E46—Why SEO Proposals Are Apples To Oranges

SEO snobs. We can spot them from a mile away. Not to say that we’re better than everyone else out there, but we know our shit.

We’re just going to come out and say it. No two SEO proposals are created equally and it would be a crime for us not to share what we’ve learned.

Our biggest piece of advice when receiving a marketing proposal of any kind is remembering the phrase: the devil is in the details.

Tune into our latest podcast to understand and learn how to navigate SEO proposals and make the best decision for your company’s SEO strategy.

In this episode you’ll learn about:
1. How our agency sets up our SEO proposals in detail
2. The importance of feeling the value of your agency’s services
3. What questions to ask your marketing partner about SEO services
4. How important LOCAL market keyword research is for your business
5. Understanding WHY SEO set up is so foundational to your strategy

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Send us your questions, comments, feedback, praise! We can’t wait to hear from you!

Amanda Joyce:
Hey, guys. Welcome back. We are excited to dive in on another episode, and today, we are going to be talking about marketing proposals and how they are not all created equal.

Devon Hayes:
Welcome to Trades Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.

Amanda Joyce:
This is for you if you’re a contractor, looking for actionable marketing insights.

Devon Hayes:
Learn from home services industry experts to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.

Amanda Joyce:
Let’s dive into today’s trade secret.

Devon Hayes:
We have seen and heard so many different things about our competition, but just other agencies out there, and when our potential clients are trying to compare our services to another agencies, everything always looks like a foreign language with marketing jargon and acronyms, and things that don’t make sense to you, just the same way. I’m sure if I was in your business, there’s a bunch of terms that I wouldn’t understand, but inevitably, you got your proposals that list every acronym and everything trying to talk over your head, even though it’s like three minutes of work, and then you have your proposals where everything is an add-on and you don’t realize that, so you feel like you’re getting a good price until you’re like, "Oh, if I want to report, that’s another 250 a month. Okay." So we thought, we thought we would just have a really, just share kind of our knowledge, our experience. We know why our proposals are different and kind of stand out because they’re not just …

It’s kind of a package deal for everything we do because we know that’s what makes us effective, but there’s no right or wrong way. We just figured it would be good for you to understand the variables and maybe help you make a good business choice for what fits with you and your goals.

Amanda Joyce:
Absolutely. It’s always interesting when we’re in the sales process, and we are chatting with a new potential client, and the questions that they typically come back to us with, it’s eye-opening about what services we’re providing, how maybe there’s something we’re not detailing out in our proposal that we should, or sometimes we’re scratching our heads at things that we learned that were included in a proposal, and so we kind of figured it might be a good idea when we dive in today, to first kind of talk to you guys about some of the things we’ve seen, what we’ve learned in this process. And just like you guys, I’m sure when somebody reaches out to you and they’re top of funnel, they’re working their way down, maybe they’ve narrowed it down to you and one other contractor in your space, sometimes you’re really grateful to have that opportunity to be able to explain to them why it is that you’re so great at what you do and maybe what’s missing in their proposal, so this is kind of our opportunity to give you guys that peek under the hood and help you make that decision if you’re ready to sign the dotted line, but you’re like, "Why is this one so much cheaper than the other one?" And sometimes the proof is in the fine print.

Devon Hayes:
That’s true. That’s true. I hate when I hear, "To be honest, you’re quite a bit more expensive than the other proposals I’ve received," and we kind of go into, "It’s not really our sales pitch, but it’s really why we’re just more expensive." And so with SEO, there is organic, local, and technical is how you could break out that one service, and that’s a service in itself. And many of our competitors, that’s what they offer.

They offer all three of those, or maybe even just local SEO. We have a local-only SEO package for those contractors just starting out, where you don’t quite have that higher dollar marketing budget that you need as you kind of get bigger into the two, three, four, five plus million-dollars range. But anyways, the point is SEO, in itself, is a service. With our packaging, we also have content marketing, which is a separate service, and there’s agencies that just do content marketing where they’re writing. We call it content or copy, but words on a page.

