How Do You Compare Two SEO Agency Proposals Side by Side?
An owner in Hermitage sent me two SEO proposals last month and asked which one was the ripoff. Fair question. One was $850 a month, the other was $2,400. Both were twelve months. Both listed keyword research, on-page optimization, Google Business Profile management, content, link building, and monthly reporting. Same twelve bullets, near enough word for word, and a difference of about eighteen thousand dollars over the year.
He was not asking me to sell him a third proposal. He wanted to know how anybody is supposed to tell these apart, and I did not have a good short answer for him, which is usually a sign something is worth writing down properly.
(For context: we are Pennsylvania Digital Studio, out of Greenville, and we write proposals that sit in exactly these stacks. So read this knowing I am not a neutral party. What I can promise is that every test below is one I am willing to have run on my own proposals, which is the only version of this post worth publishing.)
Why do two proposals for the same job come in thousands of dollars apart?
Because the bullet list describes a category of work, not an amount of it, and there is no industry convention for how much.
"Content" is four blog posts a month, or it is one, or it is one every other month written by somebody who has never spoken to you. "Link building" is genuine outreach that lands three or four real placements a quarter, or it is a subscription to a directory network that costs the agency eleven dollars. "Google Business Profile management" is a weekly post and a review response inside a day, or it is logging in each quarter to confirm the hours are right. Every one of those is defensible under the same bullet.
So the spread is not usually one honest proposal and one dishonest one. More often it is one proposal priced on hours somebody will actually spend and one priced on what the market will bear for a bullet list. Occasionally it is genuinely a ripoff. You cannot tell which from the bullets, and that is the whole problem.
The useful move is to stop comparing the lists and start comparing the quantities underneath them.
What are you actually comparing when the deliverables look identical?
Take both proposals and write four numbers next to every line item. How many, how often, who does it, and how you will know it happened.
Do it literally, on paper, in two columns. Most of the time one proposal survives this and one turns to fog, and it takes about fifteen minutes.
"Content" becomes: four posts a month, roughly 1,200 words, written by a person you can name, published to your site where you can see them. Or it becomes: fog. "Reporting" becomes: a call on the second Tuesday with a human, walking through calls and form fills. Or it becomes: an automated email you will stop opening in March.
Two things worth knowing before you run this. First, a good agency can answer all four questions on every line without preparing, because those numbers are how they built the price. If answering takes a week, nobody costed the work. Second, watch what happens when you ask. An agency that says "content is four posts, and honestly for your market I would rather do two good ones and put the other hours into your service pages" is telling you they think about your business. That answer is worth more than the bullet it came from.
We put actual numbers on what the market charges here in what an SEO agency costs in Western PA, which is a useful sanity check to hold both proposals against before you go any further.
Which line items are real work and which are filler?
Some of this is genuinely hard to judge from the outside. Some of it is not.
Almost always real work: the Google Business Profile, if it comes with a posting and review-response cadence you can verify weekly. On-page work on your money pages, because you can read the pages before and after. Content, if it is specific to your trade and your area and somebody interviewed you to write it. Technical fixes, once, at the start.
Real, but slower and less certain than it will be sold to you: link building. Real links move rankings more than anything else on the list, and they are also the easiest place to spend your money on nothing. Ask where the last five links they built for a client in your industry came from. A good answer names sites. A bad answer says "high DA publications," which names nothing.
Usually filler on a local proposal: social media posting bundled into an SEO retainer (it is there to make the bullet count look fuller, and it almost never moves local search), "SEO audits" delivered monthly rather than once (the site does not change that much), and anything described as proprietary. Directory submissions past the first twenty citations are close to worthless.
The one nobody lists and everybody needs: somebody watching whether the phone actually rings, and changing the plan when it does not. That is not a deliverable, it is a habit, and it is the single biggest difference between the $850 and the $2,400 in practice.
Who owns the website, the profile, and the content when it ends?
Read this part of both proposals before you read anything else, because it is the part that decides how expensive a mistake costs you.
You want, in writing: the domain registered to you, the website hosted somewhere you can take over or export, the Google Business Profile owned by your Google account with the agency as a manager (never the reverse), analytics and Search Console owned by you, and every piece of content yours to keep.
