SEO RFP Template: How To Find The Best Agency

Whether your need for search engine optimization (SEO) has outgrown your in-house capabilities or you need to part ways with your current provider, the process of vetting an SEO agency can be daunting. 

Finding the best possible enterprise SEO agency for your business starts with writing a strong SEO RFP. Fortunately, you don’t have to be an SEO expert to hire an SEO expert. All you need to find the perfect SEO partner for you is a clear understanding of what questions to ask an SEO agency and what answers to expect.

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Why Do You Need an RFP for SEO?

An SEO RFP is a formal document you send to multiple agencies at once, describing your business, goals, and budget, so each one can respond with a comparable proposal instead of a one-off pitch.

Creating a comprehensive RFP for SEO increases the likelihood that agencies will tailor their proposals and plans to your specific needs.

With the market saturated with SEO agencies, consultants, and integrated marketing companies who provide SEO services, standardizing the proposal process helps you objectively evaluate how their different strategies might address your business goals.

Align Stakeholders

Writing a comprehensive RFP allows you the opportunity to invite all stakeholders to the table to align expectations about what you hope to achieve with an SEO campaign.

A thorough pre-RFP discussion lays the groundwork for a better outcome, in both your SEO agency search and the SEO campaign that follows.

Deciding Who To Invite to Your RFP

Before you send anything out, decide who’s going on the list. If you’re unhappy with your current agency, that doesn’t automatically rule them out of a rebid. Inviting an incumbent to compete alongside new agencies gives you a real baseline to judge against, and it gives your current partner a fair shot at winning the business back with a stronger plan. A reasonable RFP list runs from three to five agencies, enough to see a genuine range of approaches and pricing, without producing so many proposals that comparing them becomes its own project.

Clarify Your Needs

A disciplined approach to RFP creation will require you to step through your marketing goals and clarify the role you expect SEO to play in supporting your business objectives. Starting with a well-defined purpose puts you on a path to finding a partner who understands your needs.

Solidify Project Details

As you pull together project details for your RFP, you’re getting a step ahead of the onboarding process with your new SEO agency. Any reputable SEO company will want to understand the ins and outs of your industry, business needs, and team makeup. Collecting that information ahead of your search will not only help you find the right partner but will also help you hit the ground running once you’ve found them.

Encourage Self-Selection

Every potential partner who receives your RFP should be able to gauge whether or not they’ll be a good fit for your business. No SEO provider wants to waste time bidding for a project that isn’t attractive to them or that they aren’t well-suited for. 

By providing scope and budget upfront, you’re giving agencies all the information they need to recuse themselves if they so wish. This means sifting through fewer proposals from ill-qualified SEO providers.

What Should Be In Your RFP?

When considering what should go into your RFP, think about where your SEO stands today, where you want it to go, and what you need from a partner to help close that gap. At the most basic level, an SEO RFP should include:

1. Company Information

• The size of your company
• Details about your target audience
• Your company’s total revenue and business forecast
• A list of your competitors
• An overview that explains why you need SEO. Include context about the timing of your need (i.e., manual penalties, lost traffic, product launch)
• Point of contact information

2. Current SEO Strategy

• Strategically significant keywords
• Current SEO budget
• Web traffic and web traffic mix. How many sessions does each traffic channel drive?
• Results of SEO efforts to date
• Details about your backlinking efforts and content strategy

3. Team and Tech Details

• Content development resources
• Web development resources
• Your existing technology stack, including your CMS, analytics platform, and any SEO tools already in use
• Any legal or compliance constraints in your industry that an agency needs to design around
• A short history of past marketing initiatives, and where the documentation for them lives

Note if resources are internal or external.

4. Project Summary & Goals

• SEO budget
• KPIs: What metric(s) will you use to measure success?
• Desired outcome. What would a home run look like?
• Timeline
• Communication expectations 

A well-scoped overview is short and specific, not a jargon-heavy list of every possible SEO tactic. Something like, “We need to grow organic revenue from our 40-SKU ecommerce catalog by 25% in 12 months, with technical SEO and content as the two priority workstreams,” gives an agency a real target to propose against. A goal like “improve our SEO across the board” doesn’t.

