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Unsure about programmatic SEO "experts" because strategy seems off. Should I walk away?

I work at a roofing company that wants to create a programmatic SEO tool. We found some developers who told us they were specialists, and they're even developing their own SEO tool (we didn't receive access to it).

I'm not completely ignorant about SEO. I grew my website to 90,000 visits/year by myself with no budget before working here, had an agency with some clients for a few years, but I haven't been 100% active in the SEO world for 2 years now. I'm doing other things at this company and just trying to help since the owner asked me to, given my previous experience.

At first, they told the owner they were sure it would be a success. They want us to pay $10k/month for 6-12 months just for this tool.

Everything seemed okay. The owner is a very nice person with great business vision, so he trusted them and wanted to grow the project even more. So instead of being a small programmatic tool, we'd do something bigger with lots of data and AI.

But we had some meetings and heard some statements from them that really concern me. They wanted us to create this tool under another company's (partnership) domain. This partner has 31 Moz DA on their domain. They told us we'd inherit their domain authority. They said that creating links from the main domain to the subdomain would do the job, and that even a few links from them would be game-changing. When the owner asked if a $10,000 per month budget just for backlinks would help us, they answered saying it was average, but the 4th-5th spot for one of our main keywords has domains with only 15 DA ranking.

they want to use the same tool for programmatic SEO on our partner's subdomain AND, using the same tool, on our own new domain. And I was like, what?? So now we're duplicating our content and tool across different domains? That sounds absurd to me, and obviously it wouldn't work.

When we contested using a third party's subdomain and asked about having our own domain, they went from "we can do it, it'll work" to "it depends, it's risky, we're not sure."

When I contested the idea that subdomains inherit all juice from the main domain, they got mad at me and told me I should read more. I asked: if this is true, why don't the big companies create several subdomains, link internally to their own subdomains, and dominate every industry? It doesn't make sense to me.

I also don't think $10k/month just for backlinks (+ content + tool, etc.) is average when we're targeting keywords that are ranking well with only 15 DA.

They told us they're specialists in programmatic SEO, but never shared a success story with us or provided an example.

After all of this, considering my current level of knowledge, I wouldn't move forward with them because many things seem sketchy to me. What's your opinion? Am I outdated and wrong or i'm not crazy here?

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