Somebody is writing words on a page for you about your services, about your brand. And we also include website management with ours, and then we have the final pièce de résistance of conversion rate optimization. But those are four separate services that we bundle into just one package, because we found that’s how we’re most effective, when we can kind of have our hands in all of those four pots. There’s more, but when we can have our hands in those pots, we are much more effective. So that’s how our agency does it.

That’s the way we format our proposals, but that’s not the same as what we’ve seen. Right, Amanda?

Amanda Joyce:
Exactly. We’ve seen a whole lot of different approaches to it, and to each their own. In some cases, maybe some business owners prefer that. They’d rather have that smaller package with a lot of add-ons. I know the way you and I are, is we just want to get the invoice set up and move on to the work, so it’s much easier than every time that someone reaches out and says they want a little bit more detail on a report to be like, "Yeah, that’ll be another $250."

We’d rather just send them the report. And I’m sure you guys see this too in your proposals, when you’re like, "Oh, yeah. The reason they’re so much cheaper than me is there’s all this stuff they’ve left out, that I promise you, you’re going to get a surprise midway through your contract, where it ends up being much more expensive than what this looks like on paper." So I’m sure you’re all very familiar with this, you’ve just done it on the other side. So, so much of it is just really digging in and looking at the fine print of what’s included in that proposal, and hopefully, if it is a more expensive proposal, it’s really detailed so you can see what it is that you’re paying for.

Devon Hayes:
Absolutely. I don’t think any two SEOs are really created the same. I think the problem with going … In my opinion, this is both just our opinions, obviously, you have to do what feels good to you, but to me, a lot of the things that we include in a package are the things that you don’t know that you need. You don’t know that you need Google Analytics set up properly to track events and conversions on your website.

You might not even know you need Google Analytics. You might not know that you need Google Search Console, this free tool that helps you see how Google sees you. So if you don’t know to ask me to please add that onto your package, then sometime down the road, when you say, "How am I performing?,"

I say, "Well, you’re not paying for reporting," and you didn’t pay … Well, you didn’t pay … You say, "Fine, I’ll pay for reporting," I say, "Great. Give me access to your Google Analytics," you say, "What’s that?"

"Oh, that’s another add-on. I’d be happy …" Or, "Here’s access, but we don’t have conversions or events set up properly, so I can’t tell you how we’ve been performing." But these are things you wouldn’t know how to ask. So for us, in our setup, everything we do, it’s what we know you need, even if you don’t know that you need that thing.

Amanda Joyce:
Exactly.

Devon Hayes:
This is like a really long sales pitch on accident. We really don’t mean to, but this is … I mean, if you understand maybe why someone’s more expensive than it, I think it helps you see the value in what we do. Like you know the value in choosing a better quality of like paint or drywall, how long you should let concrete sit over this guy, who says he could do it faster. Whatever it might be, you know that, and I wouldn’t know to ask those questions.

So that’s why it’s … I don’t know if there’s anything more important than trusting your marketing partner because these are kind of all the things that inevitably will play a role in your success and the value you feel you’re receiving from your marketing partner.

Amanda Joyce:
Absolutely. And I think, to your point, so many of our listeners don’t even … You don’t know what you don’t know, so you don’t know what to ask, but probably one of the best things you can do is if you’re looking at two or three proposals and they’re all over the board in terms of cost and what’s listed on them, look at the most detailed one, probably the most expensive. It might not be, but look at the most detailed one and start … See what’s missing on the others, and ask the question.

Maybe the agency that’s not as expensive, just assume, that they’re like, "Duh, we’re going to put Google Analytics on there. We didn’t know we had to include it in our proposal," but you want to make damn sure it’s going to be in there, so just go through it with a fine-tooth comb. Really look line item by line item, and make sure, really quickly, you’re probably going to figure out why one’s more expensive than the other, and having to put together your own proposals, granted, they’re totally different services, you know how to look at a proposal and you can kind of just apply that same logic, but no question’s a dumb question. If they’re a good agency and they’re going to be a good partner, they’re not going to have any problem with you coming back and saying, "Is this included? Why is this not included?"

