A single trade fair in a good hall costs more over four days than any line in this article costs over a year, and the leads it produces are a stack of business cards nobody follows up past week three. That comparison is the one an exporting manufacturer actually makes, and it is missing from every proposal in this category.
Unusually for this field, nothing here has to be requested. AutoSEO lists at 149 dollars monthly for one domain, and FullSEO at 500 for the same domain. On top of either sit two optional items, each ordered on its own account: reference-work slots at 10 dollars, available as 0, 1, 5 or 10, and network slots at 1 dollar, available as 0, 20, 100 or 500. Every total further down is those four numbers multiplied out.
What this actually gets weighed against
No mid-sized manufacturer compares these figures against other providers of the same kind of service. The comparison is against whatever already sits in the marketing budget — and on that basis the numbers land very differently than they do in isolation.
| Line | Order of magnitude per year | Attributable? |
|---|---|---|
| One international trade fair | Five figures with stand and staff | Loosely, via lead lists |
| Trade directory listings | Four figures, several publishers | Almost never |
| Print advertising in sector titles | Four to five figures | No |
| Search visibility | Four figures | Yes, per enquiry |
The last column separates the final row from the rest, and that is the real distinction. Not the price, but whether anybody can say at the end of the year what the line produced. For three of the four the honest answer is no, and everyone in the room knows it while the budget is being approved anyway.
There is a second comparison, made less often and more revealing: the cost of internal time. Handling this in-house consumes somewhere between six and ten hours a month depending on the state of the site, and those hours belong to a technical sales manager or the owner rather than to somebody junior. Valued at what they generate in the core business, the apparently free option is comfortably the most expensive on the table. It only reads as free because no invoice arrives for it.
What appears in the accounts
The monthly figure, visible, auditable, and the thing every budget conversation is about.
- Between 318 and 1 150 a month
- Easy to compare, easy to cut
What never appears anywhere
The hours the arrangement demands from people whose time is the scarcest resource in the building.
- Under one hour, or six to ten
- Never compared, never costed
What separates the two tiers day to day
AutoSEO — continues without input
Fits where the website is one of six things somebody handles.
- Query suggestions appear on their own. Fed from three directions: Google reporting, the observed results output, and seed terms you enter yourself. Accepting, rejecting or deferring stays possible; three quiet weeks stop nothing.
- Placements accumulate in the background. Through the partner network, without item-by-item approval — the difference from a tool licence that waits to be fed.
- What gets proposed concerns pages you already have. You are told which page and which edit — not handed a redesign that nobody has room for in a quarter with deliveries going out.
- Analytics carry no separate charge. Reporting, position history and the project log sit inside the monthly figure and never appear as their own line.
FullSEO — steering, where somebody steers
Fits where a named person can judge which queries are worth pursuing.
- Queries chosen by hand, with an automatic fallback. When nobody gets to it, automatic selection resumes. Nothing stalls — and the surcharge buys nothing that month either.
- Placements only above a set threshold. A minimum authority is defined instead of taking what is available. That property is what a lender or an acquirer asks about.
- Human review before anything takes effect. Proposed changes pass a check first.
- Staff are part of what is supplied. According to the description, this level includes access to people working on search, on site development and on written material.
Most of these decisions come down to that automatic fallback listed first above. It guarantees nothing stops when the responsible person is at a customer site for a fortnight, and it guarantees the surcharge quietly lapses in those fortnights. In a company with seasonal peaks that is the normal condition rather than an exception.
Put the other way round: where the person does exist, the surcharge buys something no additional budget replaces. Ordering queries by the margin on the orders behind them, rather than by how many people search, shifts the composition of incoming enquiries within a few months. In a mid-sized manufacturer that knowledge sits with the technical sales lead or the owner and almost never with an external agency — which justifies the surcharge precisely when one of those two is willing to schedule the half hour.
Billing is per domain, and an exporter has two
This is the point where the arithmetic diverges from the single-site case. A German site and an English site are two domains, so they are two charges — and they do different jobs, which means they do not automatically deserve the same tier.
- The English site carries revenue. Export enquiries land there, deal values are high, and the queries are technical. This is where deliberate query selection can pay for itself.
- The German site carries recruitment. Apprentices and skilled workers, plus local supplier relationships. Valuable, and not something that rewards weekly steering.
- Same tier on both is the default and rarely the right answer. It is chosen because it looks consistent, not because either site needs it.
- The submission allowance is shared regardless. One thousand addresses a day covers the account, so both sites draw on the same pool whichever tiers they sit on.
The third point deserves a moment because it is where most of the avoidable spending happens. Matching tiers across both sites feels tidy and defensible, and it costs 4 212 dollars a year for steering that the domestic site has no use for. Nobody argues for it explicitly; it is simply what gets ordered when a form asks for a tier and nobody has thought about the two sites separately.
Optional items, sold only in fixed bands
| Optional item | Unit price | Bands you can order | Top band per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reference-work slots | 10 $ | 0 · 1 · 5 · 10 | 100 $ |
| Network slots | 1 $ | 0 · 20 · 100 · 500 | 500 $ |
There is nothing in between. Deciding seven encyclopedic slots would be about right means choosing five or ten — fifty or a hundred dollars monthly, six hundred apart across a year. That gap belongs in the original submission to management rather than in a later explanation.
It also helps to be clear what each add-on is for, since they are usually ordered together and then assessed as one item. Encyclopedic slots target the material that gets quoted when an answer is assembled. Network slots affect how a site is weighed in an ordinary ranked list. Two different mechanisms with two different timescales, and combined into a single budget row neither can be judged. Separating them costs nothing and is what makes an annual review possible at all.
