A single enterprise contract in this segment covers several years of the largest configuration described below. That does not make the price irrelevant — it makes the price the wrong thing to argue about. What matters is whether twelve months is inside your runway, and whether anybody will still be measuring at the end of it.
Proposals in this field avoid the number. There are packages, there is scoping, there is effort by arrangement. The annual total appears nowhere, which is the one line a board pack needs and the reason so many of these decisions get deferred rather than declined.
The prices themselves are published and do not move. A domain on AutoSEO costs 149 dollars per month; the same domain on FullSEO costs 500. Beyond that, two extras are ordered on their own — a Wikipedia placement at 10 dollars, available as 0, 1, 5 or 10 slots, and a PBN placement at 1 dollar, available as 0, 20, 100 or 500 slots.
What separates the two levels
Not the reporting. Search Console analytics, position tracking, generative market analysis and the indexing tools belong to both. The separation is how much proceeds unattended and where a person steps in — which for a company with two people in marketing is a question about capacity, not about features.
AutoSEO — nothing blocks on a person
Fits a company where content is one person's half-time responsibility, which describes most at this stage.
- Candidate terms arrive and are ranked without intervention. Assembled from Google reporting, live results and seed terms you provide. Each candidate can be accepted, rejected or deferred individually — and if nobody gets to it, the campaign does not stall.
- Placements accumulate continuously. Through the partner network, with no per-case sign-off. Where a company reports to investors on channel mix, the continuity matters more than the volume.
- Recommendations against the pages you have. The model names existing pages to extend or link differently rather than proposing a rebuild you cannot resource.
- Reporting and assistant carry no surcharge. Google reporting, position tracking and the project timeline are inside the monthly figure, not billed alongside it.
FullSEO — a say, if somebody exercises it
Fits where a named person understands the German commercial vocabulary and has the time booked.
- Terms selected by hand, with automatic fallback. Where the selection does not happen, automation resumes so nothing halts. In a company shipping every two weeks, that fallback engages more often than anybody expects at purchase.
- Placement against a target authority score. A floor is set and selection follows it, which is the relevant property for a company that has to describe its link profile during diligence.
- Human review before anything takes effect. Proposed changes pass a person first — the point at which a regulated company's approval process attaches.
- Staffing is part of what is bought. According to the provider's description, this level comes with search specialists, developers and writers behind the automated part.
The third property is the one worth weighing carefully in a regulated company. Where every customer-facing statement passes an approval step, a tool with no intermediate review may be unusable regardless of price — and a tool that has one may justify its cost on that basis alone, independently of anything it does for visibility.
Worth noting alongside that: the analytical depth does not vary between the two. Whichever line a company buys, it sees the same eight Google reporting screens, the same six on position tracking, the same six of generative analysis and the same submission tooling. What the higher price purchases is the ability to intervene in the selection, plus the review stage before anything goes live. For a company that has never had structured reporting, the first step is the significant one and the second is a question of internal capacity. Both sit inside the same Semalt workspace.
Two add-ons, sold in steps
| Add-on | Per slot | Orderable quantities | Monthly at the largest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Placement on Wikipedia | $10 | none, 1, 5 or 10 | $100 |
| Placement in the PBN | $1 | none, 20, 100 or 500 | $500 |
Nothing between those quantities exists. Deciding that seven Wikipedia slots would be right leaves five or ten as the options — 50 or 100 dollars a month, 600 dollars apart across a year. In a company where the board reviews spend line by line, that step belongs in the plan and not in a variance note.
Four configurations, calculated in full
| Configuration | Composition | Monthly | Twelve months |
|---|---|---|---|
| A · Minimum | AutoSEO, one domain, no add-ons | $149 | $1,788 |
| B · Entry, reinforced | AutoSEO + 10 Wikipedia slots ($100) + 20 PBN slots ($20) | $269 | $3,228 |
| C · Full level | FullSEO + 5 Wikipedia slots ($50) | $550 | $6,600 |
| D · Split across two domains | FullSEO on the main site + AutoSEO on the documentation domain | $649 | $7,788 |
Stripping the add-ons out, the step between levels is 351 dollars a month — the difference between 500 and 149 — and therefore 4,212 dollars over a year. Configuration D is the one worth noting for technology companies specifically: where documentation sits on its own domain, both prices apply per domain, and the sensible split is usually the higher level where commercial pages live and the entry level where documentation does.
The real question is duration, not amount
In a venture-funded company the binding constraint is rarely the monthly figure. It is whether the activity will still be running in twelve months, given that the marketing plan is rewritten at each raise and the person who started it may not be there.
The larger configuration, abandoned at month seven
Cancelled during a planning reset, four months before anything could have been assessed. Spend incurred, nothing learned.
- Costs more than A run to completion
- Produces no data for the next decision
The smaller configuration, run to twelve months
Survives a planning cycle because the line is small enough not to attract attention, and produces an answer.
- Cheaper in total
- Yields a basis for a larger decision
This is an uncomfortable recommendation for anybody who wants to move quickly, and it holds across this segment. The value of the first year is not the traffic; it is finding out which German terms produce enquiries. That answer costs 1,788 dollars if you run configuration A to completion and nothing at all if you run configuration C for seven months.
A line under a thousand a year
Small enough that a planning review does not pause on it, which is the property that matters most between raises.
- Reaches month twelve intact
- Answers the question it was bought to answer
A line approaching ten thousand
Large enough to appear on a slide, and therefore large enough to be cut in a quarter where something has to be.
