Ask a recruitment agency to place one engineer and the fee lands somewhere between twenty and thirty per cent of what that person earns in their first year. On a senior appointment that is an invoice with five digits on it. Put a year of search visibility next to that figure and it is no longer a close call — which goes some way to explaining why firms in this field keep their prices behind a conversation, since a published price is a price somebody can compare.
Neither price has to be requested. AutoSEO lists a domain at 149 dollars monthly; put the same domain on FullSEO and it is 500. Alongside sit two extras, each ordered on its own: reference-work slots at 10 dollars apiece, available as 0, 1, 5 or 10, and network slots at 1 dollar apiece, available as 0, 20, 100 or 500. Every total further down comes from multiplying those four out.
The number this ought to be measured against
Most employers know roughly what a placement fee costs and have never calculated what a hire costs them in total. Even a rough version changes how the figures below read, because it includes the things that never appear on an invoice: interview time, the weeks a role sits open, the manager who does two jobs in the meantime.
| Channel | Rough cost per hire | What it leaves behind |
|---|---|---|
| Recruitment agency | A fifth to a third of first-year salary | Nothing, once the placement ends |
| Job board postings | Low four figures per role, repeated | Nothing after the listing expires |
| Careers fair attendance | Four to five figures with staff time | A stack of contacts, decaying |
| Search visibility | Four figures a year, all roles | Pages that keep answering |
The last column is where the bottom row differs, and it matters more than the amount. Everything above it stops working the moment the spending stops. Pages that answer what candidates want to know keep answering, for every role, for as long as they stay accurate — and that distinction is almost never priced into the comparison.
The practical difference between the two tiers
AutoSEO — proceeds without prompting
Suited to companies where nobody formally owns the website.
- Suggestions turn up unasked. Three inputs produce them: Google's reporting, the pattern of results coming back, and any seed wordings typed in by hand. Accept one, throw it out, or ignore the whole list for four weeks — none of that stops the machine.
- Link building proceeds in the background. The partner network sees to it and nobody approves anything item by item. This is exactly the point at which the arrangement stops resembling a piece of software waiting to be operated.
- What gets proposed concerns pages you already have. You are told which page and which edit, rather than handed a rebuild nobody has room for while three roles are open.
- The numbers are not a chargeable extra. Reporting, placement history and the project log sit inside the monthly amount and never appear as a separate line.
FullSEO — a hand on the wheel, if one is free
For companies where a named person can judge which questions are worth answering.
- A person decides, the system covers the gaps. Where nobody gets to it, automatic selection resumes. Nothing stops — and in such a month the surcharge earns nothing either.
- A floor on where links come from. Instead of taking whatever is available, a minimum authority is set. That is the property somebody asks about later.
- Nothing takes effect unreviewed. Every proposed change passes across a desk before it is applied.
- People are part of what is supplied. For this tier the provider additionally lists staff working on search questions, on the site itself, and on written material.
How one of these decisions turns out is usually settled by the first point above. Three weeks in which the responsible person is buried in interviews do not bring anything to a halt, because the automatic selection takes over — and precisely for that reason the surcharge yields nothing during those three weeks. In a recruiting function that runs in bursts, that describes a large share of the year.
Turned around, the case reads differently. Where such a person exists, the extra payment secures something no amount of additional budget replaces. Order the questions you answer by how hard the corresponding role is to fill, rather than by how many people search for it, and the mix of applications arriving shifts noticeably inside a quarter. That knowledge sits with whoever runs recruiting and essentially never with an outside supplier.
What appears on the invoice
A monthly figure, auditable, comparable, and the only thing any budget conversation ever concerns itself with.
- Between 199 and 1 149 a month
- Simple to compare, simple to cut
What no invoice records
The hours an arrangement takes from the people whose attention the company can least spare.
- Under an hour, or most of a day
- Never costed by anyone
Billing follows the domain, and careers is often separate
Here the sums stop resembling the straightforward case. If the careers area sits at an address of its own — whether the recruitment platform's or a subdomain you control — that counts as a second domain, hence a second subscription. Since the two serve entirely separate purposes, there is no reason to assume both warrant the same package.
- The main site carries commercial questions. Products, services, the reasons a customer gets in touch. Deliberate query selection has plenty to work with here.
- The careers domain carries candidate questions. Read months before anybody applies, and needing findability far more than weekly steering.
- Matching tiers is the default and rarely correct. It gets ordered because it looks consistent, not because either domain needs it.
- Either way the daily allowance is one pool. The thousand addresses per day attach to the account itself, and the tier each domain happens to be on makes no difference to that.
Two optional items, sold only in fixed amounts
| Bought separately | Cost each | Amounts on offer | Largest amount, per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reference-work slots | 10 $ | 0 · 1 · 5 · 10 | 100 $ |
| Network slots | 1 $ | 0 · 20 · 100 · 500 | 500 $ |
Intermediate amounts do not exist. Settle on seven encyclopedic placements as the sensible figure and the system will make you pick five or ten instead, which is fifty dollars a month against a hundred and works out at six hundred dollars over the year. Put that fork in front of whoever approves the budget at the outset; raised afterwards it looks like a price rise nobody mentioned.
Knowing what each extra is actually for helps, since they tend to be bought together and then judged as one expense. Reference-work slots aim at the material that gets quoted when a paragraph is assembled. Network slots change how much a site weighs inside a conventional list of results. Two mechanisms operating on two timescales — folded into a single budget row, neither can be assessed afterwards. Separating them costs nothing.
