A German subsidiary asking head office for a marketing budget is competing against five other territories on the same spreadsheet. The request that succeeds is not the most persuasive one; it is the one with a twelve-month figure, a stated assumption and a review date. Everything else reads as a country office asking for trust.
Proposals in this field are curiously reluctant to state a number. Packages are described, bespoke scoping is offered, effort by arrangement is mentioned. The annual total appears nowhere, which is precisely the line the spreadsheet needs — and its absence is why so many territory requests die in the second meeting.
The underlying prices are published and fixed. AutoSEO is 149 dollars a month per domain; FullSEO is 500 dollars a month per domain. Two add-ons are purchased separately: Wikipedia placements at 10 dollars per slot, available as 0, 1, 5 or 10, and PBN placements at 1 dollar per slot, available as 0, 20, 100 or 500.
The difference is not the reporting
Search Console reporting, position tracking, market analysis and the indexing tools are present at both tiers. What separates them is how much runs unattended and at which point a person intervenes — a distinction that matters more for a subsidiary than for a domestic firm, because the person in question has to exist locally.
AutoSEO — nothing waits on an approval
Suited to a subsidiary without a dedicated marketing role, which describes most of them.
- Terms are gathered and ranked automatically. Drawn from Google reporting, live results and seed terms you supply. Each candidate is still decided individually — accepted, rejected or deferred — but nothing stalls if nobody decides.
- Placements accumulate continuously. Through the partner network, without each case being presented for sign-off.
- Suggestions against the pages you already have. The model names which existing page to extend or link better, rather than proposing a redesign.
- Reporting and assistant carry no surcharge. Google reporting, position tracking and the project timeline are part of the tier rather than billed separately.
FullSEO — a say, provided somebody exercises it
Suited where a named person can read German commercial vocabulary and has time booked for it.
- Terms chosen by hand, with an automatic fallback. Where nobody gets round to choosing, the automatic mechanism resumes and the campaign carries on rather than halting. In practice that safety net catches more weeks than most buyers anticipate.
- Placement against a target Domain Rating. A quality threshold is set and selection follows it, instead of accepting whatever the network produces.
- Human review before changes take effect. Proposed edits pass a person first, which matters where a group brand guideline is in play.
- People, not only software. The provider states that this level includes search specialists, developers and writers alongside the automation — which is the part a group brand guideline usually makes relevant.
For a subsidiary the second tier only makes sense where somebody local can genuinely make the selection. A group marketing manager three time zones away cannot judge whether a German process term carries commercial intent, and delegating it upward produces the worst outcome available: the higher price with the fallback doing the work anyway.
Two add-ons that only come in fixed sizes
| Add-on | Per slot | Available quantities | Monthly at the largest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Placements on Wikipedia | $10 each | none, 1, 5 or 10 | $100 |
| Placements in the PBN | $1 each | none, 20, 100 or 500 | $500 |
Nothing between those quantities can be ordered. Conclude that seven slots would be about right and the options remain five or ten, which is 50 against 100 dollars monthly and 600 dollars apart once the year is counted. Discovering that after approval means explaining a variance rather than a plan.
Four budget requests, calculated in full
All figures in dollars, over twelve months, before tax and before any discount. Each line is straightforward multiplication.
| Request | Composition | Monthly | Twelve months |
|---|---|---|---|
| A · Minimum viable | AutoSEO, Germany only, no add-ons | $149 | $1,788 |
| B · Entry with placements | AutoSEO + 100 PBN slots ($100) | $249 | $2,988 |
| C · Full tier, cautious add-ons | FullSEO + 1 Wikipedia slot ($10) + 20 PBN slots ($20) | $530 | $6,360 |
| D · Full tier, reinforced | FullSEO + 10 Wikipedia slots ($100) + 100 PBN slots ($100) | $700 | $8,400 |
Stripping the add-ons out, the step between tiers works out at 351 dollars monthly — the difference between 500 and 149 — and therefore 4,212 dollars over the year, which is what the right to choose terms costs by itself. Worth noting alongside it: the gap between A and B is 100 dollars a month, or 1,200 across the year, and it buys the whole middle quantity of placements rather than a token amount.
Presenting the number so it survives the meeting
A German territory request loses on the spreadsheet for a predictable reason: it produces few enquiries compared with markets selling smaller items in larger numbers, and the spreadsheet compares counts. The correction is one additional column.
Enquiries per territory
Germany produces four; another market produces four hundred. On that column the request is finished before it is discussed.
- Compares unlike businesses
- Ignores order value entirely
Contribution per territory
Four enquiries at industrial order values against four hundred at consumer values. The ranking frequently reverses.
- Compares what the business earns
- Requires an enquiry log with origin
That second column exists only if somebody in the subsidiary records where each enquiry came from. It is a manual discipline, easily neglected, and it decides budget conversations more often than any argument about search. Without it, a territory with four high-value enquiries a year has no defence at all.
A request with a review date
States the annual figure, the assumption behind it, and when it will be judged. Reads as an experiment with a stop condition.
- Finance can model the downside
- Renewal is a decision, not a default
A request framed as an investment in visibility
No figure, no assumption, no date. Reads as an open-ended commitment with an undefined end.
- Nothing to model
- Gets postponed to next quarter
The difference between those two cards is entirely presentational, and it decides most territory budget rounds. The underlying activity is identical. What separates them is whether somebody wrote down what would count as the request having failed — which, uncomfortably, is also the question most likely to be avoided by the person making it.
What the request is actually competing against
Internally, the comparison is rarely against another supplier. It is against the alternatives a group finance function already understands.
- Doing nothing and relying on the group domain. Costs nothing on paper and means the German market is served by pages written for nineteen markets at once. The cost appears as absent enquiries, which no ledger records.
