SEO Proposal Template: Free XLSX + Client-Ready PDF Example

An SEO proposal template as an Excel workbook with five sections (situation, scope, deliverables, timeline, investment) and a completed PDF example. It starts with a baseline audit of the prospect's site, not with a list of services, because a proposal that opens with what you sell instead of what they need reads as a brochure and gets compared on price. The baseline is the proposal.

Most SEO proposals fail for the same reason: they describe the agency instead of diagnosing the client. A prospect who reads three proposals that all say “technical audit, keyword research, content strategy, monthly reporting” has no way to choose except on price.

This template starts with their site, not with your services.

The five sections

Preview of the file

Section 1 is a baseline audit. Everything else flows from what it found.

Section 1 is the whole proposal

The baseline audit takes 30 minutes and uses free tools: Search Console (if you have access), Google PageSpeed Insights, the site’s robots.txt, and a 500-page crawl in Screaming Frog’s free tier. That is enough to find three to five real problems and frame the rest of the proposal around fixing them.

What the audit should show, specifically:

Indexed page count vs pages on the site. A large gap means Google is ignoring pages, and that is a technical problem with a fix.
Core Web Vitals. One number from PageSpeed Insights, with the specific cause named (usually a third-party script or unoptimised images, not the site’s own code).
The highest-traffic page and its actual conversion rate. This reframes the conversation from “how do I get more traffic” to “this page gets 4,000 visits and produces two enquiries.”
One specific competitor who outranks them, with a concrete reason why (more backlinks, better content depth, more complete schema).

The audit is free work. Do it anyway.

Thirty minutes of free work that shows you understand their site will close more business than a ten-page deck about your methodology. The prospect sees that you have already started, and that changes the dynamic from “should I hire someone” to “should I hire someone else.”

Section 2: Scope, and the exclusion list

Scope is where proposals get challenged six months later, so be explicit about what is included and what isn’t. The workbook has an exclusions tab with the common ones pre-filled:

Paid advertising management
Website development or redesign
Content writing beyond the specified volume
Social media management
Domain purchases or hosting

Every exclusion you name in advance is a scope-creep conversation you do not have later. Every one you leave ambiguous is a conversation you will have, at the worst possible time.

Section 3: Deliverables with acceptance criteria

A deliverable isn’t “keyword research.” It is “a keyword research workbook covering [topic area], with volume, difficulty and intent for a minimum of 200 queries, delivered by [date].”

The difference matters because acceptance criteria let the client know when the work is done. Without them, “keyword research” becomes a rolling obligation that never officially completes, which means you can never officially move to the next phase.

Section 5: Pricing that doesn’t invite negotiation

Three principles from writing proposals for 15+ years:

Monthly retainer, not project pricing, for ongoing SEO work. Project pricing creates a delivery deadline that conflicts with the reality that SEO results take months. A retainer with a monthly scope and a 90-day minimum commitment aligns both sides.

State what is excluded before you state the price. When a prospect sees the exclusion list before the number, the number is framed by what they are getting. When they see the number first, every exclusion below it feels like something being taken away.

Do not discount in the proposal. If you want to offer a lower rate, offer a smaller scope. A discounted full-scope proposal tells the client the full price was negotiable, and every renewal becomes a negotiation.

What I have learned from writing proposals

Four things, roughly in order of how much revenue each has saved:

The baseline audit closes more deals than the pitch deck. Showing a prospect their own broken canonical tags is more persuasive than any case study about someone else’s site.
A 90-day minimum commitment filters out clients who expect results in week two. Those clients churn regardless. Let them churn before they sign rather than after.
State the reporting format in the proposal. Clients who know they will receive a monthly report with named KPIs are less likely to send ad-hoc “how are we doing” emails, which saves more time than any other clause in the document.
Send the proposal as a PDF, not as a link. A Google Doc invites live editing. A PDF invites a reply, which is a conversation, which is where deals close.

Where this fits

The baseline audit in Section 1 is a lightweight version of the SEO audit template. For a deeper audit with scoring, use that workbook. Once the proposal is signed, the SEO report template is what monthly reporting looks like, and the KPI dashboard tracks the metrics the proposal promised to move.