Search Engine Optimization Proposal

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION PROPOSAL

Prepared for: [Prospect’s name, designation, company name]

[Prospect’s email address, phone and fax]

[Prospect’s address]

Prepared By: [Your name, designation, company]

[Your email address, phone and fax]

[Your business address]

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

[Your prospect’s business name] has a good website that is currently not properly optimized for maximum search engine visibility. It currently receives very limited amounts of organic search traffic, resulting in a small number of qualified leads generated each month. [Your company name] has performed a preliminary SEO analysis of the site’s current state and has identified several factors that contribute to [Prospect site’s name]’s commercial underperformance.

1. Business Challenges

• [Prospect site’s name] is not being found by potential customers in the first page of search engines
• These potential customers are instead finding the websites of competitors
• [Prospect’s business name] does not have in-house personnel and resources that can address its current SEO and business needs
• [Prospect site’s name] is not generating enough revenue to cover the initial and on-going resource investments that went into it

1. SEO Challenges

• [Prospect site’s name] is currently not found on the first page of Google search results for non-branded keywords that refer to its products
• The limited visibility is resulting in low amounts of targeted visitors from search engines
• [Prospect site’s name] does not have a rich backlink profile that can boost search engine rankings and drive referral traffic to its pages
• The site does not have a robust content library that’s optimized for search
• Technical issues are hampering the crawl of search engine spiders from one page to page

1. Baseline Metrics

At the time of this proposal’s creation, [Your company name] has determined the following baseline metrics for [Prospect site’s name]:

Avg. Visits per Month:

Avg. Organic Search Visits per Month: XX

Alexa Traffic Rank: XX

Google PageRank: XX

Domain Authority: XX

Avg. Conversions per Month: XX

Avg. Conversions from Organic Search Visits per Month: XX

Avg. Site Revenue per Month: XX

Avg. Revenue from Organic Search per Month:

Current Keyword Rankings

1. Goals

[Prospect site’s name]’s SEO campaignwith [Your company name] has [number]primary objectives:

• Drive targeted search engine traffic through better positioning in Google’s SERPs
• Overtake competing business websites in SERPs to gain a larger share of the market
• Increase conversions from search engine traffic

1. WHY [YOUR COMPANY]?

[Your company name] is a full-service search engine optimization agency that offers responsive, ethical and enterprise-quality SEO services tailored to your website’s unique needs. We have a team composed of passionate professionals who come from diverse backgrounds to offer simplified solutions to complex online marketing challenges.

Founded in [year], [Your company name] has a rich portfolio built on SEO success stories. We have worked with a diverse set of clients from startups to Fortune 500s, giving us the kind of experience necessary to tackle your SEO problems effectively.

Here’s why entrepreneurs, marketing leaders and other digital marketing agencies constantly seek [Your company’s name] services:

• Proven track record: We’ve helped companies such as [client], [client], and[client] accomplish their SEO goals
• Ethical practices: We use 100% white hat SEO to make sure your site succeeds without putting it at risk from Google penalties
• Value for money: We offer premium services at reasonable rates
• Credible management: Our senior management team is composed of respected authorities in the field of SEO, analytics, PPC and usability.
• Complete Transparency: We offer full campaign visibility and comprehensive reporting to give clients the peace of mind that they deserve.

1. WHAT’S AT STAKE?

[Your company name] has performed an analysis of the potential rewards that a successful SEO campaign can bring to [Prospect business’s name]. Using keyword data, click-through rate estimates based on first page positions, current conversion rates and [Prospect site’s name]’s average conversion value, we have calculated the range of potential revenue per month for your main keyword.

Important: Please keep in mind that these are ballpark estimates and not guarantees. Revenue may vary depending on market trends, product seasonality, competitor activity, and other factors beyond [Your company name]’s control.

Examining the keyword “iphone accessories,” we found out through Google Keyword planner that it’s searched approximately 33,100 times in the US alone. This will be the basis for our computation since [Prospect site’s name] only targets the United States.

We used Google click-through rate data reported by Search Engine Watch. These figures are widely accepted in the search marketing industry as the best click share estimates.

The conversion rate and the conversion values were provided by [Prospect’s name].

The table below shows the estimated ROI from ranking on the first page for just one of several keywords that this campaign will target:

Analyses for other target keywords may be conducted at your request.

1. PROPOSED SOLUTION

In response to the SEO challenges identified, [Your company name] proposes a comprehensive SEO campaign that utilizes technical improvement, content development, content promotion and link acquisition techniques. These activities are intended to enhance organic search visibility, which in turn drives the inbound marketing efforts of the business.

1. The Inbound Marketing Model

[Your company name] will follow the inbound marketing model illustrated above. This paradigm shows how rankings translate into visits, conversions and finally into returning customers.

• Rankings – With an optimized website, [Prospect site’s name]’s rankings are intended to improve. The goal is to get all of the site’s target keywords in Google’s first page to capture targeted traffic that can be converted into customers.
• Visits – The main benefit of having strong search engine rankings is that it sends quality, targeted traffic to your site’s pages. When your website is found on Google by a user looking for its line of products, there’s a great chance that this visitor is highly interested in what the site has to offer.
• Conversions – A conversion happens when a visitor to a website performs an action that helps you achieve a goal. Obviously, the more visitors a site has, the more opportunities it has to convert. Traffic from organic search is proven to be the easiest to convert compared to other traffic referral channels.
• Retention –Inbound marketing doesn’t end with the completion of a transaction. [Your company’s name]’s SEO campaign encourages customer retention and repeated transactions with its content marketing elements and follow-up system.

