Work out what one customer currently costs you to acquire. In enterprise software that figure is usually four or five digits, and it is almost never written down. Set the annual cost of search visibility beside it and the decision resolves in under a minute — which is why proposals in this field avoid publishing prices, because the comparison is not close.
Both figures here are public. A domain on AutoSEO is 149 dollars a month; the same domain on FullSEO is 500. Two optional items are ordered separately: encyclopedic placements at 10 dollars each in quantities of 0, 1, 5 or 10, and network placements at 1 dollar each in quantities of 0, 20, 100 or 500. Everything below multiplies those four numbers out.
The number this should be measured against
In a company selling licences at enterprise prices, marketing spend per acquired customer is the figure that governs every channel decision. It is rarely calculated honestly, because doing so requires attributing a long, multi-person buying process to specific activities. But even a rough version changes how these numbers read.
| Channel | Rough annual outlay | Attributable per customer? |
|---|---|---|
| One industry conference with a stand | Five figures with staff time | Loosely, via badge scans |
| Paid search on category terms | Four to five figures | Yes, and usually expensive |
| Outbound sequencing | Five figures with tooling and headcount | Yes, and declining in efficiency |
| Search visibility | Four figures | Yes, with a long lag |
The last row differs from the others in one respect that matters more than the amount: what it builds does not disappear when the spending stops. A conference stand produces nothing after the third day; pages that answer evaluation questions keep answering them. That difference is rarely priced into these comparisons and it is the strongest argument the bottom row has.
There is a second comparison, rarely voiced, that says more about what this really costs: the time it takes from your own people. Run in-house, the work absorbs somewhere between six and ten hours monthly, the exact figure depending on how the site is set up — and they are the product manager's hours or the founder's, not those of a junior. Value them at what the same hour generates in the core business and the option that appeared to cost nothing turns out to be the dearest entry on the whole list. Its apparent zero price is an artefact of nobody issuing an invoice.
What appears in the accounts
The monthly amount: visible, auditable, and the sole subject of every budget conversation.
- Between 298 and 1 020 a month
- Easy to compare, easy to cut
What appears nowhere
How much of the week this asks from the handful of people whose attention the company can least spare.
- Either under sixty minutes or most of a day
- Nobody puts a price on it
What separates the two tiers in daily use
AutoSEO — runs without being prompted
Built for the case where nobody is formally responsible for the site.
- Nobody has to request the suggestions. They are assembled from three inputs — Google's own reporting, the shape of the results being returned, and whatever starting terms were typed in. Take one, discard it, or ignore the list for a month; nothing halts as a result.
- Links get built while you do other things. The partner network handles it and no case-by-case sign-off is required. That is precisely where this parts company with a software licence that sits idle until somebody feeds it.
- Suggestions concern pages you already have. A named page and a specific edit, rather than a rebuild nobody has room for during a release quarter.
- The numbers are not a chargeable extra. Whatever you get by way of reports, the record of how placements moved, and the running log of the project is covered by the monthly figure — none of it turns up as its own line item.
FullSEO — steering, where somebody steers
Suited to companies where someone can judge whether a query is worth pursuing.
- A person chooses, the system falls back. Where the work is not done, automatic selection resumes. Nothing stalls — but in such a month the surcharge returns nothing either.
- Only sources above a declared level. Rather than using whatever happens to be available, a minimum authority is set. That is the property examined during due diligence.
- Review before anything takes effect. Proposed changes pass a human check first.
- Staff form part of the service. The provider lists specialists for search, for site development and for written material as belonging to this tier.
Most of these decisions turn on the fallback listed first above. A fortnight of the responsible person being unavailable does not halt anything, because the automation resumes. It also means the surcharge earns nothing during that fortnight. In a company where the product manager also runs releases, that is the ordinary condition rather than the exception.
Turn it around and the case looks different. Given such a person, the extra payment secures something money on its own cannot. Rank the target phrases by what the contract behind each one is worth rather than by how many people type it, and the mix of enquiries arriving shifts noticeably inside three months. Who holds that knowledge? In a firm this size, the founder or whoever runs product — hardly ever an outside agency. Which means the extra payment makes sense exactly when one of those two is prepared to put the half hour in the calendar personally.
Billing is per domain, and most software companies have two
The arithmetic diverges from the single-site case here. A product site and a separate documentation domain are two domains and therefore two subscriptions. They do different jobs, and it does not follow that both deserve the same tier.
- The product site carries the commercial questions. Pricing, comparisons, objections. Deliberate query selection has something to work on here.
- Documentation carries the early evaluation. It is read long before anyone buys and needs findability rather than weekly steering.
- The same tier on both is the default and rarely right. It gets ordered because it looks consistent, not because either domain requires it.
- The daily submission ceiling is shared regardless. A thousand addresses a day belongs to the account, whichever tier each domain sits on.
Pause on the third item, since that is where the waste concentrates. Putting both domains on the same level looks orderly and is easy to justify in a meeting — and it hands over 4 212 dollars annually for a capability documentation has no use for. No one ever advocates this position out loud. It is what a purchase form produces when it asks for a single tier and nobody stopped to think about the two domains as separate cases.
Two optional items, sold in fixed quantities
| Optional item | Unit price | Quantities available | Top quantity monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Encyclopedic placements | 10 $ | 0 · 1 · 5 · 10 | 100 $ |
| Network placements | 1 $ | 0 · 20 · 100 · 500 | 500 $ |
Nothing exists between the quantities. Concluding that seven encyclopedic placements would be about right forces a choice between five and ten — fifty or a hundred dollars a month, six hundred apart over a year. That gap belongs in the original request rather than in a later explanation, where it reads like a quiet increase.