If any of those sit with the agency, the monthly fee is not really the price. The price is the fee plus the cost of rebuilding whatever you cannot take with you. We have taken over enough of these to know the rebuild is usually somewhere between two and six thousand dollars, and it lands at the exact moment the owner has already decided the relationship is not working. A proposal that is silent on ownership is not neutral on it.
The other side of that coin: an agency that hands you ownership up front is telling you it plans to keep the account by being worth keeping. Our longest client relationship is twenty years with a single business, and none of that was contractual lock-in, because there was not any.
What does the money actually look like?
Since I am asking you to compare openly, here is ours, in the same shape.
Foundation is $499 a month with a $500 one-time setup. Growth is $998 a month with a $1,000 setup. Dominate is $1,497 a month with a $1,250 setup (ad spend not included in that number). Paying annually cuts the setup in half and gives you two months free. Those numbers are on the local SEO services page and they do not move depending on who is asking.
We are a little above the bottom of the market on purpose, and here is the mechanism that pays for it:
We get your business into the top 3 of the Google Maps pack for your core service queries within 90 days, or you stop paying the monthly fee until we do. We keep working. You keep your number.
The reason that matters in a proposal comparison is not the guarantee itself, it is what it forces. An agency that has to hit a defined result on a defined clock has to tell you at the start whether your market is winnable, has to pick queries it believes in rather than queries that look good on a report, and cannot spend month four on filler. If the cheaper proposal in your stack carries a comparable commitment, that is a genuinely strong signal and you should weigh it heavily. If neither does, you are buying effort rather than an outcome, and you should price it accordingly.
What questions should you ask before you sign either one?
Send both agencies the same six questions in the same email and compare the replies, not the proposals. The replies are unrehearsed, which is the point.
1. What are the five queries you expect to move first, and what position are we at on them today?
2. What does month one look like, day by day, and what does month six look like?
3. Show me a client in a trade like mine, and tell me what their calls looked like before and twelve months after.
4. Who is doing the actual work, is any of it subcontracted, and can I talk to that person?
5. What would make you tell me this is not working, and how soon would you say it?
6. If I leave in month seven, what do I keep?
Question five is the one that separates people. Almost nobody has an answer prepared, so you hear them think. An agency that says "if we are not in the pack by month four on the two main terms, we have the wrong plan and I will tell you" is an agency that has thought about being wrong. An agency that cannot imagine a version where it is not working will not notice when it is not working.
Question three is the other one worth pushing on. Case studies with percentages and no phone numbers are decoration. "They went from about six calls a month to about twenty-five" is a claim someone can be held to. Ours are on our work, and you are welcome to call any of them.
What should make you walk away from both?
Some things are not comparison problems, they are stop signs.
A guarantee of a number one ranking on a specific keyword by a specific date, with no conditions. Nobody controls Google's ranking order, and the ones who promise it are either going to pick a keyword nobody searches or explain in month five why it does not count. (A map-pack commitment tied to your core service queries in your own market, like ours, is a different animal to a blanket number one promise, and it is fair to make an agency explain the difference.)
Pressure to sign this week for a discount that expires. Local SEO is a twelve-month decision and there is no reason on earth it has to close on a Friday.
No access to your own accounts during the pitch. If they will not look at your Search Console with you before you sign, they are quoting a price without looking at the job.
A proposal that never mentions your competitors by name. Your market is thirty businesses, not an abstraction. If nobody looked at who is currently in the three pins you want, nobody looked at anything.
And the quiet one: if both proposals came back inside a day of your first call, with no questions asked about your jobs, your margins, or which towns you actually want work in, then both of them are selling a package rather than solving your problem. That is a fine reason to go get a third quote from somebody who asks harder questions than either of them did. If the relationship is already underway and you are trying to work out whether to stay, we wrote about how to tell a slow agency from an agency doing nothing.
Happy to be one of the two proposals, and equally happy to just read the two you already have and tell you which one is priced honestly, including when the answer is neither of them and including when the answer is the other one. No charge for that, and no pitch attached to it. Andrew Hersh, andrew@padigitalstudio.com, 724-638-7754.