On this page
Getting three quotes is standard advice and it is close to useless for SEO, because the three will not be describing the same thing. One will be four hours a month of tidying. One will be a writing programme. One will be a technical rebuild. All three will arrive as a single monthly figure with a short list of nouns underneath it, and you will be invited to compare the figures.
So the useful skill is not collecting quotes, it is making each one say enough to be compared. That is what this page is for.
The five things a quote has to name
1. What is in scope, and what is not
The second half matters more than the first. Almost every quote lists what is included. Very few say what is excluded, and that is where the arguments happen five months in. Ask explicitly whether writing is included, whether changes to the website itself are included, and whether anything is capped by number.
2. What arrives each month
Not what will be worked on. What lands. A written plan, a set of changes, a number of pages, a conversation. If the answer is vague, the month has no shape and you will not be able to tell a good one from a bad one until a quarter has gone.
3. The term, the notice and the exit
Three separate questions that often get one answer. How long is the commitment. How much notice to end it. And what leaving actually involves in practice. A twelve-month term with a three-month notice period is a fifteen-month decision, and it should be described that way.
4. Who does the work, by name
The single most useful question in the list, and the one people feel rudest asking. The person selling to you is frequently not the person who will do the work, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as you know before you sign. Ask who, ask how much of their week, and ask who you will speak to when something goes wrong.
5. The fee and the advertising spend, apart
If any advertising is involved, these are two numbers and they must be two lines. A blended figure hides which half is going where, and a supplier taking a percentage of your ad budget has a financial reason to want that budget to grow.
The template
Send this before you agree anything. It is deliberately short, it is not aggressive, and a supplier who answers it fully is showing you something about how they work. There is nothing to download and no email address to hand over. Copy it.
- What is included each month, and what is specifically not included?
- What will I receive each month, and in what form?
- How long is the term, how much notice do I give, and what does ending it involve?
- Who will do the work, and roughly how much of their time will this take?
- Is your fee separate from any advertising spend, and is the spend paid by me directly to the platform?
- If we stop, what stays with me: the pages, the writing, the accounts and the data?
- What would you expect to have changed after three months, and how will we know?
The last question is doing quiet work. It asks for a prediction without asking for a guarantee, which is the only honest shape that question has. Nobody can promise a ranking. Anyone serious can tell you what they expect to be different and how you will be able to see it.
How to compare the answers
Put the three replies side by side and ignore the prices for a moment. You are looking for two things: which one is most specific, and which one is most willing to say what it will not do. Specificity is a decent proxy for whether somebody has actually thought about your business, and a supplier prepared to write down a limit is a supplier who intends to keep the rest.
| What the quote says | What that probably means | Worth asking |
|---|---|---|
| Ongoing SEO optimisation | Nobody has decided yet | What lands in month one, in writing? |
| 4 blog posts and monthly reporting | A writing programme with a report attached | Who writes them, and who decides the subjects? |
| Technical audit and implementation | A finite project, priced monthly | What happens in month four, when it is done? |
None of these is wrong. They are three different jobs at one price, which is why the price cannot decide it.
The cheapest quote is very often just the one with the least written down.
What we do instead of quoting
Our prices are printed on the service pages, so there is nothing to quote and nothing that changes after a call. What you get before any money moves is a written audit: what is working, what is holding the site back, what we would do about it, and what fixing it would cost. It is free whether or not you go ahead, and there is no sequence of follow-up emails attached to it.
You are welcome to send the template above to us as well. We would rather answer it than not.