You’ve landed the client. The calls went great. They’re excited, and so are you. But before a single keyword is tracked or a backlink is earned, there’s one thing between you and chaos: The Contract.
SEO is already filled with ambiguity—rankings shift, algorithms change, and expectations. They’re often sky-high. This is when you absolutely need a clear, professional agreement to make sure you are in the right.
In fact, a legally bound SEO contract template sets the tone, scopes the work, and protects your reputation and revenue.
To help you skip the legal maze and focus on what you do best, we’ve pulled together a list of free SEO contract templates. Ready-made, customizable, and built for real-world client work.
20 Free SEO Contract Templates for Professional Agreements
What Are SEO Contract Templates?
SEO contract templates are pre-designed legal documents that outline the scope, deliverables, timelines, payment terms, and responsibilities between an SEO provider and a client.
These templates help formalize the working relationship and ensure that both parties are aligned on SEO goals and objectives from the start.
More precisely, a well-crafted and proper SEO contract also clearly states what services will be provided (e.g., keyword research, on-page optimization, link building), how results will be measured, and what timelines are expected.
🧠 Fun Fact: The term ‘SEO’ was first used in 1997! That’s when website owners began optimizing for early search engines like AltaVista and Yahoo, giving birth to the practice we now call search engine optimization.
20 SEO Contract Templates
To make your client partnerships smoother and your SEO services more professional, let’s now look at this curated list of free SEO contract templates ready to go in one customization:
1. Business Contract Template
For product marketers handling multiple client deliverables, contracts often live across scattered email threads, Docs, or outdated PDFs. That slows down handoffs, muddles expectations, and eats up hours in revision.
The Business Contract Sample Template solves that by giving you one clear, editable workspace to draft, manage, and store contracts from start to signature. It includes pre-filled fields for names, terms, services, cancellation clauses, and even acknowledgment tracking.
Every edit is visible, so you’re not digging through threads or worrying about missed changes. You can also use Time Tracking to add deadlines and monitor contract completion.
✅ Ideal for: Product owners who want a fast, organized way to lock in service agreements
📮 Insight: 1 in 4 employees uses four or more tools just to build context at work.
A key detail might be buried in an email, expanded in a Slack thread, and documented in a separate tool, forcing teams to waste time hunting for information instead of getting work done.
converges your entire workflow into one unified platform. With features like Email Project Management, Chat, Docs, and Brain, everything stays connected, synced, and instantly accessible. Say goodbye to “work about work” and reclaim your productive time.
💫 Real Results: Teams are able to reclaim 5+ hours every week using —that’s over 250 hours annually per person—by eliminating outdated knowledge management processes. Imagine what your team could create with an extra week of productivity every quarter!
2. Project Management Services Contract Template
The Project Management Services Contract Template is designed for project management teams who want to structure service agreements, clearly outlining who does what, by when, and at what cost.
Inside the template, you’ll find pre-built sections detailing the scope of services, deliverables, and responsibilities, along with terms covering payments, liabilities, and contract duration.
’s platform features further enhance the experience. Use Custom Statuses to track the progress of each agreement, from draft to final approval.
And with Custom Views like List, Calendar, and Gantt, you can track timelines, visualize tasks, and keep stakeholders aligned throughout the project lifecycle.
✅ Ideal For: Project managers handling service-based client work with structured delivery requirements
3. Work Contract Template
When HR teams onboard writers, analysts, or strategists for ongoing SEO projects, speed and structure matter just as much as skill.
The Work Contract Template helps document job roles, compensation, benefits, and termination terms so you can focus on hiring. And you don’t need to be a legal professional to get started. Each section is pre-filled with editable placeholders, making it easy to customize for content leads, link-building specialists, or full-time SEO managers.
Use Custom Fields to organize contracts by department or contract type, and track edits in real time. And since signed copies are stored in the same workspace, everything stays audit-ready when you need it.
✅ Ideal For: HR teams and recruiters needing repeatable, editable work contract formats
🔍 Did You Know? 65% of Google users click on at least one organic result! If you’re not ranking high, you’re missing out on most of the clicks (and the customers).
4. Contract Review Template
The Contract Review Template is built for account managers and operational teams who want a structured way to manage contract approvals.
Inside the template, you’ll find eight customizable statuses like Draft, Internal Review, and Execution that map every stage of a contract’s journey. You can further capture everything from indemnification clauses to business type and contact information.
And with multiple views like Contract Review Process and Client Reviews, you’ll always know where each agreement stands and who’s responsible for what. For anyone managing high-volume contract workflows, this template helps highlight clauses, add tasks for revisions, consult experts, and route the document for final approval.