Just showing that added level of interest and that added attention to detail is probably also going to end up letting them know you’re an educated buyer, or you aim to be, and they’re going to hopefully treat you as such and be a good partner to you as a result.

Devon Hayes:
Yeah. And along that same vein, if you see maybe something in like two out of three proposals and one of them doesn’t have it, and you ask that person, you say, "I saw this on the other two proposals. What is this thing?," this thing could be some fluffy one-minute of work item that sounds really technical and makes us sound good. So just because it’s on two out of three, doesn’t mean that it’s missing from the other one. They probably are just like, "Well, this is what that is."

And to be honest, I mean, it’s just part of SEO 101, and we didn’t outline it or call it out here for you, because if we did that, you would be looking through a massive list, that it would be too overwhelming.

Amanda Joyce:
It doesn’t mean anything to you.

Devon Hayes:
Yeah.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, exactly. So there’s not a black and white answer that’s going to come out of today’s podcast, but we have a number of questions that we would love to share with you guys, that we will include in the notes as well, because we don’t expect you to retain every one of these, but some really good educated questions you could ask as you’re comparing proposals. These are things that do matter. They’re not the silly, little like, "Ah, we’re going to make sure your phone number’s correct on your Google Business Profile," but these are questions that you can ask and make sure that you’re getting to make sure that you truly have a bespoke SEO strategy being created and deployed for you.

Devon Hayes:
Yeah, let’s dive in on some of those questions. "Keyword research, is it included?" The answer should always be yes. Now, how in-depth or how an agency does it, that’s up to kind of the SEO. Ours is pretty extensive, but I would ask, "Is it included, and what does that include?"

"Is it just one focus keyword for my homepage, or is it a complete strategy for my entire website?," because those are two different paths with SEO agencies. They could say, "We’re going to just take this one keyword, and we’re going to rank you for just this," and once you’re happy, you can add another keyword. That’s one route. Another route is we’re going to do this keyword research, come up with the backbone of your entire digital strategy, apply it, but focus on your keyword priorities first, just because how long SEO takes. Us personally, we just would hate to leave the rest of the pages on your site dormant and unoptimized while you chase one, when there’s a potential for it to be gaining trust and authority over time as we kind of hone in on your top priorities. So that’s the first question.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah. And I would also add on that too, I would ask if it’s unique keyword research to your business, because there’s a lot of people that niche down in SEO, and they might just say, "Oh, you’re a plumber in Vancouver? We know this keyword works in South Florida. We’re going to just switch out the local modifier for Vancouver and call it keyword research," and we would definitely encourage you to find an agency that assures you that they’re going to spend time really digging in on your local market, on your competition, and identifying keywords that are unique to where you have your brick and mortar, because it really is different from state to state, city to city.

Devon Hayes:
Also, turning that information over to you, so you have it in a spreadsheet. The data changes all the time, but if you have a good base and you familiarize yourself with it too, it could help you as well, so you should … If you take it to a new agency, at least they can understand where you started from. Maybe the previous agency chose a keyword that was way too difficult for your domain rating, but they were super cheap and they didn’t think to look at those things. Your new agency can say, "Ah, I know exactly why this didn’t work." So keyword research, and you should be able to take it with you. Oh, this one, Amanda.

Amanda Joyce:
So your initial setup, it kind of depends on how people approach things, but for us, as an agency, we spent an extensive amount of time. The first three months of our engagement is focused on your initial SEO setup. So asking about that’s really critical, because it’s surprising to us sometimes when we are chatting with somebody, maybe we’re bringing them on board, or whatever it may be, that it doesn’t seem like a lot of work was done upfront to just get the baseline set where it needs to be from an SEO perspective. So asking those questions, "What are you going to do out the gate to ensure my success from day one?," because if there isn’t a clear strategy there from them, your train’s not going to leave the station for a long time. So asking them like, "What are you going to do in the first few months that’s really going to make a difference?"

