A SEO proposal template is kind of a sales pitch made by the business to new customers, trying to convince them that your organisation is the best for them and their SEO needs.
It takes a lot of time and effort to build a perfect template as it must capture the needs of your clients and address their issues in a cohesive manner.
A SEO proposal template includes the following:
Introduction
Introduction includes kicking off your proposal by acquainting your prospective clients to your website – telling your clients how your agency is the best fit for them.
Proposal being a sales pitch, here is where you need to build credibility and sell your business. The exact pricing and other deliverables should be explained later on in the template.
A great way to introduce the business would be:
Highlighting your agency’s key point and showing how it differs from its competitors.
You should include your vision and mission statement, services that you offer and why the client should hire you.
Then go on to explain the agency’s experience in the given field of work.
Here you would elaborate on the kind of work you have taken up in the pat and your clients. You could also put in a link to a case study.
This is also a good place to mention any awards or certificates that you have won or even have been nominated for.
Eventually, introduce the client to the team that they would be working with.
You could specify the experience and/or qualifications of the professionals who are a part of your agency and who would help the prospective clients with their work.
Many times SEO proposals gain word of mouth publicity and it becomes crucial to impress the clients and let them know with certainty why you believe your services are worth the prices that you charge.
Therefore, how you introduce yourself is very essential.
The introduction part should only take up a couple of slides and not steal away the spotlight from the actual information about how things take place in the organisation.
SEO Insights
This section shows the current SEO performance analysis that you have gathered about the client. This helps in building a lot of initial trust and credibility, as they see that you have spent time on:
- Understanding their business issues
- Researching their website.
- Personalising the proposal.
This may seem a time consuming task but actually does not take a lot of time. The two most important insights are considered to be – the client’s current keyword ranking and the site audit of the client’s website.
You could also include the keywords that their competitors are ranking for, but they are not.
Take this opportunity to tell them how your agency plans on working on this aspect and how you could introduce the business to newer opportunities.
If showing them how well informed you are about the prospective client’s business is not enough, you can further impress them by including a detailed competitor analysis.
The best way is to include the competitor analysis is to make a list of five of their biggest, most successful competitors that are relevant and compare these sites to your prospective client’s sites.
You could also include graphs or charts to make the analysis clearer and easier to understand.
You could run a website audit on the website to know the on-site improvements.
You should ensure that you include a high level issue that the website is facing and also suggest how you plan on dealing with that situation.
You establish a trusting relationship with the client by showing them that you took the time to research their business and pinpoint their exact obstacles. It shows that you are knowledgeable and hard-working from day one.
Deliverables
This section defines the tasks that you would be doing.
For example, if you offer link building services then you would specify how many links would you provide? Will you add any content on to the website?
And other such things.
Outlining the deliverables helps the client know what to expect from you on a monthly or quarterly basis that you decide upon. If you plan on creating content for the website, then you should let them know how many pages or blogs would you provide every month or whatever time period you decide.
All the information displayed here is to let the prospective client know what all they should expect from the agency.
Goals
The agency must set goals that it intends to achieve such as,
- Building 100 new backlinks in a month.
- Increasing organic traffic to 10%.
- Increase 10 organic signups.
To set these types of goals, you must analyse the past trends that have existed with the previous clients and then come up with a number and not just any random number.
Estimating the current traffic of the website prior to sending the proposal helps set a realistic goal.
Timeline
SEO takes a lot of time and many people don’t understand this. Therefore, you should send out a timeline along with the proposal, which specifies when the clients can expect results from your agency on the decided work.
Each of the proposed solutions is to be broken down into measurable milestones. That way, the clients can keep a tab on your progress, even if it takes a while for the metrics and the traffic to increase.
Some clients expect agencies to get a lot of work done up-front immediately. Setting a realistic timeline saves a lot of time and energy, and also headache down the road, which also helps you avoid having to end a relationship with the client.
Investment
Once you have made your case by presenting the proposal, you can discuss with your client about the compensation. The investment section of the proposal includes all the details with respect to the price that you will be charging for your services.
As your SEO services help the client’s business to grow and generate more revenue, always name this section as “investment”. This may seem irrelevant, but it actually is a way to trick the human psychology.
This way even though it is an expense, the prospective clients may see it as an investment and not an unnecessary expense. It becomes very important hence to remind your client of this being an investment rather than an expense.
You may choose to give the clients options between several pricing options to choose from. This gives the client a sense of control over the buying process and reduces the sticker shock.
You could introduce your package which covers all the services that you have included in the proposal. Then you could move on to give the client a choice between other options to choose from: a less expensive package and a deluxe package that may involve a few extra services.
Contact details
At the end of the proposal, you should include your contact details and your next steps in the process that they might have to follow.
You must ensure that all the details are mentioned so that the clients get a clear picture.
General Tips for a Proposal
You must always personalise all your SEO proposals.
It is fine to use a template for the overall structure of the SEO proposal, but the content in the sections of the proposal should always be personalized for each client respectively.
It is evident when a proposal template is sent to a client. It may save you time and effort but it won’t impress them.
A personalised proposal makes them feel valued and generates interest.
You must never forget that your clients are also considering other agencies along with yours and tailoring your proposal is a very powerful way to stand out from the competition that exists.
Make sure you state all the terms and conditions very clearly so that there are no confusions in the future. The clients should not feel betrayed and must establish an enriching relationship with your agency.
It is not necessary to include terms and conditions to be signed in the initial proposal. You may send the invoice and terms and conditions later, once the customer is onboard.
As appearances matter, you must pay close attention to your formatting.
If your agency proposal does not looks attractive, the clients will get a negative impression of your agency and regardless of how well you have written your proposal, they may reject your agency. Aim for an organised, elegant layout.
Lastly, the prospective clients may not all be SEO experts, so you must make your writing as easy to follow and precise as possible.
Make sure you use a professional but down-to-earth tone and avoid technical jargon as much as possible. If you are stuck at some point, then just think of how you will explain something to the client in person and use the similar language in the proposal.
Some of the SEO Proposal Templates that you may refer to are:
PandaDoc
Proposable
Webris
Bidsketch
Proposify
Mondovo
A good SEO proposal template helps you grab the attention of the clients and possibly convert a lot of potential clients.
You could consider the above examples and guidelines to come up with a perfect fit for your agency.
Having a perfect template in place saves a lot of time and then you in turn can focus can focus on the other essential matters of the agency.
A good proposal can help quickly close deals.