Two service levels, two extras sold in blocks, and a bill that grows with the number of websites you own rather than the size of your company. Working out the total takes fifteen minutes. Deciding whether to pay it is harder, because in an owner-run business the money leaves the same account as the truck payment.
Write-ups of these products almost always start with a feature comparison, which is backwards for anyone who signs their own cheques. If you run a fleet, a warehouse or a processing plant in southern Manitoba, you want to know what appears on the statement each month, what it totals after a year, and what that costs you in loads.
So this is a costing exercise. Every price is stated, then applied to twelve months at a company you will recognise. The campaign tools in the rebuilt Semalt panel come with a price list short enough to hold in your head, which is not true of most agency proposals.
The bill grows with websites, not with revenue
Both levels are billed monthly, and the count that matters is how many websites you put under management. An account holds as many as you like; each one you activate needs its own subscription.
Own one website and none of this matters. Own two — the warehousing side trades under a different name, or you kept the brand of the outfit you bought in 2016 — and the multiplier is the main thing on the invoice. A fifteen-truck operation with three websites pays more than a hundred-truck operation with one, and nothing forces you to treat both the same way.
Here is the part an agency will not put in a deck. Nobody is absorbing this into a departmental budget, so measure it against something you price every week. Is 149 USD a couple of pallet positions, a slice of one line-haul run, an hour of shop labour with parts? Nobody outside your office can work that out for you. Everything below is the input side of the sum.
What 149 USD a month covers
The cheaper level is hands-off rather than stripped-down. Reporting is complete: Search Console views, rank tracking, keyword dynamics and the live chat bound to your project data all appear at this price. What passes to the software is judgement — which terms to pursue, and which sites to put links on.
AutoSEO — runs without anyone minding it
For companies with nobody in a marketing job, and for a second website that deserves attention but not a person.
- Terms are found and ranked for you. You never nominate a phrase. The pool is assembled and ordered before anyone asks your opinion.
- Links go up without your instruction. Placements run through a network of over 230,000 partner sites, chosen by the system, not by you.
- Advice arrives as proposals. Whoever looks after your website carries them out, whenever that person has an evening free.
- Analytics are not trimmed here. The Search Console and SERP sections, and the project chat, are the same ones the expensive level shows.
The cost of that convenience is influence. Nobody consults you on which phrase gets chased, and you cannot insist links only land on decent websites. For a secondary property — the division brand, a domain still catching old enquiries, the plant site built once and forgotten — that bargain is usually fine. For the site your dispatch number sits on, think harder.
What the extra 351 USD buys
Stepping up to 500 USD keeps all of that and adds two things. One is the ability to overrule the machine on decisions it was making for you. The other is people: SEO specialists, developers and writers on the account. The difference each month, per website, is 351 USD.
FullSEO — you can override it, and you get help
For the website that brings the phone calls, and for anyone who wants a say in the company their brand keeps.
- Pick the terms yourself, or let go. Choose by hand as long as you have the appetite. Stop, and the automatic picker resumes, so nothing sits idle waiting for you.
- Place links against a quality floor. Name the domain rating you will accept instead of taking whatever comes up next.
- Hold site edits for approval. Changes queue until somebody signs off. Worth having when the website doubles as your capability statement in a rate discussion.
- People on the account, not only software. Specialists, developers and writers do work nobody sells by the hour in Winnipeg.
| Who decides | At 149 USD | At 500 USD |
|---|---|---|
| Choosing search terms | The system | You, with the system as backstop |
| Choosing link locations | The system | You, above a rating you name |
| Approving website edits | You act on proposals | You act, or hold them in a queue |
| Reading the Search Console data | Everything included | Everything included |
| Asking the chat about your project | Included | Included |
| Having a team behind it | Software only | Specialists, developers, writers |
Notice what the two right-hand columns do and do not differ on. Every dashboard is there at the cheaper price. The 351 USD gap buys authority over the campaign, and a crew to exercise it with you.
The two placement extras and what a block costs
Two optional extras attach to either level. Neither is an open budget: you pick a block size from a fixed menu and that is what you pay. A fixed block cannot creep, which is the appeal.