Some people are probably going to clearly outline exactly what their SEO setup is. Great. If they don’t, ask them to outline it, and if they don’t have an answer for you, they’re probably not the right choice for you, unless you’ve had some other SEO genius do all your setup for you previously, and for whatever reason, your shopping agencies. I don’t know that we’ve ever run into anyone that we’ve looked at them and said, "You don’t need any setup at all."

Devon Hayes:
That’s true, yeah. You have to give your SEO agency time to understand why your website is not performing the way you want it to. If you’re moving to a new agency, obviously things aren’t working, and it takes time to dive in to why it’s not working, and then to implement and the new strategy for you. There’s so many moving parts, and we don’t expect you to know all of them, but understanding that, just jumping in and saying, "Okay, yeah," and then reporting month one. When they don’t understand what the problem is, they should still be researching in that discovery phase, and then coming up with a solution, and then starting to roll out the foundation for what is going to make that solution work.

So after those first two, three months, you’ve got a good, solid, strong foundation, you have a research strategy, and then going into the fourth month, you can really start to measure their performance, but it’s unfair to measure them in month one when they’re still trying to figure out why your previous engagement didn’t work, and that there’s a lot of time and effort that goes into that when you choose the right partner, so you don’t want to measure month one. That’s not going to work. Month two, they’re setting everything up, that they’ve uncovered that needs to be fixed. That’s month two and three. There’s on-page.
There’s a million things that go into it. So truly, I mean, you can have automated reporting, you can look at it, but it’s really not … You’re not going to see anything that wows you in those first three months because they’re just getting the foundation in place, or they should be. That’s how we operate.

Amanda Joyce:
Exactly. They should be. Yeah.

Devon Hayes:
But, yeah-

Amanda Joyce:
So hopefully … Yeah.

Devon Hayes:
Even if they don’t, even if they don’t do a whole strategy, you’re still not going to be wowed in the first three months anyway. I don’t know what they’re going to be doing, that would say, "Sure, measure my performance after month one." I just can’t wrap my head around how that would make sense, but you should have the strategy laid out, and then for us, we tell our clients, starting in day one of month four, "Yep, measure us. Measure our performance. We’ve got the foundation in place, and now we’re doing all these other things, but absolutely measure those KPIs, your positioning, your ranking, keywords you rank for, organic traffic through to the site."

Leads are going to come later. It’s SEO, it’s slow, but we still track a month over month how many phone calls are coming in. You can have those KPIs that give you that warm, fuzzy feeling without saying, "You just telling me I shouldn’t touch in or check in for six months?" No, that’s not what we’re saying.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, absolutely. But as you’re looking at that proposal, make sure there’s a concerted effort to get the foundation in place. If there isn’t, that’s probably why it’s so inexpensive.

Devon Hayes:
Yeah. Yeah. I just can’t wrap my head around, yeah, how you could possibly outline all of that and implement it and be ready to go.

Amanda Joyce:
Yeah, but that’s why I feel like sometimes we see those SEOs that are like, "Oh, it’s $500 a month," and it’s because there is not a unique strategy really being put in place. They’re checking some boxes that are just probably SEO best practices from five or six years ago, and then they’re like, "Yeah, you’re optimized. Yay."

Devon Hayes:
Yeah, or those big, big, big agencies that just have, they have a big checklist. I mean, it could be current date best practices. Let’s pretend that it is. They still haven’t taken the time to learn about you, like, "What’s the behavior flow of your website? Where are they falling off?"
"What pages should they change? What pages should they not touch because they’re already ranking for some reason?" They did not take the time to learn it, but they’re checking the boxes of, "Does the site title have my service, plus location in it? Check." So there’s a reason.

There’s massive national agencies, and they have these checklists that they follow, but that might not be a great fit for everybody. Maybe it makes more sense for your business to have a customized solution, because then, you really know that somebody’s invested in your business versus like an account manager who’s going through their SOP and checking off the task list.

