As an SEO agency or consultant, a proposal is your chance to show the prospect you can help them smash their organic traffic goals.
In this post, I’m going to give you the exact SEO proposal template that’s helped our agency close more than $10m in client deals.
To be honest, the proposal template itself isn’t overly important.
What’s important is the information contained in the proposal – you need to be able to communicate your value.
Specifically, you need to call out these 6 things:
- Statement of the prospect’s problem
- Documentation of the prospect’s goals
- Your pitch to solve the prospect’s problem with your services
- Accurate forecast of growth as a result of your plan
- Timeline for when you will execute your services
- Clear breakdown of costs
The rest of this post will walk you through our SEO proposal template and break down exactly how to implement each of the 6 items listed above.
Let’s get into it!
There are SO MANY additional insights in the video below, I suggest watching it.
Grab the free SEO proposal template while you still can!
Want a copy of the Free SEO proposal template for client closure that’s off the charts? Grab it here!
How to close more SEO contracts…
Find opportunities, pitch solutions.
I know I baited you here with our super sexy SEO quote template, but at the end of the day the document you send is worthless without the right insights.
Our sales team follows a simple process to make sure we’re identifying their problems:
- Initial Discovery call. All leads are required to have a 30 minute Zoom consultation. During this time we ask questions about things that might be holding them back from achieving their marketing goals.
- Analysis + call. After the consultation, we move into the proposal process. We run a “top 10” analysis to determine the 10 most pressing issues a website is facing (technical roadblocks, lack of links, etc). This analysis becomes the baseline for our pitch.
- Proposal + pitch call. With the analysis in hand, we can pitch our services as solutions to their problems. Without identifying their specific problems, your pitch will get lost in the shuffle with the other agencies.
Find issues, pitch solutions, demonstrate results.
This post is focusing on the proposal part of the sales process, but you can find a full video walking you through the graphic above below.
Want to master the art of agency sales? Check out our Agency Sales Bootcamp program.
The SEO proposal template
Ready to dig in? Here’s a sample SEO proposal breakdown that will have clients eating out of your hand
Start with a simple cover slide
A simple page, don’t overthink it, just your customer’s logo, the date, and write a contact email that they can use to reach you. I also suggest hiring a designer to customize the template we’ve given you, you can find capable ones on Upwork.
Sell yourself with an about page
This is where you tell the prospect a little more about your agency. I like to use this space to sell our story and key differentiators. Highlight your past achievements and your strong points.
Summarize your approach in an executive summary
Ideally, you’ll have had multiple conversations with the prospect before this point. Cite the conversation you have had with the client during the consultation process, especially the pain points.
Give a high level view of your strategy and how you will alleviate their pain points.. Mention the areas of improvement and what they should expect in the proposal ahead.
This is your chance to really stand out from a sea of proposals by clearing demonstrating your understanding of their problems and their goals as a result from working with you.
This should always be written custom depending on the pitch.
Find issues, pitch solutions
This is the most important part of the proposal. We like to run a full site crawl then analyze keyword, link, competitor and content.
We’re looking for issues that we can solve with our services. We build what we call a “top 10” analysis, where we find 10 issues + suggestions for organic growth.
The “top 10” gets dropped here, 1 slide for each issue found.
This is your opportunity to show that you’re capable and taking initiative on the campaign. Prospects want to see that you have a plan, this makes it easier to quantify your worth.
You can format them in a number of ways, whatever works for your agency. Below is an example from a local SEO pitch that required us to build out location based landing pages as part of the campaign.
Sometimes you can use templated slides from past proposals here, as a lot of websites will share the same issues. For example, we always include slides that map to our “SEO Sprints” approach to SEO – there’s almost always a slide in there speaking to the technical issues on the website.
State their goals, clearly
During your initial consultation you should ask a prospect what their goals are for engaging an agency. This is the place to put them in writing so the prospect knows you’re driving the campaign to their expectations of success.
These goals should tie in directly with the services you are going to offer and deliverables you will prepare.
Focus on big areas like link outreach, technical audit, content creation, etc.
Our proposals usually contain boilerplate goals that we tweak depending on the pitch.
Propose your solutions
The first half of the proposal was spent speaking to the prospect about issues, goals and strategy. This section will focus on how our services can fix those issues and increase their organic traffic.
The solutions section focuses on the actual deliverables we will be building over the life of the campaign. They help define scope of work and justify pricing.
Here is an example of a deliverable from one of our WEBRIS pitches.
Depending on the scope of your pitch you can have as many deliverables as needed. Preferably put one deliverable in each slide.
Below is another example of how we put project planning and management as a separate deliverable. We like to think of project management as a separate deliverable because it takes time and resources and we need to bill for that time. Including it as a deliverable puts the prospect in the mind frame they are getting something tangible for that time.
Forecast SEO results
This is arguably the most important part of any SEO pitch. You need to be able to demonstrate the impact of your services to fully justify the cost of your services.
Most agencies are pitching SEO as an “expense”. In other words, 10 hours to technical SEO, keyword research, etc. A prospect views this as an expense to their business that needs to fall inside of a monthly budget.
This is why so many agencies have a low proposal close rate or high prospect “ghost” rates – they’re simply not excited about paying a huge bill.
Instead, you need to position your services as an “investment”, something that will generate more revenue for the prospect.
If you can do that, your proposal close rate will double overnight.
The best way to do that is to build an SEO forecast to show the expected traffic growth.
You can build these forecasts by hand, but it takes forever.
We recommend checking out the Traffic Projection Tool, it builds SEO forecasts in less than 2 minutes.
The graphs above are exported directly from the tool. Simply drop them into our proposal template and you are good to go.
Show your product
If you have a small team, display the people clients will be working with. It will not only help them familiarize themselves with your team but it will also build trust in the eyes of the clients when they will see faces associated with the names. At the end of the day, we are selling people – they are an agency’s true product, we need to include them.
Pricing breakdown
Quoting a price on SEO campaigns is a challenge – we work on the hours system. If you’re struggling to price your SEO campaigns properly, watch the video below – it should shed light on a lot of things for you.
I like to clearly state the number of hours broken down by month. I also like to put in writing a lot of the “fine print” – you can see from the screenshot what we like to include.
Last chance to sell them
Letting clients know who you have worked with in the past will build up trust and it will also help them see that you are competent enough to handle their job.
This is your last chance to sell your agency – go all out. Add in client logos…
Reviews…
Case studies…
Anything that’s going to shed a positive light on your agency.
Pulling it all together
If you’re not generating the right leads, your proposal is irrelevant.
We recently opened up a huge module within our agency sales training teaching you how to build an outbound sales pipeline for your agency.
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