SEO Case Study: How Sproutbox Increased Their Client Successes While Saving Time+Money
SEOJet Team August 20, 2024
SEO Case Study: How Sproutbox Increased Their Client Successes While Saving Time + Money Sproutbox,
The SEO Proposal Template That Will Get You Better Clients
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How a Technical SEO Audit Can Boost Your Business
SEOJet Team July 25, 2024
How a Technical SEO Audit Can Boost Your Business Ever feel like you’re doing everything
Using an SEO proposal template can help you close more and better clients. That’s because it allows you to be as thorough with each client as possible without having to reinvent the wheel with each new pitch—and you can steal my template for free.
My approach to pitching potential clients is probably different from what the industry norm is, but it worked extremely well for me as I had more clients than I had time.
Probably my biggest win was when I was able to land “The Profit” as a new SEO client.
Let me show you my process and strategy when I send out a proposal.
Why Use an SEO Proposal Template?
Before I get into it, it is important to remember that what you are selling to a potential SEO client is yourself. They simply want to know that you are the one who can get the job done. The proposal just helps solidify that.
The SEO proposal you send out needs to look professional and cover all of the points that will help your potential clients feel confident that you can do a good job for them and get them the results they want.
When they see your proposal, they’re also seeing:
- The level of detail you put into it
- Your professional recommendations
- The fact you took the time to personalize it
- What makes you stand out as an SEO expert
When you use a template, some of the work is already done for you. Now it’s up to you to fill in the blanks and put your best foot forward.
The Building Blogs of an SEO Proposal Template
You can download my SEO proposal template for free or create your own. Let’s review the critical sections of a good SEO proposal and how to maximize them.
Company Logo
You want someone to instantly like you? Place their logo nice and big at the top of the proposal.
Every business loves to see its own logo, especially coming from other people.
This shows you created this proposal for them and no one else. It’s a personal touch that can make you stand out.
Areas Of Focus
In this opening section of the proposal, you want to personalize the SEO plan you are going to put into place for the client. Make it extremely specific to their business, including things like a plan to dominate the local region if they are a local business or areas of opportunity for real growth in the search engines.
Here is how this section might look in your proposal if you were sending a proposal to a weight loss surgery center:
This shows you created this proposal for them and no one else. It’s a personal touch that can make you stand out.
Area Of Focus
After some preliminary research in the weight loss surgery niche, my strategy is to focus on 3 different areas to drive buyers to your website.
- Dominate California – Although your client base expands beyond California, we need to make sure your website’s Google presence owns all CA searches. This will be priority number one.
- National Expansion – Once we have a stronghold at the top of Google for California-related searches, we will shift our focus to rank for national key phrases. This will help bring in new business from out of state and widen the potential market exponentially.
- Weight Loss Surgery Prices – Because your prices are so competitive, we want all of America to know what your cash price is. Our focus will also be to get your prices page to rank nationally for anyone wanting to know the cost of each surgery. If someone is fine paying the cash prices, then they should be fine traveling to California to have the surgery performed by your company.
You don’t have to go into great detail. We don’t want to include lots of specifics here because we want the client to keep reading the proposal. We also don’t want to start the conversation with lots of questions (or distractions). Keep it simple and direct to move the prospect to the next section.
Keyword Research
In this section, you will talk about how you will do in-depth keyword research to find the best key phrases that will bring your clients visitors who are ready to convert to customers.
Again, we aim for short, succinct descriptions here. We don’t need to go deep into methodologies or tools. Here’s an example from a real SEO proposal:
Keyword Research
I will conduct in-depth keyphrase research to target the phrases that will bring visitors to your website who are ready to have weight loss surgery. The home page and each category page will target their own set of highly searched phrases.
We will target many “long tail” key phrases on each page that we optimize. These are phrases that are not searched as frequently but convert into customers at a much higher rate than the shorter more competitive phrases.
In this section, you will explain more about how you will optimize the different pages of their site. Meta titles and descriptions can get lost in the shuffle, but these are going to be the first things people see in the search results pages and should be written in a compelling manner.
Explain how many pages you intend on optimizing here as well.
