Why four quotes for one site come back four times apart
A founder sends the same three-line email to four agencies. "We're a D2C brand doing about ₹4 crore, our SEO is weak, what would you charge?" The quotes arrive at ₹22,000, ₹65,000, ₹1,10,000 and ₹2,40,000 a month, and the obvious conclusion is that three of them are lying.
Usually none of them is. They're quoting four different jobs, because the email described no job at all. The cheap one assumed a WordPress site with 40 pages, no dev dependency and monthly reporting. The expensive one assumed a headless build where every change needs a sprint, a legal review on every claim, and 6,000 product URLs.
There is an established way to normalise proposals after they arrive — convert everything to hours, put them on one sheet. That works, and it's the wrong place to solve this. Fixing it at the brief costs you ninety minutes and removes most of the spread before a single agency starts guessing.
The six inputs, and what each one changes in the price
Each of these moves the number, and each of them gets guessed at conservatively — meaning expensively — when it's missing.
- Add two lines of context if you have them: your rough commercial goal for the year, and any past penalty, migration or agency relationship that ended badly. Both change the plan and neither is embarrassing.
- You do not need to share revenue. You do need to share the baseline — see the next section — and it's worth stating up front what access an agency will eventually get, rather than discovering the gap at contract stage. The questions worth asking before you sign covers the other side of that conversation.
| Input | What to write | What it changes in the price |
|---|---|---|
| Current organic baseline | Trailing-90-day organic sessions, non-brand clicks, and enquiries the business attributes to organic | Decides whether this is a recovery job or a build from zero. Recovery is faster and cheaper and everyone should know which one you are |
| Dev release cadence | "We ship fortnightly", or "changes go through an external agency with a four-week queue" | The single biggest swing. A four-week queue can double the calendar time for the same work, and calendar time is what a retainer bills |
| Approval chain | Who signs off on published copy, how many people, and the typical turnaround | Three approvers with a legal review turns four articles a month into two. Say so and the quote reflects two |
| Existing content volume | Total indexable URLs, roughly how many are blog versus commercial, and how many you'd call thin | Decides the split between fixing what exists and writing new. Fixing is usually cheaper per unit of traffic and rarely gets quoted because nobody knew the count |
| Target geography and language | Cities or countries that matter, and whether Hindi or regional-language pages are in scope | Local, national and multi-country are three different jobs. Regional-language content needs editors, not translators, and that is a real line item |
| Who owns the CMS | Platform, who holds admin, and whether an agency can publish directly or must hand files to someone | Publishing access removes a whole coordination layer. No access means every deliverable carries handover overhead |
The baseline section, written out so you can copy it
This is the part of the brief that changes what an agency can promise you. Put it in before anyone quotes, because a number agreed after the proposal is a number both sides can argue about.
Paste this block, fill in the figures, and send it to everyone unchanged.
- Window: the 90 days ending
<date>. Named explicitly, so nobody picks a flattering quarter later. - Organic sessions:
<n>, from<GA4 property ID>, default channel group Organic Search. - Non-brand organic clicks:
<n>, from Search Console, with these brand terms excluded:<list them>. - Enquiries the business attributes to organic:
<n>, counted in<CRM name>, defined as<your definition — a form, a call over 60 seconds, a WhatsApp thread that reached a human>. - Indexed pages:
<n>, from the Search Console index coverage report on<date>. - Referring domains:
<n>, from<tool>, on<date>. - Seasonality note: anything that will distort a comparison — festive peak, exam cycle, financial year end, a campaign that ran inside the window.
Three things to leave out, and why they make proposals worse
Most bad briefs are bad because of what they add, not what they miss.
A keyword list
Sending 300 keywords you generated in a free tool tells the agency what you already believe. The useful part of the first month is the agency disagreeing with you — finding the queries your buyers actually type, which are usually longer, less obvious and lower volume than the list you'd assemble yourself.
Send the list as an appendix labelled "what we think today" if you must. Don't send it as scope. A proposal priced against your list is priced against your blind spots.
A desired ranking position
"We want to be #1 for SEO services India" filters your responses in exactly the wrong direction. The agencies willing to write that into a proposal are the ones least equipped to deliver anything, because nobody controls Google's index — Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO names a guaranteed #1 ranking as a warning sign, alongside claims of a special relationship with Google.
State the commercial outcome instead. "We need 40 qualified enquiries a month from organic by Q3" is a harder brief and it gets you better answers.
A fixed deliverable count
"Eight blogs and 20 backlinks a month" converts the brief into a procurement exercise, and the winner will be whoever is cheapest per unit of the thing you specified. That is a race you don't want to win.
It also removes the agency's ability to tell you the truth. If your site's problem is 200 thin pages and no internal linking, the right first quarter has almost no new articles in it — and no agency will propose that against a brief demanding eight.
Ask everyone for the same three numbers
This is what makes a spreadsheet possible. Add these three requests at the bottom of the brief, and ask for them in the proposal rather than on a call.
- Give every agency the same deadline and the same word limit. Ten pages of a template beats nothing, but three pages written for you beats both.
- Ask for the first 90 days specifically, not a 12-month roadmap. Twelve-month roadmaps are written by people who haven't crawled your site yet and are revised in week three anyway.
- Hours per month, split by discipline. Technical, content, links and PR, reporting and strategy. Not a total — the split. Divide the fee by the total to get an implied hourly rate, and you can finally compare a ₹40,000 quote against a ₹1,50,000 one on the same axis.
- Names and seniority of the people who will work on the account, and how much of their week it gets. Not the pitch team. This is the single most common gap between what was sold and what arrives.
- What happens if the number in our baseline hasn't moved in 90 days. The answer separates the field faster than any other question in the process. "SEO takes time" is an answer. It's just not a commitment, and you should price it as one.
The briefs we decline, and why that's useful information
We take three new clients a month, so declining is normal here rather than dramatic. These are the ones we say no to, and every reason is worth knowing whoever you end up hiring — because an agency that says yes to all of them is telling you something about how it makes money.
- No baseline, and no willingness to build one. If nobody will count the trailing-90-day enquiries, our guarantee has nothing to attach to and every future review becomes a debate about a moving number.
- A required ranking position in the scope. We don't sell it because nobody can honestly deliver it, and a brief that insists is going to end badly with whoever accepts it.
- Dev capacity of zero, indefinitely. Technical fixes that can't ship aren't recommendations, they're a document. If the queue is four weeks, fine — say so and we plan around it. If the answer is "never", we'd be billing you to write a wish list.
- Under ₹40,000 a month against a national competitive keyword set. The arithmetic doesn't work and we'd rather say so than take a quarter of your money to prove it. Our SEO starts at ₹75,000/mo, with smaller sites from ₹40,000 — the full pricing is public.
- Two agencies already working on the same domain. Nobody can be accountable for a number two teams are both editing. We'll happily do an independent review instead.
- A brief that asks for a strategy as part of the pitch. Free audits are sales pitches with a deliverable attached. We'll tell you what we'd look at; we won't do the work for free, and neither should anyone you're considering.