How to evaluate an SEO proposal

Read the deliverables before the price

A price is only meaningful against a scope. Two proposals at $2,500 can describe completely different work, and the cheaper-looking one is often the smaller one.

Line up the deliverables side by side before you compare the numbers at the bottom.

The six things to look for

1. A named measurement, with a denominator. What gets measured, against whom, and does that set stay fixed?

2. Specific deliverables. “Content optimisation” is not a deliverable. “Rewrite six service pages answer-first” is.

3. A stated timeline with a first checkpoint.

4. What is excluded. A proposal with no exclusions has not been thought through.

5. Who does the work. Senior on the pitch and junior on the account is the oldest pattern in the industry.

6. Exit terms. What happens to the site, the content and the data if you leave.

The four warnings

A guarantee. Rankings and AI citations are not in the agency's control, and a guarantee means either a loophole or a metric chosen because it is easy.

A single composite score. A number whose derivation you cannot inspect will always move in the flattering direction.

No exclusions. See above.

Pressure on the price. An agency that discounts 30% to close this week was overpricing, or is about to under-resource you.

The question that reveals most

Ask: what would make you tell me this is not working? A good answer is specific and has a date on it. A vague answer means nobody has decided what failure looks like, which means it will never be declared.

Where this costs us

Published as a checklist a prospect can run against our own proposal, alongside the client results we are permitted to publish, which are two rather than the hundreds a larger agency can show. We would rather be compared on both than on neither.

“An agency that discounts 30% to close this week was overpricing, or is about to under-resource you.”