How to Conduct a Winning SEO Project Proposal to Clients
Regardless if you’re an SEO specialist extraordinaire with rock-solid skills, knowing how to effectively present an SEO project proposal to prospective clients is a megawatt competency that needs to be honed to earn their trust and ultimately seal the deal.
In this SEO Premier Blog, we explore important steps and effective strategies to conduct a winning SEO project proposal, in order to establish a successful partnership with your clients.
Treat it as a foot-in-the-door phenomenon:
- SET A DISCOVERY SESSION
A discovery session is your springboard to knowing the goals, identity, expectations, and challenges of your client. It’s an information gathering event where you can discuss in greater detail their business, target audience, platforms used, current online presence. By collecting these data, it enables you to have a deep understanding of their needs so you can tailor-fit a strategy that will help you and them achieve success.
Before the pandemic, discovery sessions were scheduled face-to-face and required collocative collaboration between you and among stakeholders. Today, many more are comfortable staging virtual and asynchronous meetings.
Asynchronous meetings are those that use various tools or forms to elicit information from the client. Tools like empathy maps, journey mapping, SWOT analysis, user persona, and business model canvas provide you or the SEO agency valuable information about the client.
Prior to setting up the proposal meeting, make sure that you have compiled and organised the notes and results of your discovery session.
- CONDUCT A COMPREHENSIVE WEBSITE AUDIT
Along with the results of the discovery session, a comprehensive website audit sets a strong foundation for your proposal. The SEO audit will identify existing issues, technical gaps and obstacles, and areas for improvement. When you conduct a website audit, focus on important ranking factors like content, link profile, site architecture, keyword usage and density, and website speed and performance.
Presentation also matters when you show your findings to the client. Instead of writing a long and voluminous text-based report, be concise and creative by using visual aids like charts and graphs. These presentation tools will make your report more accessible and understandable.
- CREATE A CUSTOMISED SEO STRATEGY
Once you’ve mapped the current state (discovery plus website audit), it’s now time to formulate the target state for the client’s brand/business. Enter the SEO strategy that is the blueprint for bridging the gap between the present state to the future state.
Furthermore, it outlines the solutions tailor-fit to the client’s needs, budget, resource availability, timeline, and risk appetite.
One of the best practices is to break the strategy into actionable steps like keyword research, competitor analysis, technical SEO, content creation, outreach activities and link building, site structure improvements, local SEO, paid advertising and many more. It’s imperative to clearly explain what each of the above areas does to help improve the ranking and conversion of your landing page or website.
The SEO strategy must also include criteria for success. KPIs like organic traffic growth, keyword rankings, conversion rate, social media following and engagement rate help increase confidence in your strategy and ability to prove your expertise as a specialist or a boutique digital agency. Don’t over promise by setting unrealistically high targets and milestones. Which gets us to our last point…
- PLAN THE TASKS AND DELIVERABLES
To set the client’s expectations about measurable impact from your SEO services, they must be aware of the specific tasks and deliverables and timelines of such. This includes a list of activities as well as a work breakdown structure of the deliverables. They are then mapped against dates and certain schedules.
At this point, you can already suggest ways of working, communication channels, risk and incident management approaches (in case there are hiccups in the project’s duration), and reporting cadences.
The activities plus the timeframe will establish organisation and transparency for the client, which further demonstrates your commitment and professionalism during the project.
In the proposal meeting, the project plan can serve as an interlude for discussing the nitty-gritty of the contract and service level agreements. This can include SEO packages, pricing structures and schedules, expected outputs, and other terms.
In every step, you must emphasise the value you’re creating for your client’s brand or business. Where brands try to outperform one another in the digital space, and many more SEO agencies compete to get their business, knowing how to conduct a winning SEO project proposal might be your key advantage to win their trust and start helping them walk toward the path to SEO success!
