A brief sample (heavily edited and redacted) of our standard proposal template. If you have a problem w/ rats, don't read it.

1. e lop me nts
evrtent
grkDith Po
isinwo w
P rom d g shoul
Why BigOr
by Ian Lurie &

2. Hey there.

3. You’re probably wondering where
there’s a rat on your screen.

4. I’m not a developer.
(Only four fingers.)

5. follow me!
I’m a great guide to
Portent’s story, though.

6. I’m smart...
i dare say.

7. ...Creative and curious...
at last! The
other side!

8. ...a practical survivor...

9. ...and a social animal.
hey.
yo.

10. Most important, I really
understand value.

11. SEO requires all of
these attributes.

12. Portent has ‘em.
Clever, smart, creative people who make
search a value generator for your
business.
That's what it
should be. Not
a cost center. A
value builder.

13. Portent Interactive is not:
A design company, a creative
agency, or a search marketing firm.
sniff
(Please don’t call us those. It hurts our feelings.)

14. Portent Interactive is:
A whole-brain internet marketing agency.

15. Portent started in 1995.
whoa. 16 years in
business. They must
know a thing or
two.

16. Their approach brings it all together -
creativity, marketing and data - to make
you successful.
'successful' means 'helps
your business grow'. Not
'wins an award' or 'makes
visitors say oooooh,
aaaaahhhh'.

17. Key team members
With really embarrassing baby pictures...

18. Ian Lurie
Ian started Portent. He is the internet
marketing geek, with a blog, a book and
occasional speaking gigs on the
subject.
(he’s bigger now)

19. Ian Lurie
If you care about this kind of stuff, Ian’s
been interviewed and/or written for the
Atlantic, the Seattle Times, the Puget
Sound Business Journal, Direct
Magazine, DM News and Visibility
magazine...

20. Ian Lurie
...he’s been a columnist on
Search Engine Land and
Search News Central...

21. Ian Lurie
...He speaks at SES San Francisco, SMX
Stockholm, SMX West, SEMPDX Searchfest,
Blogworld, Pubcon, WordCamp, the WSA,
IMC Calgary, Ad::Tech, Emerging Media
Conference...
Actually, he never stops talking.

22. Ian Lurie
...and, he wrote 4 sections of “Web
Marketing for Dummies All-In-One”:
- Web analytics
- SEO
- Social Media
- Blogging & Podcasting
(400 pages in all, not that he was counting)

23. Tracy Beach
Is our COO and CCO (chief customer
officer). He’s the guy who makes sure
you’re happy with our work, day in and day
out.
To stay on his good (he was a hairy child)
side, say nice things
about the Oakland
Raiders.

24. Tracy Beach
If you have any concerns in the course
of a project, contact Tracy. He’ll make
sure things are on track, or that they
get back on track.
(By the way, he’s not really a meerkat.
He’s just camera shy. That’ll teach him.)

25. Elizabeth Marsten
Is our Director of Search. She’s one of the
best SEM professionals in North America.
Seriously.
(and still loves Rainier Beer)
She wrote the PPC
section of the
Dummies book, by
the way.

26. They’re All Marketers
Everyone at Portent is cross-trained as
a marketer.
Because SEO is not a technical task. It’s
a marketing strategy supported by
technology.

27. To Do:
☐ Visit the site: Portent.com.
☐ Read our blog: Portent.com/blog.
☐ Read the proposal that starts on the next page.
thanks for
reading!

28. What we’ll do
This is our proposal. It covers what we’ll do, how we’ll do it, and what it’ll cost.
It does not include specific technical recommendations, or a list of things we’ve found
that are problems on your site. We’ll get you more of that as we work.
It does cover our process and how we approach SEO. Please let me know if you
have other questions.

29. Laying the groundwork
SEO doesn’t matter if you ignore the fundamentals. The next few pages
outline essential steps we take no matter what.

30. Analytics
You should know the value of a single visitor to your site. That knowledge drives
every aspect of our campaign.
We’ll work with you to build a list of conversions that matter and then put the tools
in place to track them. Ultimately, we want to calculate the value of an individual
visitor to your site.
We’re a Google Analytics Authorized Consulting Partner. We also use
Coremetrics, Omniture and HBX. We’ve added some new tools of our own, too.
And we work with a variety of custom toolsets.
As a company, we’re heavily data-driven. So we’ve created a lot of custom tools
to assemble, organize and track data.

31. Analytics
We track:
• Organic search clicks;
• Non-branded organic search clicks;
• Paid search performance;
• Rankings (obtained via proxy, no personalization);
• Cost/visitor and conversion, by channel;
• Chatter and sentiment;
• Most important, the value of one click to your site. Without that, you can’t
manage a smart campaign.

