An SEO proposal is your pitch to attract new clients. In other words, it's a key document to prove your value as an agency and convince prospective clients to hire your agency. You can use it for prospects that you're speaking with, or for lead-gen with colder leads.

The perfect SEO proposal needs to be easy to understand and outline your client's challenges, giving a clear idea of how your SEO strategy can help your client increase their organic traffic, conversions, customer numbers, and their bottom line. However, even when presented with an SEO proposal, potential clients sometimes hesitate to recognize the value of your services if the document doesn't suit their needs.

Our "Lead Gen" template will help you tailor your proposal effectively, reassuring your prospects that you're the right person to handle their SEO strategy. Even better, this proposal should take a maximum of 10-15 minutes of work to complete.

Our customizable lead gen template contains:

Read on for a step-by-step guide on how to use it.

Follow the steps below, then apply our template to automatically pull in all of the data.

1) Create a new campaign using your prospective client's URL

The first step will be to create a new campaign with your client's website URL. Alternatively, you can use one of your old campaigns and edit the campaign's URL.

2) Monitor your client's keyword performance

The keyword tracking process will allow you to identify how your client's website pages are ranking for specific search terms in SERPs.

Enable our Rank Tracker module and add keywords to learn which ones to prioritize in your SEO strategy. Although you can manually add these keywords, we recommend using our keywords suggestions feature as well, to find relevant keywords to your client's business. When using our keyword suggestions tools, use the "default" option to add keywords we've found on your client's website, or search SEMrush's keyword suggestions.

If your prospective client has a location-based business, add their Google Business Profile to our Rank Tracker (either by adding your client's business name or by using their business CID). Then enable local ranking tracking to pull in their Google Maps rankings for your chosen keywords.

3) Audit your client's backlink profile

Get a full audit of your client's backlinks using our free Majestic integration, and evaluate their backlink quality with the Citation Flow and Trust Flow metrics. This information will allow you to define a strategy to improve your client's backlink profile.

4) Apply our Lead Generation template

Once these two processes have been completed, you will be ready to apply our lead gen template, which will populate with data from all the integrations you've connected.

To apply this template, head over to the Reports section on your left sidebar and create a report from a pre-configured template. Choose the template called "Lead Gen Template" from the list of available templates.

Your report will be created based on this pre-configured template. You'll then be able to customize the text widgets based on your client's information. All the sections on your report can be customized to add, delete, edit, or resize widgets.

6) Send your SEO proposal to your potential client

Once you've edited your report to suit your prospective client's needs, it's time to forward them your proposal. You can choose to email your report directly, download a PDF version and send it via email, or create a shareable link to give a web-based report to your prospective client.

Although the process of creating your SEO proposal shouldn't take you longer than 10-15 minutes of work, we recommend saving your proposal as a new report template once you've finished editing it. This will allow you to easily apply it to other potential clients in the future.

We also recommend reading our article on creating a lead generation report as it includes similar data agency's can share during cold outreach to potential clients.

Some agencies often choose to run custom analyses and add them to their proposal. Our Google Sheets integration allows you to pull data from a Google Spreadsheet into your report, automatically updating the data every time that changes are applied to the original sheet.

This feature can also be used to attach custom data, lists, invoices, or any other information you can add to a Google Sheets (otherwise, you can also add custom text to a textbox widget).