How to Choose a Visibility Agency: A Twelve-Point Proposal Checklist
Choose a visibility agency by scoring proposals, not by reading them. Collect three. Put each one on the same scope sheet, then score twelve points from zero to two: scope counts, hours per line, who does the work, first-month delivery, reporting, measurement setup, account ownership, content rights, exit clause, revision rounds, references, and price transparency. Twenty-four is the ceiling. Nineteen and above is signable, fourteen to eighteen is negotiable, below fourteen is a decline. Three of the twelve are red lines, and a zero on any of them removes the proposal whatever the total says: account ownership, content rights, and the exit clause.
Say you run a hotel textiles manufacturer in Bursa with two export markets and a website nobody has touched since 2023. Three agencies have sent you documents of wildly different lengths. The sheet below turns each document into one number in about ninety minutes of work, and it stops the decision from drifting toward whoever built the prettiest deck.
Collect three proposals and close the window in ten business days
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- What the one-page brief has to contain
- Why a late proposal goes in the bin
- Keep the whole comparison inside one week
Three is the right number. Two gives you no middle reference, and seven gives you a spreadsheet nobody finishes. Send the same one-page brief to all three on the same day, set a deadline ten business days out, and hold that deadline. The brief names your channels, your current traffic sources, your language count, and the month you want work to start.
What the one-page brief has to contain
Six lines, no more. Your sector and city, the channels in play, your language count, the one business outcome you want, your reporting expectation, and your start month. If a proposal answers a different question than the one you asked, that is already information.
Why a late proposal goes in the bin
Response time during the sale is the best free sample of response time during the work. A supplier who misses a ten-day deadline while trying to win you will not hit a monthly report date. Hold the line once and you save yourself a year of chasing.
Keep the whole comparison inside one week
Score all three within seven days of the deadline. Memory fades fast, and a proposal read three weeks after the others gets judged against a blur. One week also keeps the agencies honest about availability.
Put every proposal on one scope sheet before you score anything
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- Turn deliverables into counts and hours
- Pull the advertising budget out of every number
- Mark the gaps, not just the contents
Proposals are written to be hard to compare. Rewrite them yourself into one sheet with the same rows: deliverable counts, hours per line, named people, reporting, and price. Do this before any scoring. Normalizing takes about thirty minutes per document and it is where most of the surprises live.
Turn deliverables into counts and hours
“Content production” is not a deliverable. “Six articles of 1,200 words, two short videos, one landing page” is. Write the count beside each item, then ask each supplier for the hours behind it. The drivers behind those hours sit in digital marketing pricing.
Pull the advertising budget out of every number
Some proposals fold media spend into the monthly figure and some do not. Separate them in your sheet or the cheapest quote will look like the most expensive one. The split itself belongs to your own planning, which you can work out from marketing visibility budget.
Mark the gaps, not just the contents
Keep an empty cell visibly empty. A blank row is the thing you will negotiate about, and a blank row you filled in from goodwill is the thing you will argue about in month four.
Score twelve points from zero to two
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- Score the document, then score the meeting
- Two scorers, one sheet
- Point five is where most proposals quietly lose
Two means the threshold is met in writing. One means it was answered verbally, partially, or with a softer term. Zero means no answer, a refusal, or a worse term than the threshold. Score from the document first and from the meeting second, and write both scores in the same cell so you can see who improved under questioning.
| # | Point | Question to ask | Threshold for a 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Scope counts | Which deliverables ship each month, with counts? | Every item has a count and a unit |
| 2 | Hours per line | How many working hours sit behind each line? | Hours given per line, not one total |
| 3 | Who does the work | Name the people on each line and their level. | Named people, subcontracting disclosed |
| 4 | First 30 days | What exactly ships by day 30? | A dated list, not a discovery phase |
| 5 | Reporting | What is in the monthly report and when does it arrive? | Fixed date, named metrics, written format |
| 6 | Measurement setup | Which accounts do you measure from? | Your own Search Console and analytics |
| 7 | Account ownership (red line) | Whose name is on the domain, ad accounts and profiles? | You are the verified owner; agency is a user |
| 8 | Content rights (red line) | Who owns the articles, photos and video afterward? | Rights transfer to you on payment, in writing |
| 9 | Exit clause (red line) | How do I leave, with what notice, and what do I take? | Notice of 30 days or less, handover list named |
| 10 | Revision rounds | How many revisions per item are included? | A number, plus the rate for extra rounds |
| 11 | References | Two clients in my sector I can call? | Two reachable contacts, one still active |
| 12 | Price transparency | What is excluded, and what triggers an extra invoice? | Exclusion list in writing, with rates |
Score the document, then score the meeting
A proposal can earn a one on paper and a two in conversation. That is fine, as long as the better answer ends up in the contract. The meeting itself has its own agenda, set out in choosing a marketing agency.
Two scorers, one sheet
Have two people score independently, then compare cells rather than totals. Any cell where you differ by two points is a question nobody actually answered. That disagreement is more useful than either score.
Point five is where most proposals quietly lose
Reporting gets one vague sentence in roughly every proposal you will read. Ask for a sample report from a live client, with the numbers blanked. What to look for in it is covered in how to read seo report.
Three points are red lines: a zero eliminates the proposal
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- Account ownership: your name on every account
- Content rights: who owns the archive in year three
- The exit clause: a notice period you can use
Points seven, eight and nine are not weighted higher. They are pass or fail. A proposal that scores twenty-two out of twenty-four with a zero on account ownership is out, because those three terms decide what you still have the day the relationship ends. Everything else on the sheet is a quality question.