To further optimize your processes, consider using a tight-knit contract management software to ensure compliance and accuracy.
✅ Ideal For: Account managers and ops leads handling contracts across clients, vendors, or SEO deliverables
Sometimes you don’t have the time to click through multiple views or sift through custom fields. That’s when you turn to Brain. Just ask, “Who’s working on this project?” and Brain will surface the most relevant details in moments!
5. Contract Management Form Template
When you’re managing dozens of vendor agreements, change requests, or SoW revisions, a missed contract status update is the last thing you want to deal with. The Contract Management Template helps legal and procurement teams track every part of the contract lifecycle in one place.
With pre-set statuses like Drafting, Reviewing, and Accepted, you can monitor exactly where each contract stands during the document review process. It’s also incredibly simple to sort documents by department, contract type, or date signed.
Everything is connected through dedicated views, such as the Contracts Master List, Contract Progress, and Contract Request Form, helping you move from intake to execution without losing track.
Plus, you can track timelines with Gantt Charts and even automate email notifications for review cycles with Automations.
✅ Ideal For: Legal teams and procurement managers handling high volumes of contracts or vendor agreements
Want to know more about Automations? Check this out!
6. Bid Contract Template
The Bid Contract Template helps contractors and consultants draft professional proposals that are easy to evaluate and approve. It includes structured sections to define the project scope, timeline, deliverables, and payment terms, ensuring expectations are aligned.
This template comes pre-built with key contract fields, such as termination clauses, project breakdowns, and pricing milestones.
It also supports detailed views of timelines and services rendered, making it especially useful for fixed-scope projects, such as one-time SEO projects.
✅ Ideal For: Contractors and business consultants submitting structured project proposals
💡 Pro Tip: Build a Contract Acceleration Incentive into your business agreement template that offers a small discount (5-7%) for proposals signed within 48 hours. This creates urgency without devaluing your services. Simply add a conditional discount field to your template that automatically adjusts pricing based on the acceptance date.
7. Campaign Proposal Template
The Campaign Proposal Template gives marketing teams a clear framework to pitch their marketing processes and ideas with confidence. It helps you outline campaign goals, define target audiences, list key resources, and break down execution strategies.
The template includes sections to capture client and preparer information, campaign timelines, supporting research, and performance goals. It’s especially helpful when working with recurring clients or under a formal SEO agreement, where expectations must be fully documented and measurable.
Because it lives inside , the proposal can easily connect to your ongoing tasks, reporting dashboards, or client management workflows. This keeps everyone in sync, from planning and sign-off to final execution.
✅ Ideal For: Marketing leads creating structured, data-driven proposals for client campaigns
💡 Pro Tip: Instead of haphazard blog posts, group related articles around one in-depth pillar page (called clusters). For example, if you offer professional SEO services, your main pillar page could be about SEO, and then you’d have six to eight supporting posts diving into areas like competitor analysis, on-page optimization, or local SEO, all linking back to that pillar.
8. Services Agreement Template
The Services Agreement Template helps formalize working relationships between a business and a service provider. From compensation to scope of work, it ensures both parties are aligned on what’s being delivered, how, and when.
It’s especially useful for recurring service engagements like design retainers, consulting projects, or monthly SEO services where roles and deliverables need to be clearly defined.
The template includes sections for contractor responsibilities, project timelines, termination terms, payment terms, and indemnification clauses.
You can customize each section with client-specific details while following a consistent format that covers all the essentials, helping you avoid ambiguity down the line.
✅ Ideal For: Agencies, business consultants, or any service provider offering structured work across projects
9. Consulting Agreement Template
The Consulting Agreement Template includes services to be provided, payment structure, confidentiality terms, liability limits, dispute resolution procedures, and more. This is to make sure boutique firms and solopreneurs are aligned with their clients before work begins.
This consulting template is fully customizable, allowing you to clearly outline timelines, rates, scope, and intellectual property clauses. It also covers status definitions, such as independent contractor terms and compliance obligations, helping you avoid misunderstandings down the road.
This agreement, stored and managed in , becomes part of your larger project workflow. You can assign tasks based on it, track client sign-off, manage legal notes with Docs, and keep everything in one place.
✅ Ideal For: Boutique firms and solo professionals offering specialized services
10. Addendum to a Contract Template
When your team needs to update SEO milestones or add new deliverables mid-contract, even a small change can create a trail of back-and-forth emails. The Addendum to a Contract Template gives client-facing teams a simple way to formalize changes, without creating a whole new agreement.
