TL;DR — Read an SEO proposal from back to front. Start by checking the term length, the exit clause and who owns the accounts. Then, look for deliverables that can be counted on and a success metric tied to revenue rather than just rankings. A good proposal will describe your business in such detail that if you swap in a competitor’s name it would break. If it promises a certain position or can’t say what the work entails, walk.

I’ve read my fair share of SEO proposals, written most of them, and sometimes they get forwarded to me by founders and marketing leads who are stumped by the three very different quotes they’ve been given.

When I stopped writing proposals for a living and started having to review other people’s work, I learned a thing or two. Agencies love to hide their weaknesses behind generic language — a pricing page that says “starting at”, a deliverables list that says “up to”, a success section that talks about visibility but never mentions a sale.

This is how I would read an SEO proposal, if I were on the other side of the desk. I’ll give you an agency’s take on how to write one that your client would actually want to use.

Start at the end

The first few pages of an SEO proposal are all marketing — case studies, logos, a chart going up and to the right, a slide about the team. Most of it is just fluff. None of it really tells you what you’re getting.

The final few pages, however, are where the action is. That’s where you’ll find the price, the term, and the payment schedule. Sometimes that section even is the contract itself, or at least a summary of the key points. Some agencies like to call it an SEO agreement — same difference.

I start there because it gives me a sense of what I’m committing to. A proposal that lets you leave at any time can afford some vagueness. A proposal that locks you in for 12 months had better be crystal clear.

Once I know what I’m in for, I go back and take a second look at the rest of the proposal in the light of that knowledge.

Does it have a personal touch?

Here’s a quick way to spot a proposal that’s been cobbled together from a template rather than written from scratch. Take the diagnosis section, the part that explains what’s wrong with your site and what they plan to do about it. Now mentally swap out your company name for that of a competitor. If the proposal still makes sense, you’re in trouble.

If nothing breaks, you know it was a template. Someone changed the logo, ran a site audit, and pasted in the results. The audit screenshots are generic, the keyword list is sorted by search volume without a word about what terms your actual buyers use, and the competitor section talks about whoever happens to rank, not whoever you actually lose business to.

A good proposal should be tailored to you — your sales cycle, the products that make the money, why the last SEO agency didn’t work out. Google’s own page on hiring an SEO makes the same point from the other angle — a good SEO should be asking what makes your business tick, who your competitors are and how customers find their way to you. If they never bothered to find out, the proposal can’t possibly say anything meaningful about it.

Deliverables that get results

Scope is where proposals start to get slippery, and I spend the most time here.

“Ongoing on-page optimisation” is not a deliverable — it’s a category. So is “content strategy” or “authority building”. What you need instead is a number and a noun. Eight existing pages rewritten per month, listed out in a month-by-month plan. Four new articles, with the target keyword for each agreed on before anyone starts writing. A technical audit in month one, with the fixes prioritised and assigned to their team or yours.

If you can’t put your finger on a specific, countable outcome at the end of the month, then it’s not worth counting.

Watch out for “up to”

“Up to 10 backlinks per month” means zero is just fine. So does “up to 4 articles”. I understand why agencies use this language, because sometimes a publisher drops the ball and nobody wants to be in the doghouse for it. But if most of the deliverables come with an “up to”, then ask what the floor is and get it in writing.

Get specific about links

If the proposal involves link building, it should say how the links are earned and what kind of websites they come from. “High-DA backlinks” tells you almost nothing. Domain Authority is a score from a third-party service — Google doesn’t use it, and it’s easy to fiddle with. I’d want to know if the links are paid placements or real outreach to publications, or digital PR, and whether I get a list of every URL as it goes live.

Google’s hiring page says you never have to link to an SEO, but a small clause like a “footer credit” or “powered by” link can tell you a lot about what they are looking for.

What they say success looks like

Find the section that spells out what success will look like. Some proposals don’t even bother with one — which by itself is a pretty clear answer.

Rankings and traffic are fine as progress signals, but poor definitions of success, because you can grow traffic and sell nothing. The proposals I trust tie the success of the work to something that shows up in your revenue: non-branded organic sessions, leads or orders from organic search, pipeline value and so on. I wrote a whole other piece on the SEO KPIs that actually matter if you want to see the full list of what I track and why.

Even beyond the numbers, I look for a baseline and a timeline. What’s the starting point today and what do they expect to happen at month three, six and twelve? If they can’t commit to a forecast, fine — forecasts are always tricky. But they should at least tell you what they will be measuring and where you are at before you sign anything. Otherwise the starting point all gets decided later by the people who are supposed to be measuring it.

