SEO RFP Template: Hire the Best SEO Agency

Use this template to compel apples‑to‑apples proposals and separate true operators from deck‑only vendors. Fill in the placeholders, enforce the format, and require each agency to answer the same prompts. The goal is simple: align SEO with revenue, pipeline, and brand equity—without sugar‑coating constraints or risks.

RFP Quick Facts

1) Executive Summary & Business Goals

Set the tone with a direct mandate. Explain why you are hiring now, where organic fits in the growth mix, and how success will be judged by the executive team. Focus on outcomes like revenue, qualified pipeline, and customer acquisition cost—not vanity traffic.

Describe your business model, average order value or contract value, sales cycle length, and key conversion paths. Clarify whether SEO is expected to lead net‑new demand, expand share of wallet, or reduce paid media dependency. Call out regulated claims, seasonality, and global expansion plans that shape scope and timelines.

Codify non‑negotiables such as brand voice constraints, legal approvals, and documentation rigor. State your risk appetite and decision cadence so agencies can calibrate proposals. Make the first 90 days explicit to force a credible ramp, not a hand‑wavy roadmap.

• Your Input: top three business goals, “definition of done” for the first 90 days, risk tolerances, cross‑functional dependencies.
• Agency Must Address: 90‑day plan, risk register with mitigations, two analogous case studies with hard outcomes.

2) Current SEO Baseline & Tech Stack

Give vendors enough signal to propose impact, not platitudes. Provide a concise baseline across crawling, indexing, Core Web Vitals, content depth, and authority. Share the CMS, hosting model, analytics, tag management, and any server‑side rendering or edge middleware in play.

Include 12–24 months of trendlines for organic sessions, non‑brand traffic, conversions, assisted revenue, and share of voice against key competitors. Disclose migration history, domain changes, and major site events that could pollute benchmarks. Identify key constraints like locked templates, slow release cycles, or limited dev capacity.

Set explicit performance guardrails so proposals stay grounded. “Good” Core Web Vitals typically targets LCP ≤ 2.5s, INP ≤ 200ms, and CLS ≤ 0.1 on key templates. Crawl budget should concentrate on high‑value URLs, with waste on low‑value or parameterized pages minimized.

• Your Input: tech stack diagram, environment constraints, historic graphs, known issues list.
• Agency Must Address: diagnostic hypotheses, quick‑win opportunities, and data they still need.

3) Scope of Services

Eliminate ambiguity by drawing hard lines around scope. Specify which disciplines are mandatory, optional, or out of scope. Require agencies to commit to resourcing and SLAs by workstream so capacity matches ambition.

Typical scopes include technical SEO, on‑page optimization, content strategy and production, structured data, internal linking, local SEO, international SEO, digital PR/link building, and analytics/BI support. If you expect schema implementation, hreflang governance, or migrations, call them out now. Define how the agency will engage with dev, design, brand, and legal teams.

Ask for a deliverables schedule that names owners, dependencies, and acceptance criteria. Require runbooks for recurring tasks and a change‑control process that documents why shifts happen. This prevents scope creep disguised as agility.

• Your Input: desired scope per workstream, internal owners, and tooling constraints.
• Agency Must Address: resource plan, weekly/monthly cadences, and deliverable acceptance criteria.

4) Keyword Strategy & Content Requirements

Anchor strategy in demand, not guesswork. Require a topical map that clusters queries by intent, with parent topics, child topics, and internal‑link hubs. Ask for explicit coverage priorities by commercial impact and difficulty so content spend matches ROI potential.

Mandate a content brief template that bakes in search intent, SERP features, evidence standards, subject‑matter experts, and required schema. Require differentiation tactics such as proprietary data, calculators, or expert quotes so you avoid “me‑too” content. Tie briefs to measurable outcomes like assisted conversions and revenue attribution.

Define minimum viable publishing velocity by cluster and the refresh policy for decaying pages. Require a taxonomy and URL strategy to prevent cannibalization and orphaning. Push for a “build once, update often” mindset that compounds equity and preserves crawl budget.

• Your Input: ICPs, buyer stages, product priorities, subject‑matter experts, compliance constraints.
• Agency Must Address: topical map, brief template, velocity plan, and anti‑cannibalization rules.

5) Technical SEO Audit & Implementation Plan

Demand a hard‑nosed audit with effort‑versus‑impact scoring and dev‑ready tickets. Insist on crawl and index controls, canonicalization, pagination, sitemaps, robots directives, and parameter hygiene. Require a Core Web Vitals plan that prioritizes template‑level fixes over superficial optimizations.

Set clear acceptance criteria for quality gates. Sitemap parity should exceed 95% for priority sections. Redirect chains should be one hop or fewer. 404 rates on internal links should be below 1% on sampled crawls. Hreflang, canonicals, and pagination must not conflict on international sites.

