The subscription is flat, the demand is not. On a coast where half the year's bookings are decided between February and June, the useful question about an automated campaign is not what it costs per month but what it costs across a whole season.
Price lists invite the wrong comparison. Put 149 USD beside 500 USD and the instinct is to hunt for missing features at the lower number, which is not how the two are separated.
What follows is a costing exercise instead: two tiers, two add-ons priced by the slot, everything billed per domain per month, run across twelve months for a Lower Mainland business whose traffic doubles in July and empties by November. The campaign automation inside the My SEO module is priced simply enough that the arithmetic is not the hard part. Matching it to a season is.
A flat monthly price against a demand curve that never flattens
Both tiers attach to a domain, not to a company or an account. One login holds a whole portfolio, but each domain being actively worked carries a subscription of its own. A single-site operator never notices this. For anyone running a Canadian storefront on a .ca, a cross-border catalogue on a .com and a separate brand for the guided side, it is the entire cost model.
So portfolio shape drives the bill rather than headcount: a three-person outfitter with four domains pays more than a forty-person firm with one. Tiers also mix freely, month by month.
That last figure is the one that collides with seasonality. Work started in March shows its first effects in April or May — perfect timing, or three months late, depending on whether the peak is summer on the water or winter on the mountain.
What 149 USD a month actually keeps running
The lower tier is automated, not abridged. Search Console reporting, rank tracking, the competitor views and the live assistant on your project data are all present at this price. What the software takes over is the deciding: which terms get chased, and where links go.
AutoSEO — the campaign that survives your busy season
For operators with nobody free to make weekly decisions, and for domains that deserve maintenance rather than management.
- Keyword discovery and ranking, unattended. Candidates are gathered and prioritised without anyone naming a starting term.
- Links built without instruction. Placements run across a partner network of 230,000-plus websites, and nobody has to nominate a target.
- Page-level suggestions from the AI layer. Recommendations arrive as proposals your team implements when it has capacity.
- The full analytics stack. Search Console views, rank tracking and the live chat are identical to the upper tier.
What you give up is the steering. Nobody on your side names the terms, and there is no floor on the authority of the sites a link lands on. For a secondary catalogue that is a fair exchange; for the domain taking July's bookings, it may not be.
The 351 dollars between the tiers
Nothing from the lower tier is withdrawn. Two categories are added: the ability to work the same mechanisms by hand, and people. Specialists, developers and writers are attached to the account here — the part a feature table renders badly, because it is not a feature.
FullSEO — automation you are allowed to overrule
For the domain that carries the revenue, and for pages where a wrong sentence about conditions is a real problem.
- Keyword selection by hand, with a safety net. You name the terms; when nobody is naming them, the automatic selection takes back over instead of the campaign going quiet.
- Placement steered by domain rating. A DR floor of your choosing replaces whatever the network would have offered next.
- Review before anything ships. Proposed edits wait in a queue until somebody signs them off.
- People, not simply a larger licence. Semalt's own specialists, developers and writers work the account at this level.
| What is being decided | At 149 USD | At 500 USD |
|---|---|---|
| Which terms the campaign chases | The system picks them | You pick them, fallback behind you |
| Where a link lands | Wherever the network offers next | Filtered by the DR floor you set |
| Whether an edit goes live | Your team implements the proposal | Queued until somebody approves it |
| Search Console and rank data | All of it | All of it |
| Live assistant over project data | Yes | Yes |
| People working the account | Nobody | Specialists, developers, writers |
Nothing analytical is held back at the cheaper price, so a domain can be run on AutoSEO for a quarter before anyone signs off on the upper tier. The extra 351 USD buys the standing to overrule the software, and people who will do it with you.
Two add-ons, sold by the slot rather than the budget
Neither package is an open-ended budget. Each sits above whichever tier the domain is on, and each is bought in whole slots — a genuine convenience for a small business, because the number holds still in a plan for a year.
Wikipedia slots
Four steps only — nothing, one, five or ten — charged by the slot each month.
- Nothing sits between the steps. One slot, five or ten — so the package runs from nothing to 100 USD a month.
- A reference context, not a traffic channel. Judge these as citations rather than as a source of sessions.