Wikipedia placements
Four block sizes exist and no others: none, one, five, ten.
- The whole menu is four options. Nothing, one, five or ten. Ten slots adds 100 USD to the bill, and that is the ceiling.
- Think reference, not traffic. Mentions in a place machines read constantly. Nobody should expect them to fill the quote form.
- Cheap enough to test. The largest block is a fifth of the upper level, so trying one slot and dropping it later is a small decision.
PBN placements
Four block sizes again — none, twenty, a hundred, five hundred — costing a dollar each.
- Quantity is the only choice. Twenty slots costs 20 USD a month, five hundred costs 500 USD, and nothing sits between those steps.
- The top block equals a whole second subscription. For the same 500 USD you could put another website on the upper level entirely.
- A low unit price is not a reason. A dollar a slot makes five hundred sound trivial. Decide from the monthly figure, not the unit.
| Extra | Blocks you can choose | Cost of one slot | Cheapest and dearest month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | none, one, five, ten | 10 USD | 0 USD up to 100 USD |
| PBN | none, twenty, a hundred, five hundred | 1 USD | 0 USD up to 500 USD |
Where the search terms come from, and the pass you make over them
Both levels draw on one list of candidate terms, assembled from three feeds. Each feed fails in a way the other two do not, which is why they are combined.
Search Console
Everything your website already collects impressions against, including phrases nobody here ever aimed at.
- Anchored in real demand
- Blind to anywhere you do not yet appear
Live results pages
How competitive terms get in: searches where rival carriers, brokers and platforms show up and you do not.
- Finds the openings
- Offers traffic that never phones
Seed terms you supply
Language out of the business — equipment, commodities, lane names, the phrases customers use on the phone.
- No tool can invent these
- Sometimes only you say it that way
Three narrow views make one usable one
Console data alone keeps you where you are. Results-page data alone chases volume that never converts. Seed terms alone describe the company to itself.
Everything merges into one queue and returns to you an item at a time. The candidate list inside My SEO asks for a verdict on each, and there are three rather than two — which sounds like a detail and is not.
| Verdict | Effect | Right occasion for it |
|---|---|---|
| Approve | Term joins the live campaign | A page for it exists, or you have decided to write one |
| Reject | Term is dropped and stops coming back | Genuinely wrong: a lane you do not run, equipment you do not own, another company's name |
| Hold | Term is parked without being killed | Correct term, wrong season, or the page behind it does not exist yet |
Switching between hands-on and hands-off
The upper level does not commit you to doing work forever, which changes the value calculation for a business with no slack. Choose terms by hand as long as you want; the month you stop, the automatic picker resumes and the campaign keeps moving.
Site edits behave the same way. Queue them for approval and nothing reaches the website until someone releases it, which matters when your pages state service areas, equipment or certifications. The arrangement that suits an owner is lopsided: approval permanently on for anything describing what you do, and hand-picking in short bursts — an afternoon when the season turns — with the machine handling the other eleven months.
Twelve months at a carrier with a warehouse division
Picture a company you have seen. Owner-operated carrier south of the city, thirty-eight power units, dry van and reefer, running west into Saskatchewan, east to Thunder Bay and south across the line. Second generation, no marketing staff. There is also a small warehousing and cross-dock division under another name, with a website built four years ago and hardly touched since.
One configuration across a year, staged so the expensive commitment waits for data to justify it:
| Months | Carrier website | Warehouse website | Billed that month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 to 3 | AutoSEO, 149 USD | not yet started | 149 USD |
| 4 to 6 | FullSEO, 500 USD | AutoSEO, 149 USD | 649 USD |
| 7 and 8 | FullSEO, 500 USD | AutoSEO plus a 20-slot PBN block | 669 USD |
| 9 to 12 | FullSEO plus one Wikipedia slot | AutoSEO plus a 20-slot PBN block | 679 USD |
The totals. On the carrier website, three months at the lower level is 447 USD, nine months at the upper level adds 4,500 USD, and one Wikipedia slot over the final four months adds 40 USD. On the warehouse side, nine months at the lower level is 1,341 USD and six months of twenty PBN slots is 120 USD. Together that is 6,448 USD for the year, roughly 537 USD in an average month.