32. Analytics: Dashboard
We’ll set up a semi-automated dashboard in Google Spreadsheets for you. Here’s a
snapshot of the standard starting template:

33. Analytics: Dashboard
Here’s a search indexation dashboard:

34. Analytics: Dashboard
And, a fancier custom dashboard we built for a client.

35. Reporting
But more important, we’ll provide detailed explanations and recommendations, from real human beings, on
a regular basis.
We write plain-language reports that explain what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what we think should change
at the strategic level. We make these reports stuff you can take to your boss:

36. The keyword map
Good SEO strategies pay attention to the long tail: The many keywords that receive
low query volume but convert well and, taken in aggregate, can provide a huge traffic
boost.
Our keyword map is our guide: It maps specific phrases to clusters of pages, then
prioritizes them by opportunity gap, potential traffic, competition and work required. It
also drives category and site structure optimization.
And, the keyword map is a peek inside your customers’ heads. We can use it to
double check all of our marketing decisions.

37. The keyword map
Here’s a quick look at a sample keyword map. Doesn’t look to exciting, I know, but it
moves online marketing from guess work to systematic campaigning. There’s a
tremendous amount of data that you can’t see - let me know if you’d like to talk more
about our mapping process:

38. Onsite SEO
There’s a lot of hype around link building. But you control your site, and onsite
factors can have a huge influence on your rankings.
We’ll review your site for:
- Visibility
- Relevance
- Structure
We still have our search engine simulator, PythiaSEO, to help with these tests.

39. Onsite SEO: Visibility
The data we collect with our search engine tester helps us improve site
visibility. We need to get search engines to ‘see’ as much of your site as
possible.
All of our other work - link building, site optimization, etc. - is basically worthless
without this ongoing work.

40. Onsite SEO: Visibility
This is PythiaSEO. Say hi, PS:
uh. hi.

41. Onsite SEO: Visibility
We’ll analyze your server log files, too, checking for crawl issues and such.

42. Onsite SEO: Visibility
As part of our work, we’ll also make recommendations for optimizing XML page,
image and video site maps and your product feeds.
Our crawler can even generate XML site maps for you, if necessary.

43. Onsite SEO: Visibility
Site performance is the final piece of the visibility puzzle. A faster site
encourages deeper crawls by the major search engines.
It also has subtle effects on search rankings.
We were one of the first companies to use performance analysis and ‘crawl
efficiency’ improvement as SEO tactics. We started doing it in 2004. We know a
lot about how to ensure search engines find all of your stuff.

44. Onsite SEO: Site Structure
At the same time, we’ll continuously review and optimize site structure.
Every page of your web site has authority it can pass to other pages, the same
way other sites can pass authority to you.
Some folks call this PageRank. Doesn’t matter what you call it. We need to
optimize each site’s structure to pass this authority where and how we want it to.

45. Onsite SEO: Site Structure
Remember PythiaSEO? Doesn’t say much, but it’s pretty dang smart. We use it
to map internal site PageRank (real PR, not toolbar PR) and find ‘leaks’:

46. Onsite SEO: Site Structure
Finally, we use the keyword map to determine where we need to interlink pages
and create new super-relevant ‘hubs’. All sites have content scattered around
that, if interlinked, can rank well for competitive long-tail or mid-tail terms.

47. Onsite SEO: Page Structure
Search engines look for certain cues to tell them the topic of a specific page.
We’ll provide recommendations for capitalizing on all of those cues: Title tags,
description tags and other page elements as necessary.
This is where our copy editing team gets into the act: They’ll look at everything
from ALT tags and visible text to block optimization and semantic matching,
providing edits for better readability and rankings.

48. Content Strategy
Content affects both on- and offsite SEO, as well as PPC. Onsite, it adds
pages, depth and relevance. Offsite, it helps with link building by providing link
bait and material for syndication.
We build our content strategy around the keyword map. The map tells us which
parts of the site need more relevant materials. It also helps show relative
keyword competitiveness.
(Even if we aren’t writing for you, we’ll review what you write and provide tips
for improving the ‘virality’ of your content.)

49. Content Strategy
We also use some natural language analysis, pulling together conversations
from around the web to see what folks are talking about most in your industry:

50. Content Strategy
But it’s not all data and number-crunching. Our awesome creative team will come up
with ideas for link- and buzz-generating content you can create and put on your site.

51. Offsite SEO
Offsite SEO is about more than links. Social media is a direct ranking factor
now, and reputation can have a long-term impact on your rankings, too.
Offsite SEO means managing every aspect of how the world sees you, your site
and your brand. And building a sustainable campaign.

52. Offsite SEO: Basic Links
Basic link building includes directory submission to both free and premium
directories that continue to hold value after the Penguin update (ask us if you want
more information).

