The price list is short enough to read in a minute: 149 USD a month, or 500. What decides whether either figure is money well spent is not on the list at all — it is whether the keywords the campaign runs on were built in French, for this market, by someone who can recognise a term nobody here types.
Automated campaign pricing looks reassuringly simple next to an agency retainer. Two tiers, two add-ons sold in fixed blocks, billed per domain per month. You can put it in a budget line without a meeting.
The complication in Quebec City is not the price. It is that a campaign spends its budget on a list of search terms, and the default way to assemble a French-language list produces a list about France. Every dollar afterwards is spent chasing words that do not appear in your market's queries — efficiently, automatically, and in the wrong dictionary.
What follows costs both tiers honestly, explains the two add-ons, spends real space on the approval step that stops the failure above, and works a full year through for a Quebec City insurance broker. Prices come from the published Semalt price list and are in US dollars; Canadian figures are approximate conversions for orientation only.
You are buying a domain-month, not a project
Both tiers are priced per domain per month. That single fact decides more about your annual figure than the choice between them, because bilingual companies here rarely run one website. There is the French site the market uses, and there is a smaller English site for suppliers, insurers, head office or visitors from outside.
If both live on one domain — French at the root, English in a subfolder — one subscription covers the lot. If your English pages sit on a separate domain, that is a second subscription at the same rate, whatever its size. A twelve-page English brochure site costs exactly what a four-hundred-page French site costs.
AutoSEO at 149 USD a month
The lower tier is the whole machine running without you. Terms are found and prioritised automatically, links are built automatically, page-level suggestions are generated against your actual pages, and the full analytics stack is included rather than reserved for the tier above.
AutoSEO
For a domain nobody has time to steer weekly, where an imperfect campaign running is better than a perfect one postponed.
- Discovery and prioritisation without a starting list. The pool assembles itself, which is convenient and is also where the French-language risk enters.
- Automatic placement. Backlinks are built through a partner network running to more than 230,000 sites, with no per-placement decision from you.
- Suggestions written against your pages. Recommendations reference documents you actually have, rather than a generic audit template.
- The full analytics stack. Search Console views, rank tracking, competitor data and the live assistant, none of it withheld at this price.
The honest limitation is that everything decided automatically is decided without local knowledge. The system is very good at noticing that a term has volume and that you are close to ranking for it. It has no view on whether the term is what a client in Beauport would say, or a word borrowed from a French comparison site.
FullSEO at 500 USD a month
The upper tier keeps the same automation and adds three switches: manual keyword selection with automatic fallback, manual placement with a domain-rating target, and a human-review mode over on-site changes. It also puts specialists, developers and writers behind the software.
FullSEO
For a domain where the wording is reviewed before it ships — which describes most regulated and French-first sites here.
- Manual selection, automatic fallback. You choose the terms; anything you leave undecided is filled automatically rather than left empty.
- Placement against a DR target. You set the donor quality you want instead of accepting whatever the default supplies.
- Human review before publication. On-site changes wait for sign-off, which matters where the French text is the version that counts commercially and legally.
- People alongside the automation. SEO specialists, developers and writers form part of what the tier buys.
Framed as 351 USD a month — roughly 480 CAD, approximately — the question becomes narrow and answerable. You are buying the right to reject, and the obligation to exercise it. A firm that upgrades and then approves everything the system proposes has bought nothing but a larger invoice.
Wikipedia slots and PBN slots
Two extras sit beside the tiers, and both are sold in fixed blocks rather than as a spend you name. Wikipedia placements run at 10 USD per slot in blocks of none, one, five or ten. PBN placements run at 1 USD per slot in blocks of none, twenty, one hundred or five hundred.
| Add-on | Per slot | Blocks available | Cost of the largest block |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia placements | 10 USD | 0 / 1 / 5 / 10 | 100 USD for ten slots |
| PBN placements | 1 USD | 0 / 20 / 100 / 500 | 500 USD for five hundred slots |
Wikipedia slots
Small blocks, deliberately. This is a category where one appropriate mention is worth more than ten forced ones.
- The block sizes tell you the intent. Nobody offers a five-hundred-slot Wikipedia block, because reference placement does not scale that way.