5. SEO RFP Timeline

• Cut-off date for agency questions (typically one to two weeks after the RFP goes out)
• Proposal due date (usually two to four weeks after the RFP goes out, enough time for a thoughtful response without stalling your project)
• Clear timeframe for decision making (budget one to two weeks to score proposals and hold follow-up calls with finalists)
• Final decision date
• Ideal start date
• Submission mechanics: settle on one file format (a PDF keeps formatting consistent across agencies), one delivery channel, such as email or a shared folder, and a single point of contact for questions, so nothing gets lost across a dozen different email threads

6. Evaluation Criteria

• A rubric of critical decision-making criteria that agencies will be judged against
• In addition to the criteria your team identifies, be sure to include any other important factors, such as:
• Geographic restrictions
• Experience in the field
• Requests for case studies
• Agency size
• Cost relative to scope, not only the bottom-line number
• Cultural fit with your team
• Specialized expertise in your industry or business model
• How quickly they respond during the RFP process itself, since it previews how quickly they’ll respond once you’re a client
• The philosophy behind their recommendations

Most of these criteria are subjective, not objective boxes to check, so agree on how your team will weigh them against each other before proposals arrive. A rubric that treats “case studies” and “cultural fit” as equally weighted line items produces a different winner than one that weights cost and expertise more heavily, and that call is easier to make before you’re looking at real proposals than after.

SEO RFP Template

By having the essential structure laid out and a list of SEO questions to ask, you can focus on the most crucial part, providing detailed information about your business, your goals, and current barriers to your success. 

Download our SEO RFP template to get started. (Get the full suite of RFP for SEO tools here.) 

Why Should You Include an Accurate Budget in Your SEO RFP?

Withholding your budget might feel like it protects your negotiating position, but in practice it works against you. Agencies without a number to design around either propose a generic mid-tier package that may not match what your project needs, or lowball an estimate to win the bid and revise it once they’ve seen your site. Neither outcome gives you a proposal you can actually compare. If you’re not clear about your budget upfront, you deny yourself the opportunity to compare proposals with a similar scope. You also risk the possibility of derailing your RFP timeline while agencies iterate on their suggestions to match your budget.

A key step in a successful and efficient RFP process is to align internal budget approvals ahead of time so that you understand what your organization is willing to invest in search optimization.

Including your budget also allows potential providers to step away from the process if they know they can’t meet your needs for the budget you’ve allocated to your SEO efforts.

Quick Tips for Writing an SEO RFP

Before you start writing your RFP for SEO, do your homework. You don’t have to become an SEO expert, but the more you understand about optimizing for organic search, the more specific your RFP will be, and the more likely you’ll recognize the agency that’s right for you when you find it.

A well-written RFP does double duty: it’s easier for you to compare responses, and it’s easier for agencies to respond to, which matters because a rushed or vague RFP tends to produce rushed, generic proposals in return. Give agencies enough context to propose specifically, tell them what “good” looks like for your business, and build in enough lead time for clarifying questions before the deadline.

Be clear.

Common SEO RFP Mistakes To Avoid

The RFP process breaks down in a handful of predictable ways. Watching for these keeps your timeline intact and your proposals comparable.

• Setting unrealistic expectations. Asking for enterprise-level results on a boutique-level budget, or expecting ranking improvements within weeks, sets every proposal up to either overpromise or lowball your timeline.
• Not specifying your business goals. An RFP that describes tactics you want (more backlinks, better content) without the business outcome behind them (grow demo requests by 20%) gets you proposals optimized for the wrong thing.
• Withholding your budget. It’s the single most common reason RFP responses come back impossible to compare.
• Overloading the document with requests. Asking for a fully custom strategy, a working prototype, and free consulting before you’ve even signed a contract discourages the agencies most worth hiring from bidding at all.
• Not allowing time for agency questions. A cutoff date early enough for agencies to ask clarifying questions produces sharper proposals than one that treats questions as an inconvenience.
• Requesting unnecessary information. Every extra document you require, such as financial statements, employee headcounts, or unrelated case studies, adds friction without adding signal. Ask only for what you’ll actually use to evaluate the proposal.

Which SEO Proposal Should You Accept?

After you’ve finished your RFP and received proposals from competing agencies, how do you choose who to work with?