- Small beside the subscription. Even the largest option costs a fifth of a FullSEO month.
PBN slots
Four steps only — nothing, twenty, a hundred or five hundred — at a dollar a slot each month.
- Twenty, a hundred or five hundred. The monthly cost therefore lands at nothing, 20, 100 or 500 USD, and nowhere else.
- The top option equals an entire subscription. Five hundred slots a month is what a second domain on the upper tier would cost.
- A dollar a slot flatters the largest box. The unit price looks trivial; the line on the invoice is the number to read.
| Package | Steps available | Slot price | Smallest paid step | Largest step |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | none, 1, 5, 10 | 10 USD | 10 USD monthly | 100 USD monthly |
| PBN | none, 20, 100, 500 | 1 USD | 20 USD monthly | 500 USD monthly |
Where the terms come from, and the verdict most teams never use
Both tiers work from one candidate pool, fed from three directions. Search Console contributes the terms the domain already collects impressions against. Live results contribute the competitive layer — the queries your rivals hold and you do not, which here usually means a listings platform or a business in Washington State. Seed keywords contribute the vocabulary of the trade.
The three are combined because each fails differently. Search Console can only report ground you already stand on, so alone it repeats last year. Live results hand you volume that converts for somebody else's model. Seed terms carry in-house language no customer types. The shared candidate pool merges all three, then returns each candidate for one of three verdicts.
Into the active set
The term joins the campaign and work begins. Check first that a page exists to receive the traffic, and that its season has not passed.
- Confirm a landing page exists
- Check the timing against the season
Out, and it stays out
The candidate is dismissed and stops resurfacing. Keep it for genuinely wrong terms: competitor names, services you do not offer, regions you do not ship to.
Right term, wrong month
The candidate is parked rather than killed. On a seasonal domain this verdict does most of the work, because half the pool is correct and simply early.
- Revisit before each season turns
- Keeps the reject list meaningful
Why two verdicts are not enough
Teams using accept and reject alone kill good terms for calendar reasons, and a year later the pool has narrowed to whatever suited March.
The mode switch, and why a seasonal business needs it
The upper tier is not a standing commitment to manual work, which is more useful than it sounds. Keyword selection runs by hand as long as somebody has time; when that stops — a peak month, a staff change, a store move — the automatic selection takes it back rather than the campaign idling.
Review works the same way on the on-site side: edits wait for approval before reaching a live page — the mode you want for anything stating conditions, prices, closures or safety, and a needless bottleneck for a post about packing lists. The realistic pattern is asymmetric.
- Manual selection in bursts. Two or three weeks of it before a season turns, then back to automatic while the season is worked.
- Review mode permanently on where it matters. Rates, conditions, cancellation terms, anything describing risk. The rest can move without a queue.
- Fallback as insurance, not as a default. Manual control fails not by deciding badly but by not deciding at all for eleven weeks.
A Vancouver outfitter, costed across a full year
Take an outdoor retailer of a kind this city produces in quantity: a Mount Pleasant store selling rain shells, paddling gear and winter kit, a rental and guided-tour arm working out of Deep Cove from late spring to early autumn, eleven staff at peak against five in February. Three domains — a .ca storefront, a .com carrying the same catalogue for shoppers in Washington, and one for the tour brand.
The constraint is not money. Between June and September nobody has an hour for a keyword decision; between January and April there is time and no revenue. One way to configure that portfolio through the year:
| Period | Storefront .ca | Cross-border .com | Tour brand | Monthly total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Months 1–2 · planning | FullSEO · 500 | AutoSEO · 149 | — | 649 USD |
| Months 3–5 · run-up | FullSEO · 500 | AutoSEO · 149 | AutoSEO · 149 | 798 USD |
| Months 6–8 · peak | FullSEO · 500 | AutoSEO · 149, PBN · 20 | FullSEO · 500 | 1,169 USD |
| Months 9–12 · shoulder, winter | FullSEO · 500, Wikipedia · 1 | AutoSEO · 149, PBN · 20 | AutoSEO · 149 | 828 USD |
Read down the columns instead of across the rows. The storefront runs to 6,000 USD for a full year of FullSEO plus 40 USD for one Wikipedia slot over four months — 6,040 USD. The cross-border site takes 1,788 USD on the lower tier and 140 USD for twenty PBN slots over seven months — 1,928 USD. The tour brand, live ten months, absorbs 447 USD on AutoSEO, 1,500 USD across three peak months and 596 USD once it drops back — 2,543 USD.