Four arrangements, priced end to end
Dollars throughout, exclusive of tax and assuming no negotiated reduction. Each annual figure is the monthly one times twelve, nothing more.
| Line | Composition | Monthly | Twelve months |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Both sites on AutoSEO, plus 20 network placements (20 $) | 318 $ | 3 816 $ |
| B | Both sites on AutoSEO, plus 1 encyclopedic (10 $) and 100 network (100 $) | 408 $ | 4 896 $ |
| C | English site on FullSEO, German on AutoSEO, plus 5 encyclopedic (50 $) | 699 $ | 8 388 $ |
| D | Both sites on FullSEO, plus 5 encyclopedic (50 $) and 100 network (100 $) | 1 150 $ | 13 800 $ |
Which of the four an exporter lands on is easier to see with both sites' figures on the same screen inside one workspace, since the whole question is whether the two deserve the same treatment.
Line C is the arrangement most exporters end up with, and the reason is visible in the composition: the full tier goes only to the site where deliberate query selection has something to work on. Line D costs 5 412 dollars a year more than C and puts the surcharge on a domestic site that will not use it — the most common way to spend money in this category without changing anything.
More important than any single number in the table is how the billing works: these are monthly commitments, not annual ones. Going up a tier or dropping back down is done by changing a setting, with no contract to reopen. That reframes the whole decision. Nobody has to be right about the next twelve months — they only have to be able to defend the next three. Mentioning that fact in the paperwork takes most of the tension out of the conversation, and it is left out almost every time.
The amount is not the decision, the duration is
A line below four thousand a year
Small enough that a budget review does not stop on it, and therefore long-lived enough to produce an answer.
- Reaches month twelve
- Settles the question it was bought to settle
A line that appears on a slide
Large enough to be noticed, and therefore large enough to be cut in a quarter when orders soften.
- Costs more than A over twelve months
- Leaves no basis for the next decision
This is not an argument for economy in general. It is an observation about what happens to marketing lines in companies that reforecast quarterly. A line reaching month twelve produces a finding. One ending in month seven produces an expense. Which line survives your own budget process is therefore a legitimate selection criterion, and it is never written down as one.
A useful forcing question for the meeting: would the decision change if the chosen line doubled tomorrow? If not, the amount is not the constraint and the conversation should move straight to the hours column. If yes, the budget is the constraint and the smallest workable line is the right answer regardless of what a larger one would add. Either way it resolves in under a minute and saves an hour of circling. Having both figures visible side by side in a single account makes that easier to do honestly.
What happens across twelve months
The invoice starts at once and the result does not. That mismatch ends more of these programmes than any other single factor, and it lands at the worst moment: part of the money is gone before anything could have shown.
The thing worth looking at changes as the year goes on. At the start, only coverage moves fast enough to tell you anything. After that, placements start to mean something; later still, visitor numbers; and last of all, enquiries you can trace back to a source — which in capital equipment may lag the visit that triggered them by half a year. Picking whichever number happens to have shifted is the surest way to make a functioning programme look like a failure. Because one workspace timestamps that progression, the review at year end takes minutes rather than an afternoon.
For a company with a long selling cycle there is one further consequence. Judging this on enquiries within the first year systematically understates it, because the enquiry that arrives in month fourteen was caused by a visit in month five. The workable substitute is to record the earlier stages honestly and to compare enquiry volume year on year rather than trying to attribute individual orders to individual clicks — an exercise that produces confident-looking numbers with no basis behind them.
One check that precedes the money question
Subscribing before you know whether the catalogue is being taken in properly costs six months. One morning is enough to find out, and there are three things to look at: does the product wording travel with the delivered document, has anything picked it up, and do individual pages carry enough of their own material to stand up alone?
A technical review establishes whether the pages ship correctly in the first place. What is realistically within reach in each destination market comes out of keyword research. And the question of whether the product pages are distinguishable from one another falls to on-page work. Since the same interface serves both tiers, switching from one to the other involves changing a setting and nothing else.
Work out your own annual figure
Questions from management and finance
Is billing per site or per account?
The domain is what gets billed. Running a German presence alongside an English one therefore means two subscriptions: on the lower tier that is 298 dollars each month, 3 576 over a year. Everything is still administered from a single place — markers behave as filters wherever you look — so two invoices do not translate into two sets of upkeep.
Why does line C cost 5 412 dollars less than line D?
Because the difference between the tiers is 351 dollars a month, and line D applies it to a second domain that will not use it. Over twelve months that is 4 212 dollars, and the remaining 1 200 comes from the larger network step in line D. The saving is not a compromise; it is declining to buy steering for a site nobody steers.
Does the top network band deliver five times what the hundred band does?
It does not. What increases is the count, not the standard, and as the band rises so does the proportion of thin sources within it. Where the technical phrases in question are not heavily fought over, the middle band does the job and frees up money for the product pages — and the product pages are almost always the binding constraint.
Is the upper tier worth it if nobody here does marketing full time?
It depends entirely on whether somebody is named and has half an hour blocked out weekly. Absent that, the system reverts to picking queries automatically and the extra 4 212 dollars a year buys a steering wheel nobody holds. Where that person exists and can tell a profitable order from a busy one, the difference can cover itself inside the first twelve months.
How does this compare with a trade fair?
Usually favourably in absolute terms, but that is not the important difference. The important difference is that one line can be examined at year end for what it produced and the other cannot. If both stay in the budget, at least make sure one of them has a number attached to it.
Can we stop after six months?
Nothing stops you, and it is the least useful thing you could do. Half a year shows you placements shifting and, in a trade where purchases take a year to close, almost never anything solid about enquiries. If six months is all the budget covers, that is an argument for the cheapest arrangement run over the full twelve — not for a bigger one stopped halfway.