Four arrangements, priced end to end
Every figure in dollars, before tax, at list price. The annual column is the monthly one multiplied by twelve and nothing else.
| Line | Components | Per month | Across a year |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | Main site on AutoSEO, plus 5 encyclopedic placements (50 $) | 199 $ | 2 388 $ |
| B | Main site and careers domain on AutoSEO, plus 5 encyclopedic (50 $) and 20 network (20 $) | 368 $ | 4 416 $ |
| C | Main site on FullSEO, careers on AutoSEO, plus 20 network (20 $) | 669 $ | 8 028 $ |
| D | Main site on FullSEO, careers on AutoSEO, plus 500 network (500 $) | 1 149 $ | 13 788 $ |
Setting both domains' figures on one screen inside one workspace makes the choice easier, because the entire question is whether the two warrant identical treatment.
Line B is the one worth pausing on, because it is where the careers domain is brought in at all — for 169 dollars more a month than line A. Where the pages candidates search for live on a second address, that is the change that makes them findable, and it costs less over a year than a single job board campaign for one senior role.
More important than any single entry above is how the billing runs: month to month, never year to year. Stepping up or stepping back is done by altering a setting; nothing has to be renegotiated. The decision therefore changes character entirely. No one is being asked to be correct about a full year — only to stand behind three months. Mention that when putting the request forward and most of the tension goes out of the room, which is why its omission is so consistently unhelpful.
What a single agency invoice covers
A fifth of a first-year salary
Paid once, for one person, for one role. If that person leaves within eighteen months, the cost is repeated in full.
- Certain outcome, high unit cost
- Nothing accumulates
Roughly 8 000 dollars
Covers every role, every month, and leaves behind pages that keep answering after the year ends.
- Uncertain outcome, low unit cost
- Accumulates and persists
Keeping both numbers — the invoice column and the hours column — visible together in a single account is what stops the comparison being made on the first column alone.
The honest framing is not that one replaces the other. An agency delivers a specific person for a specific role on a timetable, and nothing described here does that. What the comparison establishes is the scale: an entire year of the larger arrangement costs about what one senior placement costs, and it applies to every vacancy rather than one. On that basis the internal argument is usually shorter than expected.
What happens across twelve months
Billing starts on day one; results do not. No other factor kills more of these efforts, and the timing is unhelpful: part of the budget has gone at a point where, in the nature of the thing, nothing could yet have appeared.
Which number is worth quoting keeps changing as the months pass. In the opening weeks nothing but coverage moves fast enough to watch. After that the placement data starts to carry information, later the visitor counts, and only right at the end the applications whose origin can be traced. Pick whichever figure happens to have shifted and you will reliably make genuine progress look like nothing at all. Since one workspace stamps each of those stages with a date, the review at the end of the year is a short meeting rather than a long one.
The check that has to precede the purchase
Six months disappear if you subscribe before establishing whether your pages are being catalogued in the first place. Half a day settles the matter. Three things want checking: does the text travel with the document the server sends, has anything actually taken it in, and is there enough material unique to each page for it to stand up alone?
Whether the pages arrive intact at the far end is a technical review question. Working out which applicant and relocation topics are plausibly within reach belongs to keyword research. And establishing whether anybody ever wrote the pages that would answer them is the job of content strategy. Because the same interface serves both packages, switching from one to the other means changing a single option and disturbing nothing else.
Work out your own annual figure
Questions from HR and finance
Is the charge per domain or per account?
The domain is the unit. Running a main site plus a separate careers domain therefore means two subscriptions: on the smaller package that is 298 dollars each month, 3 576 over twelve. All of it is still administered from a single place, since the labels function as filters wherever you look — two bills do not translate into twice the work.
Why does line D cost 5 760 dollars a year more than line C?
Because it moves from twenty network placements to five hundred, a difference of 480 dollars a month. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on the field: in a regional labour market with limited competition for the specific roles, the smaller quantity is generally sufficient and the money is better spent on the pages themselves.
Does the top network quantity deliver five times the hundred quantity?
No. What that number records is how many placements exist, and nothing about their standing; push the amount up and the proportion of thin sources climbs with it. If the wordings you care about are not heavily fought over, the middle amount does the job and frees money for the pages themselves — and the pages are nearly always the real bottleneck.
Is the upper tier worth it without a marketing hire?
It depends on whether somebody is named and has thirty minutes reserved every week. If not, the automatic selection simply resumes and 4 212 dollars annually purchases a steering wheel that nobody touches. If yes, and that person understands which vacancies are hard to fill and for what reason, the difference can pay for itself before the first year is out.
How does this compare with an agency fee?
A full year of the larger arrangement costs roughly what one senior placement costs, and it applies to every vacancy rather than one. The two are not substitutes — an agency delivers a specific person on a timetable — but the scale comparison is worth putting in front of whoever approves both budgets, because it is rarely made.
Can we stop after six months?
Nothing prevents it and it is the least useful option available. Six months shows placements moving and almost nothing about applications, particularly where candidates research employers months before applying. If half a year is all the budget covers, take the smallest line and run it for twelve.
Professionelle SEO-Beratung für Ihr Unternehmen
Möchten Sie die Sichtbarkeit Ihrer Website verbessern? Unsere SEO-Experten analysieren Ihre Website und entwickeln eine maßgeschneiderte Strategie.
Kostenlose Erstberatung anfragen