Two comparisons show where the money goes. A year of FullSEO across all three sites would be 18,000 USD — a great deal of steering on two properties where nobody would touch the wheel. A year of AutoSEO across all three would be 5,364 USD, and would take review away from the storefront and the DR floor away from the tour brand in the three months that decide its year. The seasonal step up between those extremes costs 1,053 USD.
How fast anything moves, and which domain gets which tier
The first measurable movement usually shows up somewhere in weeks four to eight — impressions rising, second-page positions firming, terms arriving in the top thirty. That is movement in the data, not money in the till. Where a national platform and a Seattle rival hold the visible results, real position change is counted in quarters.
Put that against a season. Work commissioned in February gives a first signal around April and a useful reading in June — right for a summer business, wrong for a winter one. Start two quarters before the season you intend to win, and judge the first on leading indicators alone. The Stream assistant helps, since placements, reports and tasks arrive in one chronological feed per project.
Nobody has an hour a week
The domain matters but no one can own weekly decisions on it, least of all in the months when the business is physically full.
- Secondary catalogues
- Rental and microsite domains
You are still testing the portfolio
Five domains and no evidence about which two are worth backing. Twelve months of the lower tier across all five comes in under two domains on the upper one.
The page states conditions
Anything describing tides, avalanche conditions, cancellation rules or who a trip is unsuitable for needs a person between the suggestion and the live page.
- Tour and activity operators
- Property and trades services
Short season, contested term
When one query carries a disproportionate share of the year's bookings, manual selection and a DR floor on placements are worth the 351 USD.
One consideration is specific to a two-domain setup. A .ca and a .com holding overlapping catalogues are two subscriptions competing in two different results environments — different rivals, different volumes, different timing, since the American booking season does not open on the Canadian date. Treating them as one market with a spelling difference costs more than the second subscription. The structural side is covered in our services.
Whichever way the tiers land, the analytics do not change, which is why the partner network behind the placements and the reporting layer can both be judged from the cheaper tier first.
Questions we get asked about the price list
Can we move a domain between tiers during the year?
Billing is monthly and per domain, so tiers can be mixed — the example above steps one site up for three peak months and back down afterwards. Changing tier does not wipe the campaign's history: a domain moved down loses the manual controls, not its data.
Is 500 USD just 149 USD with more features unlocked?
No. The dashboards are identical at both prices. What changes is who decides: keyword selection by hand with a fallback behind it, placement against a domain rating floor, review before an edit goes live, plus Semalt's specialists, developers and writers on the account. The higher price buys authority over the campaign and the people to use it, not extra screens.
The PBN slots are a dollar each. Why not take five hundred?
Because 500 slots is 500 USD a month, what a second domain on the upper tier costs, and quantity is no proxy for relevance. If your pages are thinner than the platform's, more links will not close that gap. Start at a smaller step and scale on what you observe.
What goes into a budget written in Canadian dollars?
Commit to the US dollar number and carry any Canadian one as a marked approximation, with the rate and the date noted next to it. Billing happens in USD, so a converted annual total drifts across twelve months; a modest variance allowance heads off an uncomfortable conversation in the eighth month.
When is the honest first review point on a seasonal domain?
Month four, on leading indicators only — impressions, terms arriving in the top thirty, pages the engine has begun treating differently. Commercial judgement belongs at twelve months, and on a seasonal business at the matching point in the following year rather than at a calendar quarter end. More on reading seasonal data is on our blog.
This costing is deliberately unexciting, which is how the decision gets taken when the person taking it also unlocks the shop in the morning. Two prices, two packages sold by the slot, a multiplier for every domain kept, a horizon longer than the season being fought for. The tier question settles as soon as you name the site where an unreviewed change would be a real problem.
To run these numbers against a real portfolio rather than an invented one, open the dashboard against your own domains and look at the candidate pool before picking a tier. What sits in that list, and how much of it is seasonal, tells you more than any comparison table.