- A local freelancer on a day rate. Works while the person is available. When the engagement ends, tool access, documented decisions and accumulated history leave with them unless somebody insisted the accounts belonged to the company.
- Several tool licences in parallel. Data then sits in disconnected interfaces, and a measurable share of the effort goes into reconciling exports rather than acting on them.
- Request A as the reference line. 1,788 dollars a year, with reporting, campaign and indexing tools behind one sign-in and a single Google consent covering mail, Search Console and Analytics.
The third item generates the cost nobody records. Where reporting lives in one tool, positions in a second and submissions in a third, a substantial part of the work is aligning columns. A shared workspace removes that step rather than performing magic; more than thirty-five interface surfaces and eleven integrated services sit behind one login.
A fifth alternative is rarely written down and frequently chosen by default: waiting until the group runs a central programme covering every market at once. That has real advantages — consistency, one negotiation, one supplier relationship — and one structural drawback for Germany specifically. Central programmes tend to be scoped around the largest markets by volume, and the terms that matter in an industrial supply market are precisely the low-volume, high-value ones that a volume-weighted scope excludes. A territory waiting for the central programme therefore waits for something that will not address its terms when it arrives. The workspace supports both arrangements, since domains are administered together while campaigns remain per domain.
What happens across the twelve months
Billing starts immediately; results do not follow that schedule. This gap between outlay and outcome accounts for most early cancellations at territory level, and it is the costliest way to stop, because the spending has already happened while nothing yet shows.
What is worth looking at also shifts. Early on, index coverage responds within days and is the only figure that moves at all. From month two, terms entering and leaving the leading positions become informative. From month four, clicks and enquiries are worth reading. Only towards the year's end does a figure exist that a finance function will accept. Knowing that sequence prevents four months of reports built around whichever number happened to be visible, and the project timeline in My SEO Stream keeps the order of events on record for the review.
What the first thirty days involve locally
| Period | What happens | Local effort |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Google accounts connected, existing pages inventoried | about an hour, once |
| Weeks 2–3 | Term candidates arrive from three sources | entry tier: one review; full tier: weekly |
| Weeks 3–4 | Placement begins, page suggestions appear | reading, not deciding |
| From week 5 | Reports and exports for the different audiences | CSV and JSON to 10,000 rows, PDF to 250 |
The second row is where the two tiers genuinely diverge in daily life. At the entry tier the local effort across the first month is roughly two hours in total. At the full tier it is closer to two hours a week, because selection and approvals are added. A subsidiary that does not plan for that difference ends up holding the higher tier with an approval queue nobody works through — at which point the automatic fallback engages, and the surcharge has bought nothing.
There is a further asymmetry worth naming for a subsidiary specifically. At the entry tier, the automation decides which terms are pursued; it is sometimes wrong and corrects itself continuously, because every cycle reassesses the candidates. At the full tier a person decides, and a badly chosen group of terms remains badly chosen until somebody revisits it. Where that person sits in another country and reviews the list quarterly at best, the higher tier introduces a slower correction loop than the cheaper one — the opposite of what the price implies. The selection interface itself sits in My SEO and shows search volume, current position and the origin of each recommendation next to every candidate, which makes a proper review a fifteen-minute task rather than an afternoon.
One check to run before requesting anything
Buying a tier before the country pages are reliably in the index wastes months. The check takes half a day and answers three questions: are the German capability pages reachable, are they retained, and do they differ from one another enough to be treated as separate pages?
Where the tiers, the add-ons and the twelve-month total need testing against real figures rather than a worked example, the selection and its reporting sit in the same workspace. The technical prerequisite is covered under technical SEO; which term groups correspond to which order values is established during keyword research, and which pages are missing altogether follows from our content strategy.
Model the twelve-month figure in the dashboard
Questions from finance and country management
Is the price per domain or per account?
Per domain. A subsidiary running the country site plus a separate brand domain pays twice — 298 dollars a month at the entry tier, 3,576 dollars across the year. Both are still administered in one workspace, with site tags acting as a filter across every view, which matters when a group wants one report covering several territories.
Why is request B only 100 dollars above request A?
Because the middle PBN quantity is a hundred slots at one dollar each. Across twelve months that is 1,200 dollars for the entire middle band, which makes it the cheapest way to find out whether placements move anything in a market with modest competition. Adding a single Wikipedia slot on top would raise it by a further 120 dollars a year.
Do 500 PBN slots deliver five times what 100 deliver?
No — the count refers to placements rather than to their standard, and moving up a band increases the proportion of weaker sources rather than reducing it. In a market where the relevant process terms attract little competition, the middle band does the job and leaves money for writing the pages, which is where the actual bottleneck usually sits.
Head office wants to fund one market as a trial. Which one?
Not the strongest one. A trial run in the market where the brand is already established will flatter the exercise and the conclusions will not transfer to the others. Running it in the second-strongest market produces a less comfortable number and a considerably more useful one, because it tests what the activity adds rather than what the brand already carries.
Can we stop after six months if nothing has happened?
Possible, rarely sensible. At six months there will be movement in positions and seldom anything defensible about enquiries, particularly in a business with few, large orders. A territory that can only commit to six months should request the smallest line and run it for twelve, rather than requesting a larger one and abandoning it halfway — the second option spends more and learns less.
How do we report the result upward at the end of the year?
With two figures that live in the business: enquiries recorded as originating from the website, compared against the previous year, and the contribution those enquiries produced. Everything else — positions, clicks, impressions — belongs in an appendix and at best explains why the first two look the way they do. A report leading with impressions invites the question of what they were worth, and that question has no good answer.