If the success section promises a specific ranking for a specific keyword by a specific date, I’ve written a whole lot about ranking guarantees already. The short version is that Google says nobody can even guarantee a #1 ranking, and I agree with them.

The same goes for promises about showing up in ChatGPT — that’s something nobody has any control over. If AI search is part of the pitch, it’s worth reading up on how I would vet an AI SEO agency before calling them again.

The SEO contract — where the proposal gets real

Proposals are designed to sell you something — but contracts are what matter when things start to go wrong. I’m not a lawyer, and if the numbers are big you should definitely get one to look at it. These are the clauses I would look at myself, if you don’t mind.

Term and exit

Minimum terms are normal in SEO and I don’t think they are automatically a bad sign. The work takes months to start paying off, and the agency does most of the heavy lifting in the first quarter. Our own guarantee requires a six month commitment, so I’m hardly neutral on this.

What I would actually look at is the exit clause. How much notice do you need to give? Is there a cancellation fee? Does the contract just auto-renew for another full term if you forget to cancel, or does it roll over to month to month? In the contracts people forward to me, the auto-renew into a fresh long term is the one that always catches people out.

Who owns what when you leave

This one actually matters more than people expect. Check who owns the content they write, the Search Console and analytics accounts, any links they build, and any dashboards they set up during the engagement.

The answer should be you, for all of it. Accounts should be set up in your company and shared with the agency, not the other way round. Search Console’s permission levels make it pretty straightforward: you stay the owner and give the agency full or restricted access. Google’s hiring guidance goes a step further and suggests giving them just read access to Search Console while they are still at the audit stage.

Watch out for work that lives on property that the agency controls. If they build pages on a domain or subdomain that belongs to them, those pages and whatever they rank for may still be theirs when you go.

What happens when they miss

Read the performance section, if there is one, and ask what happens when the agency doesn’t deliver the scope. Not the results, the scope. If they promised eight rewritten pages and delivered three, is there a credit, a make-good month, or nothing? That’s the one part an agency can actually control, so it’s reasonable to expect a refund when they slip up.

Red flags worth walking away from right away

Most of this is just about reading carefully. A few things are simpler than that, and if I saw any of them I would stop reading right there.

The agency won’t tell you what they are going to do. Google’s guidance warns you about SEOs who are secretive or won’t explain their plans, and reminds you that you are responsible for what anyone you hire does to your site. “Proprietary methods” is sometimes a real thing. More often it’s just a way to avoid answering a question.

The keyword list is all theirs. If the agency gets to choose the keywords it will report on, it can just pick the easy ones. Agree the tracked list together, in writing.

The price only works if nobody actually looks at the output. Content that can’t pay a writer, links that can’t pay a publisher — something is being cut, and you will only find out which one later.

The proposal landed on my desk without any prior warning. Google slams cold SEO emails as the “burn fat at night” diet pills — which about says it all in their typically blunt style.

Price isn’t and shouldn’t be the deciding factor

I get asked all the time to give a straight answer — what does an SEO proposal cost? I can’t give you a single number and to be honest, I would be pretty skeptical of anyone who claims they can. I’ve had the chance to review lots of AI-generated SEO proposals and the quotes for what looks like the exact same service have ranged from $1,500 to $18,000 a month. And most of that difference comes down to what’s actually included in the scope.

So don’t go around comparing total costs. Break each proposal down into what you get for your money and compare the specifics. Sometimes the more expensive one is worth it because it includes things the cheaper one is quietly leaving out. Like implementation work or real earned links rather than just buying some. And sometimes it just is expensive.

What I always look at is the business case. If the proposal can’t even vaguely explain how the work turns into revenue for your business, the price is basically impossible to judge. You’ve got no idea whether it’s a good deal.

Questions to send back before signing anything

If a proposal makes it through all that — which is to say it’s actually a pretty good proposal — I would fire off a short set of questions before signing anything. What exactly are they going to deliver each month by the numbers? Who picks the keywords you’ll be chasing? What are the baseline metrics to judge success, and what happens if we miss the scope? Who owns the accounts, the content and the links if we go our separate ways? How do we get out of it, and what does it cost to do so?

Good agencies will answer those questions quickly and not get the wrong idea that you are hassling them. How they reply is just as revealing as the proposal itself.

What I would do this week

Take the proposals you’ve got and just start at the last page. Read that first. Swap out the competitor names with one from the company a rival does business with and see where it breaks. Count the deliverables and then send off the questions.

It takes a couple of hours of your time. Next to a year or two of a retainer that just won’t pay itself back, that is a pretty cheap investment.

Cheers, Dave.

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