Make implementation a first‑class deliverable, not an afterthought. Require ticket specs with reproduction steps, acceptance tests, and rollback plans. Mandate pre‑ and post‑release measurement windows to prove impact and catch regressions early.

• Your Input: environments, release cadence, QA resources, error budgets.
• Agency Must Address: audit artifacts, prioritized backlog, ticket specs, and QA plan with rollbacks.

6) Content Operations & Governance

SEO content dies in process purgatory without governance. Define the workflow from intake to publish to refresh, including SLAs for reviews and legal approvals. Require a shared content calendar with ownership, dependencies, and go/no‑go criteria.

Mandate a RACI so work does not bottleneck. Insist on enforceable standards for tone, claims, internal linking, and schema usage per template. Require a measurable refresh policy that retires low‑value pages and consolidates duplicative assets.

Build feedback loops into the operating model. Writers need SERP insights, editors need user signals, and SEOs need dev timelines. Demand post‑publish reviews at 30/60/90 days with concrete next actions.

• Your Input: approvers, brand guardrails, legal requirements, CMS access roles.
• Agency Must Address: calendar, RACI, templates, and refresh/retire decision rules.

7) Authority Building & Link Strategy

Authority is earned, not bought. Require a strategy that favors editorial coverage, partnerships, and high‑signal placements over risky shortcuts. Make agencies show how digital PR, assets, and community touchpoints translate into defensible links and mentions.

Set acceptance criteria that prevent vanity domains. Links must be topically relevant, come from unique referring domains, and land on the right pages. Require a quality bar using third‑party authority and traffic estimates, but prioritize human editorial judgment over single‑number scores.

Define a risk policy with zero tolerance for paid link schemes, link farms, or manipulative patterns. Require transparent outreach lists, pitch angles, and performance reporting with new referring domains, link velocity, and coverage by tier.

• Your Input: PR assets, spokespeople, partnerships, compliance constraints.
• Agency Must Address: prospecting logic, pitch strategy, acceptance criteria, and monthly reporting format.

8) Measurement Framework & KPIs

If you cannot measure it, you will not fund it. Define the KPI ladder from visibility to engagement to conversions to revenue. Require clear leading indicators and lagging outcomes so you can steer before quarters slip.

Ask for a measurement plan with attribution logic, assisted conversion reporting, and cohort tracking for LTV. Require dashboards that annotate releases, algorithm shifts, and content launches, so context sits next to numbers. Insist on an experimentation framework with minimum detectable effect and decision rules.

Set reporting cadences with different audiences in mind. Operators need weekly signal health, marketers need monthly performance narratives, and executives need quarterly business impact. Push for proactive alerts when telemetry deviates, not retrospective apologies.

• Your Input: business KPIs, attribution stance, revenue model, data sources.
• Agency Must Address: KPI tree, dashboard mockups, alert thresholds, and experimentation plan.

9) Budget, Pricing Model & Terms

Be explicit about budgets and flexibility. Share ranges by quarter and your appetite for test budgets tied to learning milestones. If international or marketplace expansions are likely, flag the potential step‑ups so vendors staff accordingly.

Request pricing in multiple formats to reveal tradeoffs. Ask for a retainer, a project‑plus‑retainer hybrid, and performance‑linked components tied to agreed KPIs. Require assumptions for each scenario, inclusions vs. out‑of‑scope, rate cards for ad‑hoc work, and pass‑through tooling costs.

Lock down commercial hygiene. Specify payment terms, currency, data ownership, IP rights, confidentiality, termination clauses, and non‑solicitation windows. The right partner will prefer clarity because it reduces friction and focuses everyone on outcomes.

• Your Input: budget bands, test budget policy, legal redlines, tool preferences.
• Agency Must Address: pricing scenarios with assumptions, inclusions/exclusions, and staffing by scenario.

10) Submission Instructions & Evaluation Criteria

Standardize the playing field. Require one PDF narrative and native spreadsheets for pricing and staffing. Enforce page limits and a structured response order that mirrors this RFP. Share the Q&A window, presentation dates, and decision timeline.

Demand proof of execution, not just strategy. Ask for two anonymized reporting samples with narrative commentary and a real 90‑day plan with named owners. Require three relevant case studies with measurable outcomes and three client references you can actually contact.

Score independently before group debate to reduce bias. Weight strategy, technical rigor, measurement, team, economics, and fit. Invite finalists for a 60‑minute session with live Q&A and a short scenario walkthrough based on your data. Publish the award date and stick to it.

• Submission Checklist: compliance with format and deadlines, conflicts disclosed, case studies, references, reporting samples, 90‑day plan, redlines to T&Cs if any.