Amanda Joyce:
Okay, content marketing. Ask-

Devon Hayes:
We did touch on this. Yeah.

Amanda Joyce:
We did, but look at your proposal. Is it included? Does it clearly state that they’re going to include content? If they’re not, ask what you’d be looking at from a cost perspective for them to provide content for you, because inevitably, first of all, we, as an agency, know and understand, without quality content published to your site, you’re not going to rank, but inevitably, they’ve convinced you that you should do SEO without regular content. There’s going to be a time where you’re like, "Hey, this thing just happened."

"We need a blog about it," whatever it may be. What are they going to charge you to write that content? Make sure you’re aware of that ahead of time, because if it’s not included, you might get sticker shock when one day you’re like, "You want $500 for you to write and publish this blog for me? That would explain why that other agency that was going to give me two blog posts a month was so much more expensive." So another one to just consider as you’re going through asking those questions about, "What’s included in the proposal?"

Devon Hayes:
Brilliant, brilliant. Next one we have here …

Amanda Joyce:
We definitely kind of touched on it, but asking about, "What time is going to be put into really learning about my unique business needs?" Again, what Devon was just talking about with the setup, and the keyword research, and all that, "Is that accounted for in the proposal? Are they going to have a kickoff call with you and ask you questions and learn about your business, or do they just already assume, because they have similar company in another market, that they know your business already and they’re just ready to hit the ground running?" Those are the agencies that don’t charge you nearly as much, but that’s why, because they’re kind of giving you a boxed product, and … I’m sorry, but you know what I mean. They’re not giving you something bespoke, so you’re getting what you’re paying for.

Devon Hayes:
Absolutely. All right. Next up, we realized that not every agency includes reporting. This was a little bit surprising, but ask them. Yeah, say, "What reporting is included in my monthly retainer?"

They might tell you there’s an automated report that goes out. They might tell you there’s an automated report, or, "We have an automated external dashboard, but we also include a one-hour quarterly review with our clients where we sit down and we don’t just hand you charts and graphs, we talk through what they mean, what’s performing well, what’s not, how many leads you got, what’s your positioning. All the things that matter, we talk it through with you instead of anticipating that you’re going to sit in front of your computer, read through the automated report and ask questions about how our strategy’s performing." So ask. Just ask the question.

Surprisingly, there’s some places where it’s an add-on, and there’s not even an automated report, and decide for your business, depending on how big you are, maybe something automated monthly. That’s fine, and that’s all you need to have that gut check. It just depends on your business and what feels good to you. We just know that in the SEO world where it’s all kind of cloak and dagger, smoke and mirrors, it’s hard to trust what’s going on, so for us … And we like connecting with our clients, but it’s really good to have someone detail what’s happening.

Like, "Well, actually, Google, there was an algorithm update, and now they’re favoring people that are open longer, so this is why we saw a drop-off on this date moving forward." There’s good information that comes out with meeting over Zoom, or I would say, in person, not in person. Does anyone be in person anymore? We don’t. We would love to. We’ll get a lot of air miles that way. Okay, great question here. "KPIs, which ones are they reporting on?"

Amanda Joyce:
Exactly. That’s probably not going to be clearly identified in your proposal, but it’s a great question to ask while you’re asking that reporting question, "Key performance indicators, are you going to be reporting to me so I know you’re successful? Basically, what’s your success metric?" Make sure you ask that right out the gate, because you don’t want to be six months into SEO, and then find out that … You just want to make sure that it aligns, and most agencies are going to be …

At the end of the day, you guys all want leads, so hopefully that’s what they’re going to report to you on, and they’re going to report to you on, that you’re seeing a consistent improvement in your visibility in the search rankings. You need to hear it directly from the horse’s mouth, "How are they going to prove success to you, and how often are they going to touch base with you to let you know that they’re getting closer and closer to that target?" It might seem like an obvious question, but it’s just a really good one to ask.