Meta Tags
I will write unique titles and descriptions for the main pages of the website, focusing on the home page and category pages on your site, as follows:
- Title tags: Up to 60 characters each
- Meta descriptions: Up to 160 characters each
Each page will be optimized for a different set of key phrases so that we maximize the amount of search engine traffic you receive.
Content Strategy
In this section, you need to outline the overall content strategy you are going to implement, whether it be building out new pages of content or working with the content on the site to make it more SEO-friendly.
If you want to go the extra mile, suggest some new pages or blog topics to cover, as well as the keywords to optimize them.
And to go another extra mile, show how your suggestions connect to their larger goals. Share why you’re making those suggestions and what you expect to get from them.
Content Strategy
I will work with you to create a content strategy that we can implement on the site to drive more traffic and new clients through each page. This will require that we add content to the site on specific pages and create new pages for the site.
I will work with the content on all pages that we optimize to ensure that it is optimized to the fullest including proper quantity of content per page and keyword density. This includes content recommendations based on key phrases that we will target both locally and nationally.
Keep in mind they’re not your client—yet. You want to balance crafting a good SEO proposal but also not providing too much “free work” before they sign the contract. Give them enough value here to illustrate your expertise.
On-Page Optimization
On-page optimization refers to all the tweaks and fixes you do within the website: images and image alt tags, metadata, internal linking, URL hierarchy, schema markup, etc.
You’ll notice that I don’t spend much time on this section in the proposal. If you want to add more that is fine but because I cover most on-page tactics in other sections this section becomes shorter.
However, you might find it beneficial to list specific action items you can do to show the full value of what your client is getting.
On-Page Optimization
I will work with alt tags, headlines, and the HTML code to ensure that each page optimized is search engine friendly and your pages are being indexed properly.
Implementation
I include this section in my proposals because if you are comfortable making changes to web pages, getting control from your client makes things go a lot faster when you can make the changes instead of having them make the changes.
This takes a huge weight off the client. Now, instead of having to spend time vetting and hiring an implementation partner, they can let you handle the entire project. And that adds major value—you can justify a higher rate if you can handle more parts of the project.
Again, you can be as general or specific here as you want.
Implementation
I will implement all SEO changes to your website unless otherwise requested. FTP and CMS access will be required in order to make these changes.
Link Building
Link building is an important part of SEO strategy, and it’s never one-size-fits-all. With so many ways to build backlinks, it’s essential to be specific about how you intend to go about it.
In this section, you need to spell out the link strategy, including how many links you think it will take per month to make headway in Google.
You should also provide your suggested monthly link budget in this section. Link building can be costly, and you want to set realistic expectations up front so your client can make an informed decision.
Remember, don’t be scared to put forth some numbers. Their success depends on it.
Link Building
In order to give your site the internet presence it needs to compete, I will implement a natural one-way link-building campaign. These links will be a spread of anchor texts that contain your key phrases in an organic way along with natural anchor texts to maintain an organic appearance to the search engines.
I intend to target backlinks using the following criteria:
- Websites of 20+ DA
- A mix of branded, natural, and niche-specific keywords
- Website traffic volume of 1000 or more
A monthly budget of $1500 will be required to obtain the necessary links to grow in the rankings, which will allow us to build 10-15 quality backlinks per month.
We will continually build links to all pages that we optimize to ensure rankings grow for each page and move up the rankings quickly. We will use our “drip linking” system to ensure all links are coming in naturally and are spread out over time.
Timeline
Every client wants to know how long things are going to take. In this section of the proposal, give them the timeline for all of the things you will be doing for them.
Note that this is a suggested schedule of events, NOT when the client will see results. You may need to stress that SEO is a long game, not an overnight success, and that it can take weeks or even months before they start seeing a noticeable difference.
Timeline
The following timeline is based on the average time needed to send deliverables and fulfill the process. Each program is unique, and may require additional time. Or, it could progress faster than outlined.
- Program Procedure Estimated Timing
- SEO Program Setup Week 1
- Keyword Research Week 1
- Optimized Code Creation Week 2-3
- Content – Ongoing
- Link Building – Ongoing
Expectations
Everyone you send a proposal for SEO services to will want to know when they can expect rankings. Even though everyone wants to rank now, you need to set the right expectations even if the client is not happy with the timeline.