1. Recommended Actions

[Your company name] recommends the following actions to enhance the good rankings of [Prospect site’s name]:

1. Fix Technical Issues – making sure that the site’s current technical state allows search engine bots to crawl public-facing pages freely is an integral aspect of SEO. [Your company name] will address areas such as crawl errors, internal linking, sitemap creation, etc. to make sure crawls run smoothly and internal link equity is properly distributed.
2. Start a Blog – A blog allows [Prospect’s site name] to target more keywords, constantly create fresh content and attract off-page ranking signals. Blogging will be an integral part of the site’s content marketing strategy.
3. Build Up the Link Profile – Inbound links from relevant, high quality websites will help maximize the website’s ranking potential. [Your company name] will use a variety of tactics to encourage authority sites to link to [prospect site’s name]’s pages.
4. Capitalize on Video, Audio and Slideshows – Text content and link building are not enough to guarantee success in today’s search engine optimization landscape. Google’s algorithms tend to reward websites that look like legitimate brands and rich media is a good way to capitalize on this. Posting YouTube videos and SlideShare presentations is a great way to expand brand awareness and attract more visitors to the website.
5. Build Up AuthorRank – Search engines are leaning towards recognizing the work of credible authors and rewarding the pages with their markups. [Prospect site’s name]’s blogging persona needs to create a Google+ account, link it with the website and trigger the Google Authorship Markup feature so the search engine can track the writer’s body of work.

1. SEO Process

[Your company name]’s SEO process follows the five-phase, cycle in the diagram below. Each circle represents a different stage in the optimization process that will put the site in a position of strength when competing in Google’s SERPs.

1. Technical SEO Audit

The first optimization element in any SEO campaign is the technical audit of the website. We will make sure that the site’s pages, its information architecture and its content taxonomy are conducive for search engine bot crawls.

The following tasks will be performed to attain a high level of on-site optimization:

1. Title tag audit
2. Meta description audit
3. Anchor text audit
4. Internal linking audit
5. Duplicate content audit
6. Weak/thin content page audit
7. Crawl error audit
8. Sitemap check
9. Robots.txt validation
10. Authoring markup and schema implementation
11. Link profile analysis

1. Online Branding Enhancement

Branding is an integral part in the current age of Google’s algorithms. A strong brand is a hefty trust signal for search engines, making websites that invest in this aspect of online marketing stronger in search results.

Branding can be reinforced for [Prospect’s site name] using the following methods:

1. Local directory listings and citations
2. Creation of social media brand pages
3. Graphical assets
4. Advertorials (full disclosure)

1. Content Development

The idea is to create a diverse set of content assets that will be used in strategic Internet locations for more reach.

Content creation is now more important than ever in SEO and online marketing. Google’s search algorithms are now advanced enough to identify and reward original, fresh and high-quality content. The websites that are able to understand and apply this principle are the ones that end up succeeding in the rankings. The more content [Prospect’s site name] produces and the higher its quality, the more traffic it will attract from Google as a result.

[Your company name] will help [Prospect’s business name] develop content with the following tasks:

1. Keyword mapping – Identification of keywords that the site is campaigning for and other terms that bear a strong degree of relevance to those keywords.
2. Content Brainstorming Sessions – Taking the mapped keywords and creating topics out of keywords that will serve as the basis for the content. We will focus efforts on creating timeless or “evergreen” content which will receive traffic for years.
3. Editorial Calendar Creation – Identification, prioritization and plotting of content to be published.
4. Content Expansion– Taking the essence of the content and using it to produce more than just articles. For instance, an article’s outline can be used to create a PowerPoint presentation that can be uploaded to SlideShare. The same presentation can be voiced over and converted to video for uploading in YouTube.

1. Content Promotion

Content will serve no traffic and SEO benefits if it only sits in the website and goes unnoticed. To gain valuable, natural backlinks, incremental click-through traffic and brand recognition, the content has to go through a promotion process.

Below are the ways in which we can distribute and popularize our content online:

1. Guest posting in relevant blogs
2. Press release distribution via newswires
3. Posting of decks in SlideShare
4. Posting of videos in YouTube
5. Posting content snippets and images on Facebook and Twitter to promote blog posts.
6. Collaborations – working with industry peers in thought leadership efforts

Surrounding our conversion or money pages with content drives valuable leads

1. ANALYTICS AND IMPEIVEMENT

At the end of each monthly campaign cycle, we will use Google Analytics, SEOmoz and SalesForce to measure and improve the following key performance indicators:

• Search engine rankings
• Search engine traffic
• Domain authority growth
• Top traffic-driving keywords
• Top traffic-receiving pages
• Conversion funnel drop-off points

VI. TIMELINE

The following are the manpower resources that [Your company name] will provide to [Prospect’s business name]:

Task Timeline

For the first seven and a half workdays, [Your company name] will perform a full SEO audit and on-page optimization for [Prospect’s site name]:

For succeeding workweeks, [Your company name] will focus on off-page optimization. The weekly task/hours breakdown will be as follows:

1. DEPENDENCIES

In order to perform its role successfully, [your company name] will rely on [prospect’s business name] to provide the following:

1. A monthly retainer fee of $XXXX
2. Support from your web development team
3. Access to Google Analytics data
4. Access to Google Webmaster Tools account
5. Access to requested revenue figures
6. Consultation time with subject matter experts in your organization