Search has split in two. People still Google. They also ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews who to buy from. This form gives us what we need to scope both — properly, and without a fortnight of back-and-forth.
The whole form is three parts and eight questions. Fields marked • are the ones we really need. We've deliberately kept it short — anything else we need, we'll either find ourselves or ask you directly. Use Save draft at the bottom to stop and come back. Nothing you type leaves your browser until you choose to send it.
Eight questions. This is the part that decides whether the scope we write is the right one.
The basics, plus your category in one plain sentence. Skip the positioning language — tell us what you sell and to whom.
Category in one line: "We sell cloud-based property management software to residential real estate agencies in Australia and New Zealand. Roughly 400 agencies use it, average contract $9k a year."
Not this: "We're a leading proptech innovator transforming the property experience."
One objective. Not three. This is the most useful box on the form. When we have to choose between two sensible options, this is what we choose against. Make it specific, make it measurable, put a date on it.
Good: "Grow qualified demo requests from organic search from 40 a month to 100 a month by June 2027."
Good: "Cut our dependence on paid search. It's 78% of acquisition today. Get it under 50% inside 12 months by building organic and AI-answer visibility."
Good: "Be the brand ChatGPT names when an Australian facilities manager asks who to use for fire compliance."
Too broad: "Increase traffic, improve rankings, build brand awareness and generate more leads."
What changed? Something prompted you to go looking. Tell us what it was, what you've already tried, and what happened. We'd rather not re-run an experiment you already paid for.
Example: "Organic traffic is down 34% year on year. It started falling in March when AI Overviews rolled out on our top informational terms. Rankings haven't moved — the clicks have. We added FAQ schema ourselves in May. Nothing changed."
Example: "We rank top three for every category term that matters. But when we ask ChatGPT 'best X in Australia' it names three competitors and not us. Two of them are smaller than us. Nobody internally can explain why."
Example: "We replatformed to Shopify in February. Traffic halved. Our previous agency said it would recover in six weeks. It's been five months."
One audience. Not "everyone", not "SMEs to enterprise". If you honestly have two, name the one that drives more revenue. Tell us the person, the moment they start searching, and what makes them start.
The audience: "Facilities managers at Australian universities and hospitals. 35–55, not technical buyers, risk-averse. They start searching when a compliance deadline lands or an audit fails — so the search is urgent and the shortlist is short. Desktop, business hours. They ask two peers and, increasingly, they ask AI."
The insight — the box we value most: "They never search our category name. They search the problem: 'AS1851 compliance requirements NSW'. Most of them don't know a software category exists for this. They think it's a spreadsheet job until someone tells them otherwise."
An insight is a truth you've observed — from sales calls, support tickets, churn interviews. It is not a statistic. If it doesn't make us go "huh", it's probably data.
Two different questions here, and the answers are often different companies. Who ranks above you, and who do you actually lose deals to?
Example: "We lose most often to PropertyMe — they're not better, they're just the default answer. Rank-wise our problem is a comparison site that outranks all of us on the money terms and takes a referral fee. Outside our category, HubSpot's content model is what I'd want ours to look like."
Reporting is only useful if it changes a decision. Tell us who reads it and what they need to decide, and we'll build to that instead of sending you forty metrics.
Example: "Monthly deck goes to the CEO, board quarterly. What they actually want to know is whether organic is cheaper per lead than paid, and whether it's growing. They don't care about rankings. We already have a Looker Studio dashboard — plug into it rather than building another one."
A band, not a number. This isn't us fishing — it's the difference between scoping something you can run and scoping something that dies in procurement. If you genuinely don't know, tick the last option and we'll show you three levels.
Briefs get rewritten because the person who signs the cheque never read the brief. Tell us who that is, and whether they've seen this.
We can scope from guesswork or from your data. The second is cheaper for you — with access we size the job; without it we price the uncertainty. Read-only is fine for everything here. Tick what exists, tell us what you're comfortable sharing, and we'll send secure access requests for the rest. Nothing here is a commitment.
| Tool / platform | Have it? | Read access for us? | Which one / who owns it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search & analytics — the non-negotiables for accurate scoping | |||
| Google Analytics 4Traffic and conversion baseline | |||
| Google Search ConsoleQuery, click and indexing data. The single most useful export. | |||
| Google Tag ManagerHow tracking is deployed | |||
| Bing Webmaster ToolsFeeds Copilot and parts of the AI answer layer | |||
| Google Business ProfileLocal and entity signals | |||
| SEO & competitive tooling | |||
| SEMrush / Ahrefs / MozTell us which — we may not need our own seat | |||
| Screaming Frog or a recent crawlEven a months-old export saves us time | |||
| Rank tracking toolExisting keyword set and history | |||
| AI / prompt visibility toolProfound, Peec, Otterly, Scrunch or similar | |||
| Site & infrastructure — needed to implement, not just advise | |||
| CMS adminName the platform: WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Sitecore, custom… | |||
| Hosting / server / CDNCloudflare, Vercel, AWS. Needed for robots.txt, llms.txt, redirects, rendering | |||
| Staging environmentSo we test before anything touches production | |||
| Ecommerce platformIf applicable — Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento | |||
| Revenue & attribution — how we prove the work paid for itself | |||
| CRMHubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive. Lets us report pipeline, not just traffic. | |||
| Marketing automation / emailKlaviyo, HubSpot, Marketo, Mailchimp | |||
| Call trackingIf phone is a meaningful conversion path | |||
| Existing dashboardsLooker Studio, Power BI, Tableau | |||
| Paid media accountsGoogle Ads etc. Query data here is gold for organic. | |||
Existing audits, crawl exports, keyword lists, analytics exports, a content calendar, the previous agency's last report, brand and tone guidelines. Old and imperfect is fine — it still tells us something.
Often not you. Give us the name and we'll go direct rather than sitting in your inbox for three weeks.
Two questions, both optional, both worth thirty seconds.
You know your business. If there's something obvious we've missed, this is the box.
Often more revealing than the success criteria. Past agency experiences count.
Example: "A monthly report full of rankings with no explanation of what it means for revenue. That's what the last agency did for two years and we couldn't defend the spend internally."
One last thing. Briefs the decision-maker has read produce scopes that don't need rebuilding. Put their name here.
Simple. Clear. Human. Onwards!