Two alternatives show the shape of the choice. Both websites on the lower level all year costs 3,576 USD — the cheapest defensible option, at the price of no say over the site that matters. Both on the upper level costs 12,000 USD, for control this owner cannot apply to the warehouse site. The staged version spends where a decision needs making.
Then comes the sum only you can do. Against 6,448 USD in a year: how many loads at your margin, how many pallet positions for how many months? If the answer does not make you flinch, the arithmetic is settled. If it does, start at 149 USD on one website and revisit it in month four with data in front of you.
How long it takes, and which level suits whom
Expect the first four to eight weeks to produce small signs, not results: impressions climbing, weaker positions firming up, terms arriving inside the top thirty. Where directories, load boards and national fleets own the first page on a commercial phrase, real position change is measured in quarters.
Then add your own pace. Owner-run companies update websites when a quiet week appears, which is seldom. If proposals sit untouched for six weeks, add six weeks to every timeline here. Six months is not long enough to judge fairly; a year is, if you read the first half as early indicators rather than the verdict.
Nobody here has a spare hour
There is no marketing person and there will not be one. The cheaper level assumes exactly that.
- Division and legacy sites
- Websites inherited with a purchase
You are still deciding whether any of this works
A full year on one website costs less than four months at the upper level, and since the reporting is identical you can judge it before spending more.
Customers check you out on that website
When a shipper's contact reads your capability page before a rate call, a vague or outdated sentence costs money. Holding edits for approval exists for that.
- Carriers bidding lanes
- Processors with certifications to state
The neighbourhood matters to you
A quality floor on placements is the only way to influence where your name turns up, and for some businesses that outweighs the link.
A word on second websites before you price anything. Ten service pages under one domain is one subscription and an editing job. Two domains is two subscriptions and a question about whether the second brand still pays its way. Answer that first — it is one of the things we work through in our services.
Whichever level you settle on, the instrumentation is the same: Search Console reporting, rank tracking, keyword dynamics and the project chat appear at both prices, so the automated campaign side of the panel can be judged cheaply before the larger commitment.
Questions owners ask
Can one website be on the cheap level and another on the expensive one?
Yes. Billing follows each website separately, so a mixed setup is normal. The example above does that, and it is the usual pattern for a main brand with a division site alongside it.
Is the 500 USD level just the 149 USD one with switches turned on?
No. Every report and the chat are identical at both prices. What you gain is the right to pick terms yourself with the machine standing by, to place links above a rating you set, to hold edits in a queue, and to have specialists, developers and writers on the account. You buy authority and people, not more screens.
Five hundred PBN slots is only a dollar each. Should I?
Work out the monthly figure first. Five hundred slots is 500 USD, the price of a second website on the upper level, and volume does not compensate for placements that are not relevant. If your pages are thinner than the platforms above you, more links will not close the gap.
How do I present this to the bank or the bookkeeper in Canadian dollars?
Show the US amount as the commitment and any Canadian figure as an approximation, with the rate and date beside it. Charges are in US dollars, so a converted annual number drifts as the year goes on. Build in a small allowance instead of explaining a variance in month nine.
When can I fairly decide whether it was worth the money?
Small signs appear in the first four to eight weeks, but if your website changes slowly the first honest checkpoint is month four, on early indicators — impressions rising, terms reaching the top thirty, pages Google has begun to favour. Save the commercial verdict for month twelve. How we read those numbers is covered across our blog.
This has been deliberately unglamorous, because that is how the decision gets made at a desk with a two-way radio going. Two prices, two block-priced extras, a multiplier per website, a payback period longer than most people assume. The question answers itself the moment you name the website where a careless sentence would cost you a customer. That one gets the approval queue; the rest run on their own.
To run this arithmetic on your own domains instead of an invented carrier, open a Semalt dashboard and add your websites, then read the candidate term list before choosing a level. It will tell you which site deserves the higher price more reliably than any feature comparison.