Account ownership: your name on every account
You should be the verified owner of the domain, the ad accounts, the business profile and the measurement properties. The agency is added as a user. Google’s own documentation on managing owners, users and permissions separates an owner, who can add and remove everyone, from a user, who cannot. For an audit stage, Google advises you to “only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don’t grant them write access)”.
Content rights: who owns the archive in year three
Articles, photography, video masters and design files are an asset that keeps working after the contract stops. Ask for a written transfer of rights on payment, including source files. A license that expires with the contract means you rent your own archive.
The exit clause: a notice period you can use
Look for notice of thirty days or less and a named handover list: accounts, files, passwords, documentation. A twelve-month lock with no exit is a bet on a team you have not worked with yet. If no proposal clears these three, in-house becomes a serious option, which is weighed in agency vs in house marketing.
How to read your total out of twenty-four
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- A three-point gap is noise
- Write the reason beside every zero and one
- Agree what you will measure before you sign
Nineteen and above means sign, with the weak cells written into the contract as commitments. Fourteen to eighteen means negotiate, and send the sheet itself with your questions numbered. Below fourteen means decline and rerun the process with a sharper brief. A red-line zero overrides all three bands.
A three-point gap is noise
If your top two proposals sit within three points of each other, the sheet has told you they are equivalent. Decide on the cells you care about most, usually reporting and the named team. Do not invent a tiebreaker you did not score.
Write the reason beside every zero and one
One short clause per cell. Six months later, that clause is the only record of what you were promised and what you accepted instead. It also makes your renewal conversation a two-minute job.
Agree what you will measure before you sign
Pick the three measures you will judge the work by, and name them in the contract. The candidates and what each one really tells you are listed in visibility kpi.
Decide in one meeting, with the blank sheet in front of you
Book ninety minutes with the two scorers and the person who signs. Read the sheet column by column, settle every cell where the two scores differ, then decide. One meeting is enough because the comparison work is already done, and a decision postponed twice usually goes to whoever follows up hardest rather than whoever scored best.
The blank template to copy
Print one of these per proposal. Keep the last column narrow so the note stays short.
| # | Point | Doc score | Meeting score | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Scope counts | _ | _ | |
| 2 | Hours per line | _ | _ | |
| 3 | Who does the work | _ | _ | |
| 4 | First 30 days | _ | _ | |
| 5 | Reporting | _ | _ | |
| 6 | Measurement setup | _ | _ | |
| 7 | Account ownership (red) | _ | _ | |
| 8 | Content rights (red) | _ | _ | |
| 9 | Exit clause (red) | _ | _ | |
| 10 | Revision rounds | _ | _ | |
| 11 | References | _ | _ | |
| 12 | Price transparency | _ | _ | |
| Total out of 24 | _ | _ | Red-line zero: yes / no |
Call the references before the meeting, not after
Two calls of ten minutes each. Ask what shipped late, how a disagreement was handled, and whether the named senior person stayed on the account. Google’s guidance on hiring a search specialist suggests asking past clients “if they felt that this SEO provided useful service”, and the answer you want is specific rather than warm.
Common mistake: scoring the proposals you were sent instead of the questions you asked. A document written to impress will answer points one and twelve beautifully and skip six, seven and nine entirely. Score the silence as a zero, then let the supplier earn a two in writing.
Copy the blank template, send your one-page brief to three suppliers this week, and score the documents the day after the deadline closes. If you want a fourth document in the pile, the scope behind our visibility service is set out on one page, which is the form the sheet is built to read.
Frequently Asked Questions
Quick Summary
- Brief three suppliers on the same day and close the window in ten business days.
- Normalize every proposal onto one scope sheet before you score a single point.
- Score twelve points from zero to two, from the document and then from the meeting.
- Account ownership, content rights and the exit clause are pass or fail.
- Nineteen and above signs, fourteen to eighteen negotiates, below fourteen declines.
- A gap of three points or less means the two proposals are equivalent.
Short Glossary
- Scope sheet
- Scope sheet is the single table you rewrite every proposal into so the rows match.
- Red line
- Red line is a term where a zero removes the proposal regardless of its total score.
- Verified owner
- Verified owner is the account role that can add and remove every other user.
Next Step
Write your one-page brief today, send it to three suppliers tomorrow, and put the blank template in the same folder as the replies. Keep the red-line row at the top of the sheet so it is the first thing you check. When the counts and hours in a proposal look thin, test them against the drivers in digital marketing pricing before you negotiate.
Updated: October 2026
Author: Ünsal Hanoğlu · Editor, Adapte Dijital · Reduces complicated work to a Monday to-do list.
Sık Sorulan Sorular
Three, briefed on the same day with the same one-page document. Two leaves you without a middle reference point, and more than three produces a comparison nobody finishes scoring. Close the window after ten business days and score everything within the following week.
Three: account ownership, content rights and the exit clause. You should be the verified owner of the domain, ad accounts, business profile and measurement properties, with the supplier added as a user. Content rights should transfer to you on payment, and notice to leave should be thirty days or less with a named handover list.
Treat any gap of three points or less as a tie. Go back to the cells that matter most for your situation, which is usually reporting and the named senior person on the account. Decide on those cells rather than inventing a new criterion after the fact.