Designed for account managers and legal ops teams, this template includes structured fields for effective dates, involved parties, and modification details. It also provides clear signature sections, so both sides know exactly what’s changed and when.
You can even link each addendum to Tasks or Docs to keep approvals and updates in one centralized flow.
✅ Ideal For: Account managers and legal teams tackling work with recurring clients or retainers
11. Client Success Collaboration Template
When a new client signs the contract, it sets off a chain of moving parts. Onboarding teams need to hand off key context, while success teams are responsible for long-term business outcomes. The Client Success Collaboration Template gives teams a shared view of every client touchpoint, from kickoff to endorsement.
The template includes a customizable pipeline with clear stages, such as New Client, Scheduling, Meeting, and Endorsed. Custom Fields help you log owner responsibilities, client needs, or red flags.
And for distributed teams, Chat keeps communication in context, so updates never get buried in email threads.
✅ Ideal For: Onboarding managers and client success teams managing post-sale delivery across multiple accounts
12. SEO Project Management Template
The SEO Project Management Template organizes your SEO work into repeatable, high-clarity workflows. It comes preloaded with four lists: ‘Content Review,’ ‘Action Plans,’ ‘On-Page Corrections,’ and ‘Keyword Research.’ Each list contains task groups broken down by stage, so you can track what’s in progress, what needs review, and what’s stuck.
You’ll find detailed subtasks like ‘Create blog posts about Keyword 6,’ ‘Update meta descriptions,’ and ‘Conversion optimization’—all of which you can sort by priority, status, or assignee. If you’re offering search engine optimization services to multiple businesses, this view saves you hours of context switching.
The template is flexible enough to support more complex workflows, such as SEO competitor analysis, SERP tracking, and keyword strategy. If you’re running a growing SEO business, this setup lets you scale processes without relying on scattered solutions.
✅ Ideal For: SEO teams running multi-client campaigns or ongoing optimization work
13. SEO Roadmap Template
The SEO Roadmap Template breaks down high-level SEO goals into structured, measurable tasks across every stage of the funnel. You can outline everything from keyword strategy and technical fixes to content planning and backlink outreach, all mapped against timelines, priorities, and owners.
The template includes a built-in hierarchy that organizes SEO tasks across multiple views. You’ll find pre-set fields to track content readiness, metadata updates, keyword difficulty, and ranking targets. It’s ideal for planning long-term growth while keeping marketing plans on pace.
There’s also a clear system for tracking progress. Each initiative can be tied to KPIs like impressions, CTR, and rankings. You can monitor updates, assign tasks to writers or developers, and keep your team aligned without losing sight of the big picture.
✅ Ideal For: SEO leads and directors planning quarterly or campaign-based organic growth efforts
14. SEO Report Template
Monthly SEO reports shouldn’t take hours to pull together or require 12 tabs to explain. The SEO Report Template gives marketing and SEO teams a single place to track marketing efforts, alongside the campaigns that drove them.
Each report entry captures key metrics, including revenue, site traffic, leads, conversion rates, and top-performing keywords. To keep your reporting cycle moving, you can group them by quarter, tag them with custom labels, and assign review statuses.
What makes this setup even more helpful is how tightly it connects reporting with execution. You can link each data point back to the campaign or task that drove it, making it easier to double down on high-ROI activities.
✅ Ideal For: Marketing teams and SEO managers tracking campaign results across clients or reporting periods
15. SEO Agreement Template by PandaDoc
The SEO Agreement Template by PandaDoc is designed for SEO specialists and performance marketing teams that need to lock in deliverables, timelines, and payment terms.
It includes editable sections for ownership of deliverables (such as articles, reports, or schema markup), reporting schedules (weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly), and termination clauses, making it easier to manage expectations and avoid scope creep in long-running SEO projects.
✅ Ideal For: SEO specialists and niche performance marketing agencies managing multiple small-to-mid-size SEO contracts.
16. PDF/ Google Doc SEO Contract Template by SE Ranking
Tailored for SEO agencies, this PDF/ Google Doc SEO Contract Template by SE Ranking covers everything from SoW and deliverables to payment terms, reporting frequency, and liability disclaimers.
Whether you’re offering keyword research, link building, or technical audits, this template provides a customizable, ready-to-sign agreement in PDF or Google Docs format.
If you’re pairing this with a proposal, use quote management tools to streamline your pricing, and revisit your acquisition plan to target better-fit opportunities.
