A proposal is a preview of the working relationship
A proposal is the first piece of work an agency does for you. How it is written tells you how reports, plans and difficult messages will be written later. A document that is vague before you have signed will not become precise afterwards.
The warning signs below are common across the industry and are not proof of bad intent. Some come from sales templates that nobody has questioned. Each is worth raising, and the response matters more than the original wording. An agency that revises a clause when asked has told you something good about itself.
Guaranteed rankings and promised results
No agency controls a search engine, an ad auction or an AI assistant. Rankings depend on what competitors do and on systems that change without notice. A guarantee of a position, a traffic level or a number of leads is therefore a promise about something the agency cannot deliver on its own.
Guarantees that are kept are usually kept by narrowing the target: ranking for a phrase nobody searches, or for your own brand name. Guarantees that are chased hard can push an agency towards tactics that work briefly and damage the site later. In both cases the guarantee has served the sale.
A sound proposal commits to what the agency controls: the scope, the method, the people and the reporting. It sets targets against your own baseline and describes them as targets, with the conditions they depend on. Confidence expressed as a forecast with assumptions is fine. Certainty is the warning.
Vanity metrics as the measure of success
Impressions, followers, clicks, a count of keywords in high positions and an authority score from a third-party tool are all easy to increase and only loosely connected to revenue. They have a place as diagnostics. They become a problem when they are the goals the proposal is built around.
Look at what the proposal says success will be. If the stated outcomes are all activity or visibility measures, ask how they connect to enquiries, sales or customers, and whether the agency will see that data. An agency may fairly say that it cannot be accountable for your close rate. It should still want to know what happens to the leads it helps produce.
The same caution applies to deliverable counts. A number of articles or links each month is a measure of output. It says nothing about whether those were the right articles. A method for choosing is described in sizing a search opportunity by commercial value.
No access to your own accounts
Your advertising accounts, analytics, search data, website, domain and business listings are assets of your business. They should be created in your name, with the agency added as a user. A proposal under which the agency owns these, or reports from them without giving you a login, puts your history in someone else’s hands.
The practical cost appears when you leave. Campaign history, audience data and conversion records can be lost, and a new provider has to start again from nothing. Lack of access also removes your ability to check a report against its source.
There are harmless explanations. Some agencies open accounts for convenience and will transfer them on request, and some tools are licensed to the agency and cannot be handed over. Ask for the position in writing: what is yours, what is licensed, and what is transferred at the end. If you already have accounts, the agency should work inside them.
Long lock-ins and vague deliverables
Some marketing work takes months to show a result, and an agency that invests heavily at the start may reasonably ask for a minimum term. A commitment period is not a warning sign in itself. It becomes one when it is long, renews automatically, has no review point and offers no exit if the agreed scope is not delivered.
Vague deliverables make any term worse. Phrases such as ongoing optimisation, monthly SEO activities or social media management describe a category of work. They do not say what will be done. If you cannot tell from the proposal what you would expect to see at the end of the first month, neither side can later show whether the agency did its job.
The two problems compound. A long contract with a loose scope leaves you paying for something undefined with no way to leave. Ask for a scope you can check, a review at a sensible interval and a notice period. The relationship between scope and fee is covered in how digital marketing agencies price their work.
Reports with no decisions
Ask to see a sample report before signing. Many are long exports of charts from analytics and ad platforms, with a paragraph noting that some numbers went up. They prove that the tools are connected. They do not tell you what the agency concluded or what it intends to do differently.
A useful report is short. It says what was done, what changed in the numbers that matter, what the agency believes caused the change, and what it recommends next, including anything it wants to stop. It reports bad months in the same format as good ones. If the proposal describes reporting only by frequency and page count, ask what decisions the last few reports for another client led to.
What a sound proposal contains
The opposite of each warning sign is a plain statement. A proposal worth signing can be read by someone outside marketing, who could then say what is being bought.
The diagnosis is the part most often missing, because it costs effort before a contract exists. Some agencies charge for it as a separate piece of work and others absorb it. SERPMOZ starts with a growth audit for this purpose. Whoever you speak to, a proposal written without looking at your accounts is a price list with your name on it.
For the wider conversation around the proposal, use the questions in how to choose a digital marketing agency.
- A diagnosis of your situation, based on your own data.
- A scope specific enough to check each month.
- Named roles, and who reviews the work.
- Targets set against a baseline, with their assumptions.
- Your ownership of accounts, data and content, in writing.
- Term, review point, notice period and handover.
