AutoSEO or FullSEO: What an Automated Campaign Costs a Budget Committee

The hard part of this purchase is rarely the price. It is writing the justification memo, because "we took out a subscription" is a considerably more awkward sentence to defend than "we retained a consultant."

The rates fit in a sentence. AutoSEO is $149 monthly for each domain; FullSEO is $500 monthly for each domain. Wikipedia placements sell at $10 a slot and private-network placements at $1 a slot. What follows is those four figures worked through, alongside an account of what the campaign module hands back.

The awkward sentence in the funding request

A commercial firm buys software the way it buys anything: somebody with authority decides and the line appears. That is not how it goes at an association, a foundation or a grant-funded programme, where an unfamiliar recurring charge draws a particular kind of attention from a particular kind of person.

Two objections arrive reliably. A subscription looks open-ended where a scoped engagement does not; and nobody in the room can say plainly what arrives each month for the money. Both are fair, both have answers, and the answers need preparing before the meeting rather than improvising in it.

• A per-property charge, not an agency retainer. Nothing is scoped by hours. The charge attaches to a domain and stops when the domain does.
• The work is continuous, not delivered. No report at the end of a phase — a system running, its record visible at any hour somebody looks.
• Two tiers because two levels of oversight. The lower tier decides for you; the upper waits for a person, which is exactly the distinction a finance committee is asking about.
• Every approval leaves a trace. The keyword flow records what was proposed, accepted and refused — the audit trail an ordinary agency arrangement never produces.

Note how much sits inside the words "per domain". One website means one charge. An association with a certification programme beside its main site, a foundation with a campaign microsite, a society whose journal has its own address — each is priced separately, and they need not share a tier. For institutions that accumulated domains over twenty years, that is the most useful line in the price list.

AutoSEO, and what $149 a month covers

What this tier withholds is the veto. The candidate pool stays on screen and readable, but the arrangement assumes you watch outcomes rather than approve inputs. For a domain nobody opens more than monthly, that is usually the right trade.

It becomes the wrong trade at an identifiable point: when a proposed term could be publicly embarrassing rather than merely unproductive. For an organization whose standing is its asset, a phrase implying a position it never took is not the same category of problem as a wasted click.

FullSEO, and what the additional $351 buys

The three switches are independent, and a mixed setting is ordinary rather than a compromise. A professional society might pick its own terms, knowing exactly what its credentials are called, leave placement automatic because nobody internally holds a view on donor sites, and still insist a person read every line of public text.

Where the keywords come from, and who is entitled to refuse one

Three separate feeds fill the candidate pool, which is why what appears there never matches the list your staff would have drawn up alone.

Candidates then come forward one by one for a verdict, and three are available: accept, refuse, or set aside. The third is underused. A term tied to an unconcluded rulemaking, or a programme awaiting board sign-off, is not wrong forever; parking it withholds the term without discarding the research.

This is also the feature answering the governance objection, and the funding request should say so. Every proposal, acceptance and refusal is recorded against a date and a person. An organization asked to show a funder how a communications budget was directed can produce that record — more than most agency engagements manage twelve months after the fact.

• Name one reviewer, never a working group. One person with subject knowledge and the standing to refuse. Committees generate backlogs, and a backlog hands the decision to the automatic fallback.
• Budget twenty minutes a week. Candidates arrive in batches. Treat the review as a habit; treated as a project, it slides until it stops.
• Attach one line to every refusal. "Not our position." "That belongs to another agency." "Students, not members." Three months of such lines amounts to a brief for whoever writes the next page.
• Defer anything with a date attached. Pending regulations, unannounced programmes, credentials in development — deferral keeps the term until it becomes true.
• Feed the reviewer's vocabulary into the system. Batches of seed terms and URLs can be handed straight to the Stream assistant, turning a correction into an input instead of a monthly complaint.

The two placement add-ons, priced by the slot

Neither add-on is an open budget. Both sell as fixed blocks: convenient to forecast, impossible to overspend on by accident.

Twelve months costed for a Silver Spring association

Picture a national professional association with offices in Silver Spring. Its main site carries advocacy positions, member resources and comment letters. It also owns a second domain for the certification programme, built years ago by a vendor and barely touched since.

Public positions live on the main site, so that property takes FullSEO with review enabled from month one. The certification domain is narrow, low-risk and watched by nobody, so it takes AutoSEO — but not immediately. It waits until month five, once a staff member has ruled on which pages are worth keeping. One account holds both, separated by site tags.

Verify the total yourself, because somebody on the committee intends to. The opening four months bill $500 apiece: $2,000. Month five adds the second subscription, giving $649. Months six through eight carry the Wikipedia block too, $749 each, or $2,247. In month nine that block ends and twenty private-network slots begin, so the figure settles at $669 and holds through month twelve: $2,676. Sum the parts — $2,000, $649, $2,247, $2,676 — and you reach $7,572, an average of precisely $631. Of that, $380 is add-ons, roughly five cents in every dollar.

Three features of that calendar survive any change to the figures. Placements come after subscriptions, never alongside, since volume bought in the opening weeks lands before a single term has been approved. Nothing switches on for the second property until somebody has settled what it is for. And on the main site the private-network line reads zero — written in deliberately, not left blank.

How long before anything moves

Nearly all disappointment with campaigns of this kind traces back to the calendar rather than the software. Four to eight weeks is the usual wait before any measurable shift. A trend firm enough to defend in a meeting takes another quarter or two, and the full picture needs a year — hence a schedule drawn over twelve months.

Write that into the request, along with a review point. A one-year commitment nobody revisits is exactly what a finance committee is right to distrust. A one-year plan with a checkpoint at month six, and named figures to examine when it arrives, is ordinary governance and reads as such.

Who each tier actually suits

Questions that come up before anyone signs

Arithmetic is the simple part. Rates hold still, and anyone with a spreadsheet can rebuild the table above in ten minutes. Three questions determine the bottom row: how many properties the organization genuinely means to look after, how much oversight each deserves, and whether somebody chose the add-on blocks or merely accepted what was already selected.

One choice shapes the result rather than the total, and this article has circled it throughout. Automation executes decisions in quantity; how good those decisions are gets fixed at the moment of approval — which happens to be where the record accumulates that a board or a funder will one day want to read. Our service overview describes how that review sits alongside a running campaign, and the blog covers the reporting that shows whether it is doing anything.

All of it — both tiers, both slot blocks, the campaign screens — can be inspected against a real property before a commitment exists. Sign in and connect your first domain, then settle in writing, ahead of the first invoice, whose signature sits on a refusal. Put that name in the memo. It counts for more than the tier printed next to it.