Worth knowing before ordering: the two options do quite different jobs, and because they tend to be bought at the same moment they end up being judged as a single expense. One of them aims at the kind of material that gets quoted when a paragraph is put together. The other alters how much weight a site carries inside a conventional list of results. Different machinery, different timelines. Folded into one line of the budget, neither can be evaluated afterwards. Splitting them costs no money and is the precondition for having anything to say when the year is reviewed.
Four arrangements, priced end to end
Every figure is in dollars, excludes tax, and assumes list price. The yearly column is simply the monthly column multiplied by twelve — nothing else is folded in.
| Line | What it consists of | Per month | Across a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Product site and documentation, both on AutoSEO | 298 $ | 3 576 $ |
| B | Both on AutoSEO, plus 100 network placements (100 $) | 398 $ | 4 776 $ |
| C | Product site on FullSEO, documentation on AutoSEO, plus 100 network (100 $) | 749 $ | 8 988 $ |
| D | Both on FullSEO, plus 20 network placements (20 $) | 1 020 $ | 12 240 $ |
Seeing both domains' figures on one screen inside one workspace makes the choice easier, since the whole question is whether the two deserve identical treatment.
Most firms built this way settle on line C, and the composition explains why: the upper tier is applied solely to the domain where choosing queries deliberately has any material to work with. Line D adds 3 252 dollars annually and directs that money at documentation, which has no use for it. As ways of increasing spend without altering outcomes go, this is the one that recurs most often.
More significant than any individual number here is how the billing runs: month by month, not year by year. Going up a level or dropping back is a setting change with no contract to renegotiate. The whole character of the decision alters accordingly — being correct about a full year is not required, only being able to stand behind the coming quarter. Stating that in the request removes most of the weight from the discussion, and it is omitted almost every time. Having the arrangements side by side in a single account turns the change into an arithmetic question rather than a negotiation.
When the sales cycle outlasts the review period
Here lies the real difficulty in this market, and it has nothing to do with price. A company needing twelve months from first contact to signature cannot judge a channel on twelve months of closed business — this year's signatures trace back to last year's first contacts, and this year's first contacts will not be visible until next year.
Closed business in year one
The figure everybody wants and the only one that is systematically understated in the first year.
- Almost always shows a failure
- Ends the programme early
Qualified first contacts
Approaches with a traceable origin, counted and separated by source. They occur early enough to say something within the first year.
- Leading indicator for signatures
- Requires disciplined origin capture
Making that distinction before the first month, and writing it down, saves an unpleasant conversation at the year end. Skipping it means being handed the closed-business figure, being unable to explain it, and losing the budget line — regardless of whether the work succeeded.
In practice the right measurement means two things. First, every incoming approach needs its origin recorded — not as a mandatory field on a form, because the answer there is routinely wrong, but as a question in the first conversation. Second, approaches that reach proposal stage have to be distinguished from those that do not. Doubling enquiries while the number of qualified contacts stays flat is not a success; it is a signal that the pages are setting the wrong expectations.
The shape of the first twelve months
Billing starts on day one; outcomes do not. More of these efforts die from that gap than from any other single cause, and the timing could hardly be worse — a chunk of the budget is already spent at a point where, by the nature of the thing, nothing could yet have shown up.
Which measure means anything also shifts across the year. Early on only coverage responds quickly enough to observe. Placements become meaningful next, then visitor numbers, and last of all qualified first contacts. Reporting whichever figure happens to have moved is a reliable way to make working effort look ineffective. Because one workspace timestamps that sequence, the annual review takes minutes rather than an afternoon.
One check that comes first
Sign up before establishing whether your pages are actually being catalogued and the first half-year is gone. An afternoon answers it. Three things need checking: is the wording part of what gets delivered, has anything picked it up, and does each page hold enough distinct material to justify existing on its own?
Whether pages leave the server intact is what a technical review is for. Which of the questions asked during an evaluation you could plausibly answer well is a matter for keyword research. And whether the pages capable of answering them have ever been written falls to content strategy. Both tiers run inside the same interface, so switching between them alters one setting and leaves everything else untouched.
Work out your own annual figure
Questions from leadership and finance
Is the charge per domain or per account?
Per domain. A product site and a documentation domain are two subscriptions — 298 dollars monthly and 3 576 across a year on the lower tier for both. Administration remains in one place, with markers acting as filters across every view, so two invoices do not create two sets of upkeep.
Why does line D cost 3 252 dollars a year more than line C?
Two movements produce that number. Upgrading the documentation domain costs the tier gap of 351 dollars monthly, which is 4 212 over a year. Working against it, line D scales the network quantity back from a hundred placements to twenty, returning 960. Subtract the second from the first and 3 252 remains — nearly all of it spent on a control mechanism that the documentation domain will never have anybody operating it.
Does the top network quantity deliver five times the hundred quantity?
It does not. The figure counts placements, not their standing, and the proportion of weak sources rises with the quantity. In a technical niche where the phrases are not heavily contested, the middle quantity suffices and leaves budget for the pages themselves — which is where the constraint usually sits.
Is the upper tier worth it without a marketing hire?
Only where a named person has half an hour blocked weekly. Without one, the system reverts to automatic selection and 4 212 dollars a year buys a control nobody operates. With one who knows which enquiries turn into profitable contracts, the difference can cover itself in the first year.
How do we measure this with a twelve-month cycle?
On qualified first contacts with a traceable origin, not on closed business. This year's signatures came from last year's contacts; measuring on them measures the wrong year. Switching to first contacts requires disciplined origin capture and is the only way to say anything at all within the first twelve months.
Can we stop after six months?
Nothing prevents it, and in this market it is particularly unwise. Six months shows placements moving and not even a complete set of first contacts. If half a year is all the budget covers, that argues for the cheapest line run across the full twelve rather than a larger one halted midway.