This will prevent your client from being disapppointed with you based on their results, plus it gives you more time to tweak and refine your approach to generate the results you expect.
Expectations
We expect to see results for California-related searches within the first two months. The national results will take more time. For many of the long tail key phrases, we will start seeing results within the first few months. The more competitive phrases we target will take more time to move up in the search engines.
By the end of the 6-month agreement, you should see a dramatic overall rise in search traffic and sales from search traffic.
Work & Payment Terms
Once you’ve established a clear plan and its value, it’s time to show them the cost of the SEO campaign. Don’t be scared to ask for money. Remember, the success of their SEO campaign depends on you charging them enough to make a difference in Google.
Work & Payment Terms
The agreement will be valid for a period of 6 months from the signing of the agreement.
My SEO consulting fee for this project is $1500 per month plus the $1500 link-building budget for a total cost of $3000 per month.
The first installment of $3000 will be due up front and the remaining payments will be due in monthly increments for the remaining 5 months.
White Hat SEO Promise
Let’s face it, there is a dark cloud that hangs over the SEO industry because a lot of bad SEOs have wasted a lot of people’s money and even got them penalized by doing shady stuff to get results.
Because of this, you need to spend some time easing the concern that almost every single potential client you talk to will have.
This is the last piece in the proposal before I ask for their signature. Here is the terminology I use.
White Hat SEO
My promise to you is that your website will be optimized using the most current industry-accepted standards, giving you the best chance for success.
I will continue to work with your website until we see an increase in search engine rankings. Based on past experience with similar websites, we can expect great success.
But these can’t just be words you use to close the deal. You have to mean it. You have to be willing to work longer than the term of the contract if your client doesn’t see results.
One of the reasons why I built SEOJet was because, in truth, link building is the piece of SEO where most sites succeed or fail.
On-page SEO is pretty simple with countless guides out there to help, but link building is what separates any search term’s top 3 results in Google from everyone else.
If you want to make sure that all of your SEO clients not only stay safe from Google updates but also continue to climb the search results, check out what SEOJet can do
.
What About The SEO Audit?
Now you’re probably wondering why I haven’t included a whole bunch of reporting on what the potential client has done already, or their current state of SEO (i.e., an SEO audit or backlink audit).
Think of it from a potential client’s perspective. They are coming to you because they need help with SEO. They already know this.
Spending a ton of time showing them that they need help with SEO isn’t helping solve their problem. It would be like someone going to a salon to get a new hairstyle and the stylist spending the first 10 minutes telling the client why the hairstyle they walked in with looks bad.
Don’t bring your potential client down in the dumps right before you are going to ask them for a lot of money.
Instead, you give them the plan and solution to solve the problem. That is the focus of the proposal. In 16 years of doing SEO, I have never sent an SEO audit or backlink audit to one single potential client unless they specifically asked for it.
You run an audit for your own benefit, but that doesn’t mean you need to share those results with your clients.
Instead, you can use the audit data to inform your suggestions about what they need and what you can do for them.
From there, it’s a matter of highlighting your expertise and showing how confident you are that you can help them get to where they want to be.
How SEOJet Can Help Your SEO Clients
Want to take your SEO to the next level?
SEOJet was built for someone just like you—an SEO consultant that has to manage multiple SEO clients.
I hated guessing every time I built a link for one of my clients and so I set out to finally figure out what Google wants to see in a #1 ranked backlink profile.
Using #1 ranked backlink data from Google, SEOJet builds out link maps for your clients so that every link you build moves you closer to the top of Google.
The results have been amazing both for my own sites and for our users.
Click here to see how SEOJet works.
Using SEOJet link maps I have been able to get top 3 rankings with 70% fewer links than my competitors.
How did I do it?
I only built links that I actually knew would boost my rankings. That’s what SEOJet can do for you.
Want to see how SEOJet can make you look like an SEO ninja?
SEOJet helps you quickly build customized backlink strategies for all of your clients so they can get to the top of Google quickly and stay there for the long term.
Best of all, it’s all white-label so YOU look like the hero.
Get a demo today, then grab my free SEO proposal template to start closing more lucrative deals.