✅ Ideal For: SEO agencies who want a flexible, lawyer-backed agreement to formalize scope, deliverables, and terms of engagement
17. Word SEO Proposal Template by Backlinko
Backlinko’s SEO Proposal Template provides a complete structure for confidently walking prospects from introduction to agreement. It includes a professional cover letter, a clear breakdown of services, and a contract section you can quickly personalize.
What sets this apart is how easily you can adapt it to different SEO projects, including but not limited to offering audits, link-building campaigns, or ongoing client acquisition strategies. You can download it as a Word doc, Google Doc, or PDF, making it easy to edit and share across your workflow.
✅ Ideal For: SEO freelancers and consultants looking to pitch consistently and convert leads
18. SEO Contract Template by Get Cone
This SEO Contract Template by Get Cone is designed primarily for agencies that specialize in SEO. It covers a wide range of topics, including scope, timelines, performance evaluations, disbursements, and intellectual property rights.
The structure is comprehensive enough to minimize risk, clarify mutual responsibilities, and outline key areas such as keyword research, technical audits, content optimization, and link building.
With clauses covering force majeure, non-solicitation, and notice periods, it’s well-suited for long-term SEO engagements where clarity on both sides matters.
✅ Ideal For: SEO agencies and consultants managing high-touch or recurring client engagements
19. SEO Retainer Agreement Template by Many Requests
This SEO Retainer Agreement Template by Many Requests is ideal for SEO service providers who offer ongoing SEO services and need to set clear expectations with clients from the start. It covers clauses related to deliverables, exclusions, timelines, and payment schedules, making it easier to avoid mid-project surprises.
It also includes well-thought-out sections on intellectual property, confidentiality, liability, and dispute resolution— applicable for long-term SEO relationships where roles and responsibilities need to be spelled out.
✅ Ideal For: Freelancers and SEO agencies offering ongoing, recurring SEO services on a monthly or quarterly basis
20. SEO Services Agreement Template by Legitt
Legitt’s SEO Services Agreement Template, made for solo SEO professionals, includes fields related to SEO audits, content optimization, reporting, compensation, and intellectual property (IP) rights.
It also addresses deeper clauses, such as confidentiality, dispute resolution, indemnification, and limitation of liability.
This template stands out for its legal thoroughness. It’s suitable for longer-term or high-value engagements where risk mitigation and compliance are non-negotiable. You can tailor it to different SEO scopes, payment structures, and jurisdictions, making it flexible yet airtight.
✅ Ideal For: Solo SEO consultants handling complex, multi-phase SEO campaigns
What Makes a Good SEO Contract Template?
Now that we’ve explored several SEO contract templates, how do you select the one that’s best for you?
A good SEO contract template defines expectations, protects both parties, and makes performance measurable.
Here’s what separates the good ones from the generic ones:
- Defined SEO roadmap: A solid contract outlines what success means in an SEO roadmap—whether it’s increasing organic traffic by X%, hitting specific keyword milestones, or improving Core Web Vitals scores
- Detailed Scope of Work (SoW): The SoW should spell out what you’ll deliver (e.g., technical SEO audits, content strategy, backlink building) and what you won’t (e.g., writing blog posts or fixing dev bugs)
- Timelines and deliverables: The best templates break the work into phases, with timelines for audits, on-page fixes, monthly reports, and so on. It makes engagement trackable and gives both sides a cadence to follow
- Clear reporting and communication cadence: How often will you meet? What metrics will be shared? A good SEO contract includes a section on reporting frequency, tools used, and KPIs tracked
- Payment terms and cancellation clauses: A good SEO contract template has a fee structure, due dates, and a cancellation notice period. It also outlines refunds, penalties for late payments, and what happens if the contract ends early
- Legal protections and liability limitations: A well-crafted SEO contract protects both parties with clauses around confidentiality, non-disclosure, and liability limits (especially important if you’re handling sensitive data or working with third-party vendors)
Make Every SEO Deal Streamlined With
SEO proposals? Sent.
Client terms? Agreed.
Scope creep? Not on your watch.
helps you organize every part of your SEO process, from the first contract to the final deliverable, in just one workspace. Use Docs to draft and store contracts, Boards to manage active client work, and Chat to discuss timelines.
And if you need to track approvals, payments, and who’s working on what, just trust Brain, Automations, and Tasks.
To top it off, use a list of over 1,000 templates to jump-start everything. No more blank pages. No more ‘Where’s that doc?’ panic.
Try for free and turn your SEO chaos into client-ready clarity.
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