53. Offsite SEO: Guest blogging
We’ll look for sites that need content and are looking for bloggers.
Then we’ll brainstorm ideas and send them on to you.
Major players, like virgin.com, look for guest posts. They’re there for the taking.
So do most industry associations - they’re out there constantly looking for
content to fill newsletters, their own sites and special event sites.

54. Offsite SEO: Link sleuthing
Few people like to do it, but link sleuthing is one of the best ways to build quality
links over time.
For example: We’ll find bloggers and site owners who link to you incorrectly
(broken link repair), mention you without linking, or link to similar content, and
politely ask them to correct broken links or link to you.

55. Offsite SEO: Link bait
Link bait can generate the highest-value link authority for your site. We
brainstorm and work with you on really compelling ideas that are likely to get
related sites linking to you. Then we’ll produce and promote that content.
Even if link bait doesn’t immediately generate high link growth, it pays off in the
long term. Over time, bloggers hungry for something to write about find your
pages and link to them. Here are a couple of Portent favorites:

56. Offsite SEO: Nice commenting
We find interesting posts relating to your industry and post good, useful
comments. No “Nice post!” fakery - these are legitimate comments, with your URL
in the ‘URL’ field.
These build links. They also build relationships with bloggers, which helps us
with guest blogging and link bait.

57. Note: SEO Management
Half of SEO is execution: Making sure you do all the little things. So, we build a project
management toolset right into PythiaSEO. It lets you keep track of individual
recommendations, and whether they’re complete:

58. Part 1.5: Social media
“Social” media is so intertwined with search engine optimization that you can’t
separate them.
So, we’ll always make recommendations to help you build a responsive
audience. Those recommendations might include design, copywriting, how to
handle a complaint, or the next offer you can make to your fans and followers.
We’ll help you build your Twitter & Facebook following, look at second-tier sites
for niche opportunities, and use social media to help boost link growth.

59. Part 1.5: Social media
I could go on for another 10 pages about social media. I won’t. Please don’t take
that as a lack of interest/experience. It’s more a case of hype fatigue. Social
media isn’t new, or groundbreaking.
It’s people talking to each other.
So it makes sense that it works.
And really, SEO doesn’t work without it. So all our SEO bids include social
media recommendations.
Our jobs, as marketers, is to connect you with those who most want to talk to
you.

60. Part 2: Optimization
What we won’t do is get lazy.
We should always be stretching for a new, high-converting channel.
Even if you hire us purely for SEO, we’ll devote some time to looking at your
analytics data from a higher level. We’ll give you recommendations to reduce
‘bounce’ rate, improve conversion rate and strengthen your overall internet
marketing.
If we find a new channel we think could help, we’ll point that out, too.

61. You may not always like us...
...but you will always trust us.
We will, at times, make you uncomfortable.
We’re inconvenient. We’ll tell you if some aspect of your site is hurting you. We
may suggest pay per click ads that stretch your brand.
That’s because we are very, very passionate about our clients. We want
Bigorg to kick butt.
We’re very nice about it. But we will rock the boat.

62. Bid (you looked here first, admit it)
SEO and Social: Optional
An SEO playbook
Portent will write a one-time report that details an SEO plan for BigOrg.com,
including changes and recommendations for your site refresh. The playbook gives
you the plan to execute everything we’ve detailed in this proposal. Then you go do it,
or you can hire Portent to go ahead with it. Either way, you end up with a plan that
covers both tactics and strategy.
The Portent team will meet with you at the project start, to get an idea of goals, pain
points and your site plans.
Then we’ll write a first draft plan.
Then we’ll meet with you again to review.
Then we’ll revise the plan.
Then we’ll present the final version and train you and your team.

63. Bid
SEO and Social Step 2:
The “we got this” option:
Analytics, keyword map, reporting, calls every 2 weeks included.
SEO: The basics
Onsite SEO: Site crawls and recommendations every 2 weeks.
Content strategy: Article recommendations, editorial calendar and suggested page
edits.
Offsite SEO: Competitive link & social media analysis. Basic link building; guest blog
post recommendations; link bait and building recommendations.
Other: Quarterly reporting; access to PythiaSEO Logger

64. Bid
SEO and Social Step 2:
The “Portent handles It” option
Same as the “we got this” option, but:
Link sleuthing and link building beyond directory submission by Portent.
Portent writes and promotes 2 link bait pieces per month for you.
Portent writes one blog post per week for you.
Portent performs nice commenting to build relationships with other bloggers for you.
Portent helps you build Twitter/Facebook profiles via curation.
Weekly calls (instead of every 2 weeks)

65. Essential stats
Portent employees: 27
Years in business: 17
Investors: None
BBB rating: A+

66. Now what?
Give me a call, or send me an e-mail, and we can set up a
time to review this proposal. It’s just that - a proposal. You can
select an option that fits, or tailor something.
206.575.3740
ian@portent.com