Devon Hayes:
That makes me think you should ask how leads are reported. Do they just pull the number directly from Google? Do they just pull the number directly from Callrail? Do they just pull the number directly from your website form fills, or are they going in and removing any spam, any non-leads that they get from those sources?," because those numbers, as we all know, can be inflated. You know how many spam email forms you get.

People calling, looking for work, that shouldn’t be counted in your lead count, so asking that question like how leads are reported, because they might define it differently than you. They might see a lead as someone who visited the homepage of your website, and make that an event in Google Analytics and report on that. It’s a vanity metric. It looks great, but that’s not a true lead. They didn’t call you. They didn’t fill out a form, so ask how leads are reported, and if they’re cleaned up and what they would define a lead as.

Amanda Joyce:
Yes. Absolutely great one. Yeah, for sure. We touched on this before too, but meetings is like, "How regularly are you going to be meeting with them?" Make sure you just really understand that. It’s critical because, again, they might charge you for every meeting, or maybe they make time for a monthly meeting, whatever it may be. It’s just another one that you just don’t want to be surprised by later when you find out that you ask them for a quick Zoom and get that invoice for it.

Devon Hayes:
Asking if you have a dedicated account manager, at some of those larger national agencies, they cycle through account managers, and then this is kind of a pain point we’ve heard over and over again is that, then they get past to somebody else who has to learn the account, doesn’t know about the past, doesn’t know what’s going on, and then finally gets up to speed, and then that person moves on, so then you’re explaining something all over again. You’re still at the same place because the strategy was never changed and you’re still not getting any answers, and it’s, "I’ll get back to you," so wondering if the salesperson’s going to fall off and you’re going to get an account manager who hasn’t had kind of the rapport, learned about your business with you, meh. Maybe that’s important to you, maybe not. Again, just a question to ask when you’re considering agencies. Okay, this one we run into a lot.

This next one, "Do they include website management?" So you might have a dedicated IT team that you’re already paying for, or do you expect this new agency to keep your website up-to-date, add new content, make all these changes that you want that fall outside of the scope of their work?" Defining this piece will be good. That’ll save you from any surprises and just understanding how many hours or what their bandwidth is in terms of website management because there is … It has to go hand in hand with SEO, but understanding how like, "Where’s the line in the sand with that one?," like asking for a new website under your SEO retainer, probably out of scope.

Amanda Joyce:
That’s our list. I mean, we could go on and on and on, but if you work your way through these questions as you’re narrowing down your options, you’re going to drastically reduce the likelihood that you’re going to have some unexpected surprise. We really hope that you guys found these helpful. Are we missing any? Is there a question that you wish you would’ve asked that ended up biting you? We’d love to hear from you guys.

Devon Hayes:
You know what? Actually, I just thought of one. I know we’re about to wrap this up, but their track record, their success rate. Referrals are probably the best source for this. Ask for a list of referrals.

What’s hard about our world is that it’s ongoing forever and ever, so we can’t finish a project, and then ask for a review, so ask for a list of referrals, and ask if they have referrals within your niche. Once you’ve gotten it down to maybe the top two or three, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with asking for that, and you can even do your homework and look at their positioning with some free tools if you wanted to. So we will put those in the episode notes too, just because it’s fun to take a look at that if you want to look at it, but I think it’s massively important in such a trust-based service. Okay. Now, we’re done.

Amanda Joyce:
Okay. So now, if we missed any, please let us know.

Devon Hayes:
Yes.
Amanda Joyce:
But we really hope you guys found this helpful. We wish you luck on your journey to finding the right agency. There’s a lot of really good ones out there, and by asking the right questions, you can land with somebody that you can truly trust.

Devon Hayes:
Yes. Thank you for listening to our super long sales pitch. We hope you enjoyed it. E-L-E-Vmarketing.com. Take care.

Amanda Joyce:
Thanks, guys. That was today’s trade secret. Thanks for listening.

Devon Hayes:
Did you find this helpful? We’re just getting started.

Amanda Joyce:
Subscribe, and don’t miss our next reveal.

Devon Hayes:
Until next time.