- Needs a named owner to defend it
- Rarely survives a change of that owner
This is not an argument for spending less on principle. It is an observation about what actually happens to marketing lines in companies that reforecast quarterly. A configuration that reaches month twelve produces an answer; one that is cut at month seven produces an expense. Choosing the line that will survive your own planning process is therefore a legitimate criterion, and it is rarely written down as one.
What this is weighed against internally
- Another month of sales headcount. The comparison actually being made in most of these companies, and on that basis the entire annual figure is a rounding error. Saying so plainly shortens the conversation considerably.
- Doing nothing and relying on the English documentation. Free on paper. The cost appears as German institutions that never started a process, and no ledger records those.
- An agency retainer. Common, and the effort usually lands internally regardless. An agency unfamiliar with your approval process generates more internal work than it removes.
- Separate tool licences. Data ends up in disconnected interfaces, and a measurable share of a small team's time goes into reconciling exports rather than acting on them.
The fourth item is the one that hurts a two-person marketing function. Reporting in one place, positions in a second and submissions in a third means somebody spends a day a month aligning columns. What a shared workspace does here is delete the reconciliation step, nothing more magical than that. Behind one login sit upwards of thirty-five screens and eleven connected services, and authorising Google happens once for the mailbox, the search reporting and the analytics account together.
What happens inside the twelve months
Billing starts in month one; results do not follow that schedule. The mismatch is the most common cause of early cancellation and the most expensive, because the money has gone before anything became visible.
The useful figure changes as the year runs. For the opening weeks, how much of the site sits in the index is the one thing that reacts quickly enough to read. Around month two, arrivals and departures among the leading positions start carrying information. By month four the traffic and enquiry numbers are no longer pure noise. A figure fit for an investor update exists only near the end. Teams that do not know this build four months of reporting around whatever moved, which is exactly what makes the activity look ineffective; the dated record in My SEO Stream at least preserves the sequence for a successor.
What the first thirty days require
| Period | What happens | Internal effort |
|---|---|---|
| First week | Authorising Google, taking stock of what is already published | roughly an hour, one time only |
| Second and third | Suggested terms appear, drawn from three places | one pass at entry level, weekly at the higher one |
| Weeks 3–4 | Placement begins, page suggestions appear | reading rather than deciding |
| From week 5 | Reports and exports for the different audiences | CSV and JSON to 10,000 rows, PDF to 250 |
Look at the second line: that is where the two levels actually part company. Thirty days at the entry level absorb something like two hours of somebody's time in total. The higher level asks for roughly that much every week once term selection and sign-off enter the picture. Fail to budget for it and the outcome is predictable — an approvals list that nobody clears, the automatic mechanism quietly taking over, and a monthly surcharge purchasing precisely nothing.
One further point specific to companies at this stage, and it concerns handover rather than money. Marketing ownership in a venture-funded business changes hands roughly every eighteen months, and each change resets whatever was not written down. That includes the reasoning behind term selection, which pages were commissioned and why, and what the previous holder had concluded. A record that survives the change is worth more than the difference between any two configurations here, because it is the difference between a second year that continues the first and one that repeats it. The searchable timeline in My SEO exists for that; whether anybody writes anything into it is a matter of habit rather than tooling.
One check that precedes any of this
Committing to a level before the pages are reliably in the index wastes months. The check takes half a day and answers three questions: is the content delivered in the markup, is it retained, and do the German pages differ enough from one another to be treated separately?
Running these numbers against your own pipeline rather than against the table above is done in the same place the reporting lives. Three questions sit upstream of the money: whether the site can be indexed at all, which is technical SEO; which German phrasings map to contracts worth having, which is keyword research; and where the line between English and German material should fall, which our content strategy covers.
Model the annual figure in the dashboard
Questions from founders and finance
Is it charged per domain or per account?
Per domain. A company running a product site and a separate documentation domain pays for both — which is what configuration D reflects, at 649 dollars a month and 7,788 dollars across the year. Both are still administered in one workspace with site tags filtering every view, so the split does not fragment the reporting.
Why is configuration B only 1,440 dollars above A?
Because ten Wikipedia slots at ten dollars and twenty PBN slots at one dollar come to 120 dollars a month between them. Across twelve months that is 1,440 dollars for the full Wikipedia quantity and the smallest PBN quantity — the cheapest way to establish whether placements move anything in a market where your terms are not heavily contested.
Do 500 PBN slots deliver five times what 100 deliver?
They do not. What is being counted is how many placements happen, not what they are worth, and stepping up a band tends to bring in more of the weaker sources rather than fewer. If your link acquisition will have to be explained during diligence or a procurement review — and in this sector it will — then fewer placements against a declared quality threshold is both the more defensible position and the better result.
Should we put the documentation domain on the higher level?
Rarely. Documentation earns its position through being maintained and linked from release notes, which happens regardless of tier. The commercial pages are where term selection actually changes anything, so the split in configuration D — higher level on the main site, entry level on documentation — is the arrangement that fits most companies at this size.
Can we stop after six months if nothing happens?
You can, and it is usually the worst available outcome. At six months there will be movement in positions and rarely anything defensible about enquiries, particularly where contracts take two quarters to close. A company that can only commit to six months should take the smallest line and run it for twelve — that spends less and produces an answer, whereas the alternative spends more and produces neither.
What goes in the investor update?
Enquiries with a recorded origin of "website", against the same period last year, alongside the average contribution per closed contract. Positions, clicks and impressions belong in an appendix and at best explain why the first two look as they do. An update leading with impressions invites the question of what they were worth, and that question does not have a good answer.