How to Close Every SEO Proposal You Send
Ryan Stewart
I build, grow and sell digital agencies. Most recently, WEBRIS, a 7 figure SEO agency.
I’m going to walk you through our SEO proposal that has generated well over $4m in revenue for our agency.
You can grab a copy of the SEO proposal template here.
There are SO MANY MORE insights in the video below, I strongly suggest you watch it.
Add a cover slide
A simple page, don’t overthink it, just your customer’s logo, a 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.
Include a simple table of contents
You may add a table of contents with links to the different sections of your proposal for easy navigation. It’s a simple way to add a layer of professionalism to your proposal.
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.
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.
Need help with your sales process? Check this out.
Give the 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 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 “5 phases” 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.
Pitch 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.
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
Pricing 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.
We have a ton of resources on SEO campaign pricing:
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.
Make sure to check it out while it’s still free!
COMMENTS (3)
David Wrightsays This was awesome Ryan, thanks for putting this together!
Rubysays Don’t you feel like you’re giving them free work by detailing 10 tech, KW, and content issues you’ve found?
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Ryan Stewartsays
big companies want to see you have a plan going into the campaign. without doing the “spec” work, it’s nearly impossible to land large deals