Finding the right SEO agency plays an important role in the success of your digital marketing strategy. You need to find an agency that will support your goals and objectives, helping you achieve the best results possible for your business and establish a strong foundation.
What is an SEO RFP?
An SEO RFP (Request for Proposal) allows you to examine proposals from agencies specialising in SEO. The document outlines project requirements such as the scope of work, budgets, and SEO goals. It simplifies the process and allows you to quickly evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of potential agencies and their strategies, allowing you as the client to make a better decision.
Standardising the proposal process with an SEO RFP will help you to objectively evaluate each agency’s strategies. This is why we’ve created a sample SEO RFP that you can use as a template to ensure everything is covered.
Download your SEO RFP sample temple here
Why Do You Need an SEO Request for Proposal?
Creating an SEO RFP can be a long process, which is why we’ve created the best SEO RFP sample to make it easier for you. You need to ensure that your questions are properly prepared and high-quality to receive the answers you’re looking for, and in the level of detail required.
A comprehensive SEO RFP proposal presents the information simply to make sure there is no miscommunication and no grey areas, saving you time in the long run, and also money.
Refines SEO Needs
Our SEO RFP sample template ensures that your SEO needs are clarified and gives you an overview of your digital marketing strategy and goals. The process helps you to determine specific goals relating to your business and what you want to achieve in the future, building on current success.
Aligns Expectations
This gives you the opportunity to invite decision-makers and stakeholders to align expectations on what you plan to achieve with an SEO campaign. It clears up any questions from the beginning and ensures everyone understands what they want to accomplish from working with an agency.
Streamlines Selection Process
Issuing SEO RFPs to potential agencies provides you with a head-to-head comparison of each agency’s experience, offerings, and ability to deliver successful results.
It completely streamlines the selection process and you’re more likely to receive proposals in response that are tailored to your specific SEO goals, making the comparison and evaluation process easier and more objective. Overall, it helps you to adequately and systematically vet agencies.
Saves Time
As the SEO RFP details the information needed for your project, potential agencies fully understand your SEO needs as well as your market, competitors, team, and everything else they need to give you a full detailed proposal. You won’t have to spend much time going back and forth with different questions as it ensures the most important questions are answered thoroughly.
What Needs to Be Included in the SEO RFP?
Our comprehensive template goes into detail about what you need to include and provides the structure. Here’s an overview of what you need to include.
Current Situation
Company Overview
You’ll want to provide the agency with all the information they need to know about your company to understand if you could work well together. Even though the agency will do its own background research, it’s useful to share when the company was founded, the main products/services you provide, and if you have a USP that makes you stand out from the competition.
Team & Resources
If you already have internal resources within your team, make sure it’s clear. You’ll want to list all the in-house resources and team members that will support your SEO project. This could include website developers, content marketing specialists, and SEO specialists.
How the Company Generates Revenue
If you can explain to an agency how your company generates revenue, they can ensure that your SEO goals are aligned with your business goals. As an example, an increase in traffic doesn’t necessarily result in an increase in revenue.
SEO Strategy & Current Performance
Do you already have an SEO strategy your in-house team or an external agency has been working on? It’s useful to explain your current SEO strategy including budget, targeted keywords and rankings, a summary of traffic, and results so far. What goals have you set in the past 12 months, and have you achieved them?
Why Are You Looking for an SEO Agency?
It might be that you haven’t achieved the results desired with a previous agency, or you’ve been doing it in-house, and you now have the budget to invest in growth. Explain your reasons why you want to partner with an SEO agency.
Existing Opportunities
Even though potential agencies will conduct their own research and be able to uncover new opportunities, it’s valuable to provide them with the research you have already conducted.
By providing the top keywords you have been focussing on, an agency will be able to analyse them further and explain why they’ve performed well or uncover issues on why poor performance has occurred.
Share your top competitors that you feel are your biggest competition, an agency will be able to build on this and explain the reasons why you should/shouldn’t be concerned about specific competitors.
Next Steps
What Does Success Mean to You?
You’ll want to have a clear idea of your SEO and business goals and explain how you currently measure your goals and success. What metrics do you use? What do you see the company looking like within the next 12 months? (e.g., revenue goals, team growth, new products/services offered).
Roadblocks
If you have come across any roadblocks that are limiting your SEO success such as website issues, lack of experience within the team, and approval delays, define these so potential SEO agencies can create a plan and a workaround to address them. Prospective SEO agencies need to understand the issues you’re facing so it can be helpful to list them in order of priority.
Going Forward
Budget
You need to be upfront about the specific budget that has been allocated for this project. Stating a realistic budget will help competing agencies submit proposals that best fit the allocated resources. Provide this as a monthly or annual allocation.
If you feel that there are constraints within your budget, mention this as it will help ensure you receive useful proposals.
Timeline
You should have an idea of a target deliverable schedule. This allows potential agencies to determine if they have the resources and team available to complete the project within the expected timescale.
Communication
How does the agency communicate with clients? What’s the frequency? How often do they provide updates on progress and reports?
If your company has a communication style that they prefer such as weekly meetings, or weekly updates via email, you can include them within your proposal.
What Happens After I Submit an SEO RFP Proposal?
Even if you send a comprehensive and detailed SEO RFP proposal, you should expect agencies to contact you with additional questions. You want to make sure that the agency is the right fit for you, but a reputable agency will also want to ensure that you’re the right fit for them too. At GA Agency we are selective with the clients we work with, and only work with those we feel we can make an impact.
Questions you would expect an agency to ask include:
How Many Agencies Are You Inviting to Pitch? – It’s important for an agency to know this and if you have invited a high number of agencies to pitch, then expect a couple to drop out We would advise you to keep your SEO RFP shortlist limited to 4-5 agencies, this shows that you have already carefully selected the agencies you’re interested in working with and makes it easier for you to compare proposals.
Why Did You Choose Us as a Prospective Agency? – This helps the agency understand why they were specifically shortlisted and how they can add value to your business. As an example, a prospective client might make the decision to work with GA Agency due to our expertise in international SEO. They might want to expand internationally or grow sales in a specific market, making GA Agency the perfect partner for them.
What’s the Decision Process? – The stages should already be outlined in your RFP (e.g., proposal deadline, decision date, project start date), however, they might have additional questions in regard to pitching and who makes the decisions.
How to Know if an Agency Is a Right Fit?
Once you’ve received all your proposals back, you’ll want to start going through them with your team. Understanding if an agency is the right fit for your company will depend on factors such as the services provided by the agency, their experience, and your SEO goals.
It’s important that the agency you work with has relevant experience, especially if you have a complex project that needs a team with a range of marketing skills.
Questions to Ask an SEO Agency
Within our SEO RFP template we dive deeper into all the questions that are important to ask a potential agency, however, here are a couple of examples.
- Previous case studies of how you’ve helped clients with SEO
- What makes your company stand out?
- Provide a market assessment of SEO and any market trends that we should be aware of.
- Can you provide a comprehensive pricing proposal that covers all potential fees?
SEO RFP Sample Template
Overall, an SEO RFP is essential to help you find the best SEO agency that is the right fit for your business. Using our SEO RFP sample will simplify the process and allow you to quickly evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of potential agencies and their strategies, allowing you as the client to make a better decision.
GA Agency is an independent, award-winning, full-service agency specialising in international growth. Our specialist international and multilingual team can take your business and digital marketing strategies to the next level with our SEO consulting services. Feel free to get in touch today to find out how we can grow your business online.