The best fit for your business depends on several factors, including your SEO goals, the services provided by the agency, and the overall experience you have throughout the RFP process. 

When thinking about how to hire SEO services, here are some questions to consider:

How experienced is the agency? 

Look for real tenure and relevant project history. How many years have they been in business? What brands have they worked with? Have they worked on projects as complex as yours? Keep in mind, experience is essential, but so is flexibility. You’ll want an SEO agency that listens to you.  

What level of support can you expect? 

Look for a named, dedicated team with clear backup coverage, not a rotating cast or a call center queue.

• Do you have one point of contact? What do you do when they’re on vacation?
• Will you interact with a call center? How do you track who’s assigned to your account?
• Is there a designated team assigned to your campaign? Working with a group of individuals with clearly assigned responsibilities allows for continuity in service, regardless of sick days or PTO. Having a transparent structure provides greater accountability and better relationship-building.

How specialized is the agency? 

Would you benefit from deep expertise in organic search? Or would you prefer a multi-tool generalist who brings expertise from other marketing channels to the table?

What resources do you have in-house?

Match the agency’s strengths to your actual gaps, not to a generic full-service package. Look at how agency resources will supplement or complement your internal team. If you don’t have a content writer, you’ll want an agency to support you with SEO content writing services. If you have a limited technical team, look for a partner that can help implement SEO improvements.

Does the agency provide a comprehensive suite of SEO services? 

Confirm the agency covers the specific services your project needs, since not every agency covers every discipline. Some agencies focus on specific areas of SEO, such as content creation, technical analysis, or backlink generation.

Is the proposal aligned with your SEO needs?

Trace a direct line from your original RFP objective to every claim in the proposal before you compare it to anything else. It’s easy to lose sight of your original need as you evaluate a stack of proposals.

How does the proposal reflect the agency?

Judge the proposal itself as a work sample. Its clarity, its attention to detail, and how directly it speaks to your objectives all preview what working with this team will be like. Careless mistakes could reflect a lack of rigor that might extend to the quality of your SEO campaign. Opaque jargon will set the tone for ongoing communications.

What about the team members you meet with? At the very least, they should seem professional, pleasant, knowledgeable, and experienced. Make a note if they seem like they’re only in it for the contract, or if they seem to care about your business goals.

What’s their reputation? 

Weigh the agency’s track record in the broader context of the industry. Are they well-respected? Do they have a proven track record that’s relevant to your business?

A verifiable signal looks like specifics you can check yourself, not a general claim of being “award-winning.” Victorious, for example, points to independently judged wins across multiple bodies, including Global SEO Agency of the Year from Search Engine Land, U.S. SEO Agency of the Year from the U.S. Search Awards, and Enterprise SEO Agency of the Year from Clutch, alongside 12+ years in business and work across 17+ verticals. Ask any agency you’re evaluating for the same kind of detail: named awards, named judging bodies, and a specific number of years and industries. An unqualified “award-winning” or “industry-leading” doesn’t tell you anything.

Ask for: 

• More than one SEO case study from other customers in your industry
• References from their past and current customer roster

Check reviews on:

• Google
• Clutch

Download our SEO RFP weighted scoring rubric to help you evaluate proposals.

12 Questions To Ask an SEO Company

Before you dig into the list, keep the goal in mind. You’re trying to see how this agency actually thinks, not testing SEO trivia. Skip questions built to catch someone out on a technical term, and stick to what tells you whether they can solve your specific problem.

Put these questions in the RFP itself so every agency answers them in writing and you can compare the answers side by side. Each one points back to something you described earlier in the RFP, such as your goals, competitors, budget, or team, so a templated answer stands out quickly. Keep each answer to a few hundred words. The full strategy comes after you sign. For the follow-up conversation with finalists, use our interview-stage question bank.

Where Your SEO Stands Today

These questions test whether the agency looked at your site before writing its proposal.

