Request for Proposal (RFP) Template

If you are reading this and are like most Heads of SEO or Directors of Search then you will have been tasked with improving your department’s efficiency or performance – which normally boils down to improving clients’ SEO traffic (if you’re agency side) or your internal SEO results (if you’re an in-house SEO) for the same or lower costs!

At some point you’ll no doubt start to look to re-engineer or improve your existing operational systems and processes for managing your SEO workflow.  If you’ve just moved into a new SEO lead role, then more often than not, you’ll find a team of SEOs all using their favourite combination of different SEO tools and data. It’s possible at some stage you’ll find yourself looking to run a tender process to procure a new comprehensive SEO SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform that integrates many of these tools into one coherent platform.

We’ve put together some handy templates to help save you hours of time in going out to tender.  Hopefully, you can easily adapt them to your exact needs and use them to run an efficient and thorough selection process.

We’ll go on to explain what we’ve put together and what it covers.  But if you cannot wait – just skip to the bottom of the page to download the templates now.

There are many different options out there. Obviously, we’d love you to consider Authoritas and Linkdex alongside some better-known enterprise tools. If you are going to search the whole SEO tools market then you should consider:

• Authoritas
• Linkdex
• BrightEdge
• Conductor
• SearchMetrics
• SEO Clarity

We’re in the business of helping you achieve more SEO success in less time, so to help you manage this procurement process we’ve put together easy-to-use RFP templates that you can easily adapt to your own needs.

If you’re already working in a large corporate or multi-national enterprise with your own procurement systems like SAP or Ariba, then no doubt someone will have been through this RFI/RFP process before and you’ll likely already have a good starting point.  Then we’d recommend just reviewing the RFP Template – SEO Software Platform Requirements spreadsheet as this will allow you to review a distilled version of the many SEO tenders we’ve received over the past year or so and will give you a good insight into what leading SEOs worldwide are expecting from their SEO platforms.

You can then easily copy the spreadsheet of requirements and send it to each potential vendor you want to consider.

If you are in a company that has not been through this process before or perhaps does not have a formal tender process or requirements, then perhaps in addition to the above-mentioned spreadsheet you’ll also find the Microsoft Word RFP Template for SEO Platforms useful.

This template is designed to help you add some rigour to your SEO supplier selection process and make it easy for you to manage the whole process and objectively compare suppliers.

Whether you are working client-side or in an SEO agency, hopefully you’ll find the templates useful and comprehensive so you leave no stone unturned in your quest to make the best selection for your needs.

We recognise that no two companies are the same and that there’s no such thing as a perfect SEO platform.  After all, we should know since we have two SEO platforms!

So, we’d love to hear your feedback on any important SEO tools or data you think are critical to effectively manage SEO campaigns that we may have missed off our templates.  We’ll of course be updating this periodically in response to changes demands in the marketplace.

The templates are organised around the flexible “Authoritas 6 Stage SEO & Content Marketing Process”, but of course you can structure the requirements in any way that makes most sense to your business.