- Relevance is the whole constraint. A placement that does not belong where it sits will be removed by people who watch those pages closely.
- Bilingual pages are separate pages. A French article and its English counterpart are edited by different communities with different conventions.
PBN slots
Cheap by design and easy to over-order, which is exactly the trap the block sizes invite you into.
- A dollar a slot reads as free. Five hundred slots cost the same as one month of the upper tier, which makes the largest block look like an obvious purchase.
- Volume and quality are different axes. Five hundred low-relevance placements do not add up to one link from a source your market reads.
- Language relevance applies here too. Placements around a French-language business ought to sit in French-language context, not in whatever was available.
Three sources fill the pool — and it has to be French first
The campaign runs on a keyword pool fed from three places: your Search Console history, live SERP sampling, and seed terms you supply. Two of those three are honest about your market by construction. Your Console history contains only what real people typed at your domain. Live sampling shows the board as it stands for the queries put to it.
The third is where a bilingual campaign is won or lost. Seed terms are supplied by you, and if they are lifted from a general French-language volume tool, they will be dominated by data from France — a market of some sixty-eight million people whose professional vocabulary is not the one used in the Capitale-Nationale.
Products that do not exist here
Coverage categories, cancellation rules and advisory titles are structured differently in France, and terms built from French data describe products you do not sell.
- Seed from your own policy wordings
- Reject anything you cannot quote a client saying
Different words for the same plant
The sector name, the certifications and the buyer-facing terms differ, so a France-built list targets an audience of European wholesalers.
- Check terms against buyer emails
- Watch for EU-only certification words
Trades named differently
Job titles, permit vocabulary and the word a homeowner uses when asking for a price all differ across the Atlantic.
- Seed from quote requests, not tools
- Include both accented spellings
English terms inside French queries
Technical buyers here often search a French sentence containing English component names, a pattern a France-sourced list will not contain.
- Keep mixed-language queries in the pool
- Do not tidy them into pure French
Two further local details belong in the pool before anyone approves anything. Accented and unaccented spellings arrive as separate candidates and must be read together, not judged against each other. And the country filter is load-bearing: an unfiltered French keyword table is a table about France with a Quebec rounding error attached.
Accept, reject, defer — and who holds the pen
Every candidate in the pool is handled individually: approved, rejected or deferred. It is a small interface and it is the single most important safeguard in the product, because it is the only point at which local knowledge enters an automated system.
A term your clients would say
Approve where you can picture the sentence — in an email, a phone call, a quote request — and where the page that would answer it exists or is planned.
- Approve fewer than you expect to
- Both spellings, or neither
Right language, wrong country
The rejections that pay for the whole exercise are terms that are perfect French and completely foreign: French product names, French legal vocabulary, French job titles.
- Reject on vocabulary, not on volume
- Note why, so the pattern is visible
Plausible, but unanswered
Defer terms that are genuinely local but that no page of yours addresses yet. They become a content list rather than a wasted placement budget.
- Revisit deferred terms quarterly
- Pair each with a page to write
Someone who speaks this market
Not the tool, not head office, not a translator working from an English list. Someone who hears how clients here ask for the service.
- A senior broker or estimator will do
- Twenty minutes a week is enough
Name the person before you buy anything. On the lower tier the pool fills automatically and your influence runs through seed terms and the review you carry out; on the upper tier the selection is yours outright, with automatic fallback covering whatever you leave undecided. Either way an unattended queue means the system's judgement stands unchallenged.
Twelve months at a Quebec City insurance broker
Take a mid-sized damage insurance brokerage in Sainte-Foy. The main site is French, around four hundred pages, and there is a separate English domain of perhaps thirty pages for corporate clients and out-of-province referrals. Both are verified in Search Console.