1. Based on what we’ve shared and your own review of our site, what are the two or three biggest issues holding back our visibility in search results and AI-generated answers? How did you find them?
   Listen for: Specific pages or queries from your site, plus whether AI tools describe your brand accurately today. An answer that could apply to any company means they didn’t look.
2. Which competitors are winning the searches that matter most to us, in both search results and AI-generated answers, and why do you think they’re winning?
   Listen for: Named competitors, ideally including some you didn’t list, and a reason tied to their content or authority.
3. What would you need to see in our analytics and search data to confirm that diagnosis, and how would you measure our current AI visibility?
   Listen for: A clear line between what they can see from the outside and what they’re assuming. For AI visibility, they should plan to set a baseline before claiming any change.
4. What’s one assumption in this RFP you’d challenge?
   Listen for: Specific pushback, delivered respectfully. An agency that agrees with everything you wrote will likely agree with everything you say once you’re a client, too.

Where You Want It To Go

Next, ask how the agency would get you from where you are now to the goals in your RFP.

5. Given the goals and budget in this RFP, what would you prioritize in the first 90 days, and what would you hold for later?
   Listen for: Tradeoffs. A plan that starts everything at once hasn’t set any priorities.
6. How would you choose which keywords and questions to target for us, and how do those choices connect to the business outcome we named?
   Listen for: Prompt research into the questions your buyers ask AI tools alongside keyword research into what they type into Google, with each target tied to a page and to the outcome you named. Search volume alone isn’t a strategy.
7. How does your plan account for AI Overviews and other AI-generated answers alongside traditional rankings?
   Listen for: One plan that serves both. Rankings and AI answers draw on the same foundation, a clear and consistent picture of what your brand offers plus authority earned from other sites. An agency that sells AI search as a separate add-on is splitting one job in two.
8. How would your plan change if our priorities shifted midway through the engagement, such as a product launch or a site migration?
   Listen for: A description of how they re-plan, with a recent example.

What You Need from a Partner

The last set covers how the work gets done and how you’ll hear about it.

9. Based on the team we described, which work would you handle and which would our writers and developers own? How does a recommendation get from your team to live on our site?
   Listen for: A realistic ask and named handoffs. If you have one part-time developer and the plan needs 40 hours of dev work a month, the plan won’t ship.
10. How would you build our brand’s authority beyond our own site, through both links and mentions, including in the sources AI tools cite for our category?
    Listen for: Knowledge of which publications and communities AI answers in your category pull from, and how they’d earn a place there. Ask how they’d earn each mention.
11. What would a monthly report from you show us, including our visibility in AI-generated answers, and how would it explain what changed and why?
    Listen for: Clear labels on what each AI metric measures. Citation tracking tools sample a set of prompts, so a good agency tells you which prompts it tracks and on which platforms.
12. Tell us about an engagement that didn’t go as planned. What happened, and what did you change afterward?
    Listen for: A specific story and a change to how they work. Every agency has one.

One More Question: Will an SEO Proposal Include a Preliminary Audit? 

I wanted to pull out this question for some in-depth consideration. 

In a word, yes, a proposal submitted in response to your SEO RFP should include a preliminary audit of your website. 

This is especially important for enterprise-level SEO buyers. There are very few agencies that can handle the complexity of optimizing an enterprise domain for search, and a preliminary audit is likely to be a proof point of their expertise. 

However…

Not every agency will provide the same level of analysis during the proposal process. Pay close attention to the detail of strategic recommendations a prospective partner shares for your consideration.

The rigor and expertise you see upfront speak volumes about what you can expect from them once you’ve signed a contract.

Regardless of the scope of your RFP, after you’ve chosen an agency, you can expect them to conduct a comprehensive audit of your website. They should fully disclose what an audit reveals and use those findings to inform a customized strategy that takes both your goals and your current SEO health into account.  

During the RFP process, ask specifically about what will be included in a full audit. All audits are not created equal. You’ll want to make sure that the audit you get from your SEO company will include more than basic automated reports. 

Get Started With Our Downloadable SEO RFP Template

If you’re ready to investigate how an SEO agency can help your business thrive, get started with our sample RFP for SEO services. 

Click here to get the entire package of SEO RFP tools, including a customized Asana project, weighted SEO scorecard, and question tracker, as well as the SEO RFP template.

Learn More About Victorious 

We have a deep bench of SEO strategists and consultants ready to answer your questions about how SEO can help you meet your company objectives. Contact us to learn more and get a free SEO consultation.