How to compare SEO consultant proposals, row by row

To compare SEO consultant proposals, rewrite every one of them into the same six rows before you look at the price: the work, whose hands do it, how long you are bound, what the fee leaves out, who owns the accounts, and how success gets measured. Price goes last. A proposal that cannot fill a row has told you something. A cheap one that fills four rows is not cheap.

The limit of the method is that it compares documents, not people. A tidy proposal from the wrong person still costs you a year. The grid narrows the field, and a call with each person settles it.

Before you read the rest: I write proposals too. If mine is one of the three on your desk, this is the checklist I would want you to run on all three, mine included. My own terms are filled in further down, so you can see what a complete column looks like and hold me to it.

What Google says to ask, and what it leaves to you

My reading of the Google help page on hiring an SEO took place on 21 October 2026. It shows 5 June 2026 as its last update. Among its interview questions is one worth copying onto every proposal: Google tells you to ask what results to expect “and in what timeframe”, and how the SEO measures success.

A good proposal has answered that before you ask it.

One of its other questions is “What’s your experience in my industry?” Another is “How can I expect to communicate with you?” My grid below covers the contract: notice period, account ownership and what a monthly fee excludes. In my judgment, the contract is the part of any proposal that deserves the slowest read.

Google also sets a bar for an audit: it should give you “realistic estimates of improvement”. Hold every proposal to that phrase. A proposal that jumps from a sales call to a monthly fee is pricing work that nobody has measured yet.

Six rows, one column per proposal

Copy this into a sheet. Fill each cell with the proposal’s own words, not your summary of them.

Row	What the cell should hold	If the cell is empty
Work	Named tasks with an output you can hold: a fix list, pages published, a report	Ask for the first month, week by week
Hands	Who implements: the consultant, your developer, or a subcontractor	Ask who touches the site
Term	Minimum term and notice period, in writing	Assume you cannot leave
Exclusions	What the fee does not buy: ad spend, content, design, developer hours	Ask what gets billed on top
Ownership	Whose name is on analytics, Search Console, the ads account and the business profile	Ask before anyone creates an account
Measure	The baseline, the number reported each month, and the month you decide	Ask how success is measured

There is no score column. Do not add one. The grid exists to show you the blanks, and a weighted score hides them inside an average.

Underline the verbs in the scope

Scope sections are written in verbs, and the verbs tell you whose hands do the work. “Review”, “identify”, “recommend” and “advise” mean you receive a document. “Fix”, “write”, “publish” and “build” mean somebody changes your site. Both are honest products. They are different products, and they should not cost the same.

Put two proposals side by side and underline every verb. If one says “identify technical issues” and the other says “fix technical issues”, the cheaper one may be selling only the first half of the job. Your developer does the second half, on your bill.

I have set out the two halves, and the paper each one should leave behind, in what an SEO consultant does from week to week.

A quantity beats an adjective. “Ongoing content creation” is an adjective. A number of pieces per month, written and published, is a quantity. Ask for the quantity.

Price the exit before the month

The monthly fee is the least useful figure on a proposal. The useful one is what you owe if the work stops paying. Multiply the monthly fee by the months you cannot leave, then add any setup fee. Do that for each column and compare the totals.

A lower fee with a long lock-in can cost more to leave than a higher fee you can end with a month of notice. Take $750 a month. On thirty days notice, you walk away in month four and owe one more month, $750. On a twelve month term at the same fee, you walk away in month four and still owe every remaining month at $750. The fee is identical and the exit is not.

I do not use twelve month lock-ins myself, and the reasoning sits beside the market rates in how much an SEO consultant costs, and why the term matters.

Exclusions decide whether two prices match

Two proposals at the same fee are the same price only if they exclude the same things. Check four lines in each one: ad spend, content, design, and developer hours. A proposal that says nothing on all four has not excluded them. It has left them open. Ask, in writing, which of the four would be billed on top.

Ad management needs its own line. Google’s page says that advertising with Google “won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in our search results.” That sentence splits a bundled proposal in two. If ads and SEO arrive as one fee, ask for the two prices separately, because they buy two different things.

Ownership is a yes or a no

Every account the work depends on belongs in your name. Analytics, Search Console, the ads account, the business profile. Always. Every one.

Ask each proposal to confirm it in one line. A paragraph in reply is a soft no.

Google’s page gives one more rule worth copying into this row. If an SEO has FTP access to your server, “they should be willing to explain all the changes they are making to your site.” So ask each proposal how changes are recorded. A dated change log, sent to you, is the answer to look for.

The measure row tells you what they will defend

A proposal should name what it will count, the baseline it counts from, and a month when you and the consultant look at that number together and decide whether to carry on. Without a baseline, a report cannot show movement. Without a decision month, the engagement drifts.

Read what is being counted. A position is not the outcome. A phone call is the outcome. A proposal that reports only rankings will defend rankings in month four, whatever the phone did.

On Google’s page, an SEO who guarantees first place in search results is one to leave: it says to find someone else. Cross that proposal off the sheet.

My own terms, in the same grid

This column condenses my page of SEO consulting services and what each one excludes.

Row	What my page commits to
Work	Audit: a crawl, a profile assessment, map rankings measured on a grid, keyword and competitor work, a ranked fix list. Retainer: the search side of the business, profile and site
Hands	Audit: you or your developer build from the list. Retainer: I implement what my access reaches, and developer work is briefed and handed over, not marked up
Term	One page agreement, month to month, thirty days notice either way
Exclusions	Photography, video and design. Ad spend is separate, paid on your own card
Ownership	Accounts created in your name
Measure	A monthly report naming what changed, in plain language
Price	$499 audit. Advisory from $499 a month. Retainer $750 to $1,500 a month. Programme $2,500 a month. Canadian dollars, plus HST, no setup fee

My weakest row is Measure. The page promises the monthly report and does not name a decision month. That half of the row is blank, and the grid treats my blank like anybody else’s.

When the proposals answer different questions

If the grid shows that the proposals are not rival bids for one job, comparing their prices means nothing. An audit, a year of content and ads with some SEO attached are three different jobs. Know which problem you have first.

If nobody has yet diagnosed why the site is not being found, buy the diagnosis first. Let its fix list tell you which of the other proposals you need, if any. Whether one person or a firm suits the job is a separate decision, and I set out both sides of the SEO consultant vs agency choice without trimming either list.

If one of the bids on your desk is from an SEO consultant in Toronto, that page is where I hand a Toronto reader the grid run on their own proposals. Where the consultant sits changes nothing in the grid, so the six rows apply to that bid as they do to the others.

Questions buyers ask at this stage

Should I send the grid to each consultant to fill in? Yes. Send the same six rows to all of them with the same deadline. How each one fills it in is part of the comparison, and a consultant who will not fill a row has filled it.

Is a free audit attached to a proposal worth anything? Judge it by Google’s bar quoted above: it should estimate the improvement and the work. A free audit that has neither is a sales document with a findings heading. Read it as one.

Can somebody independent read the proposals for me? Yes. My advisory work includes “an independent read on any proposal you are given”. The six rows are the method for that read, and they apply to my own proposal as much as to a rival’s.

Method

The Google page quoted here is titled “Do you need an SEO?”. My reading was on 21 October 2026, and its footer showed 5 June 2026 as the last update. The six rows, the order to read them in and the advice on each are my judgment from writing and reading proposals, not a survey.

The grid works without me. Fill it in before you take any call, mine included, and the empty rows will tell you what to ask.

The offer is one 15 minute call: give me the site and the problem, and I will say whether I can help and what it would cost.