but it is incomplete, and the person reviewing it will notice.

Four ways the number moves

The second variation is the one most often chosen once a committee understands what the staging is for, and it is a legitimate choice. Three months of baseline is a diagnostic convenience, not a rule; where the site has known structural problems and somebody is available to review the fixes, paying 963 USD to start the reviewed work in January rather than April is easy to justify in writing.

Frequently asked questions

Which tier, and what to write in the note

The decision is less about budget than about capacity. If somebody in your organisation will select terms, set a quality threshold for links and read copy before it is published, the higher tier turns that person's judgement into the campaign's steering. If nobody will, those controls go unused and the 351 USD a month buys nothing you are collecting.

For the note itself, four sentences generally suffice: what is being bought and per what unit; the twelve-month total with the lines shown; the staff hours, stated separately and priced internally; and the zero against private-network placements with its reason. That last line does more for the document's credibility than any projection, because it is the only place where the costing declines something it could have bought. Our notes on campaign work and the other articles here cover the measurement side.

If you want to check these figures against a live configuration rather than against a table in an article, the tier selection and both slot settings are visible before anything is charged: open the dashboard and price a campaign. Put your own months and slots in, and let the total come out of the arithmetic rather than out of a proposal.