The plan: start both domains on the lower tier, upgrade the French site to the upper tier once the pool has been cleaned and the review process is real, and keep the English domain automated all year. Add-ons are taken in small blocks, twice for PBN and once for Wikipedia.
| Quarter | French main domain | English domain | Add-ons | Quarter total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Months 1–3 | AutoSEO, 447 USD | AutoSEO, 447 USD | PBN, 100 slots — 100 USD | 994 USD |
| Months 4–6 | FullSEO, 1,500 USD | AutoSEO, 447 USD | Wikipedia, 5 slots — 50 USD | 1,997 USD |
| Months 7–9 | FullSEO, 1,500 USD | AutoSEO, 447 USD | PBN, 100 slots — 100 USD | 2,047 USD |
| Months 10–12 | FullSEO, 1,500 USD | AutoSEO, 447 USD | None | 1,947 USD |
| Year | 4,947 USD | 1,788 USD | 250 USD | 6,985 USD |
Two things are worth reading out of the table rather than the total. The English domain costs 1,788 USD for the year, roughly a quarter of the spend, on thirty pages that serve a minority of the audience — which is either a deliberate choice or an oversight worth catching. And the upgrade quarter is the expensive one, so it should follow the pool cleanup rather than precede it.
How long it takes, and who each tier suits
First measurable movement typically arrives four to eight weeks after work begins, counted from publication rather than from purchase. In a bilingual setup with a review step, add the time your own approvals take — which for a regulated firm is usually the longest part of the chain.
| Situation | Tier that fits | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Single French domain, no review requirement | AutoSEO | The automation is the point; seed the pool carefully and let it run |
| Regulated firm, French text reviewed before publishing | FullSEO | Human review and manual selection are what you are paying for |
| Small English satellite domain | AutoSEO | Rarely worth the upper tier on thirty pages of brochure copy |
| Portfolio of several small domains | AutoSEO on all | Per-domain pricing makes selective upgrades the only sane approach |
| One flagship domain carrying the business | FullSEO | Concentrate the review capacity where the revenue is |
- Budget by domain count first. Multiply before you compare tiers; the domain inventory usually moves the annual figure more than the tier does.
- Buy the upper tier only if you will use the veto. Manual selection and human review are worth 351 USD a month exactly when someone exercises them weekly.
- Keep add-ons small until they have shown something. Slot blocks are cheap enough to over-order and cheap enough to test properly.
- Read results in quarters. The four-to-eight-week window is the first signal, not the verdict; a year is the honest unit for judging a campaign.
Frequently asked questions
Is the price per website or per company?
Per domain, per month, at both tiers. A French site and an English site on separate domains are two subscriptions; the same two language versions on one domain, with English in a subfolder, are one. Settle that architecture question first, because it changes the annual figure more than the tier choice does.
Can I run the French domain on FullSEO and the English one on AutoSEO?
Yes, and for most bilingual firms here that is the sensible split. The French site is where the wording needs review and where the vocabulary judgements matter; a small English satellite usually does not justify the upper tier. The panel treats each domain as its own campaign.
Should we buy the five-hundred PBN block?
Not as a first purchase. At a dollar a slot the largest block is inexpensive in absolute terms, which is precisely why it gets ordered before anyone knows whether volume placements help this particular site. Start with the smallest block, watch what happens over a quarter, and compare it against what a DR-targeted placement on the upper tier achieves.
Who should approve the keyword candidates?
Someone who hears how clients here actually ask for the service — a senior broker, an estimator, a sales lead. Not a translator working from an English list, and not the tool itself. The task is mostly rejection: removing terms that are impeccable French and describe a market three thousand miles away. Twenty minutes a week is enough.
How quickly will we see anything?
Plan for first measurable movement four to eight weeks after work begins, and judge the campaign over a full year. If your French copy passes through compliance or a review committee, count that time too: it is part of the chain, and it is usually the slowest link in it.
The two tiers are not really competing on features. They compete on how much control you intend to exercise, and control has a monthly price of 351 USD. If nobody in your company is going to look at the keyword queue and cross terms out, the lower tier is the honest choice and the money saved is real.
If someone will — and in a French-first market with a regulated product, someone should — the upper tier gives that person manual selection, a domain-rating target on placements and a review step before anything publishes. Our service pages set out how that fits a bilingual publishing calendar, and the campaign section of the panel shows the pool, the queue and the placement log in one place.
To see what your own pool looks like before committing to a tier, connect a domain and open the dashboard: import the Search Console history, read the first set of candidates, and count how many you would strike out. That number tells you which tier you need. More of the series is on our blog, and the placement network behind the campaigns is described in the platform overview.