If you’re thinking about white labelling your current SEO requirements, it makes sense to understand exactly what it actually is, and what the process involves. I’ve been providing white label SEO services as a consultant to agencies globally for almost ten years now (as well as a productised white label SEO store), and I feel that I’m qualified to tell you what you need to know.
This guide includes exactly what the white label approach is, what it isn’t, how it works best, and what you should look for before agreeing to a specific service. Let’s take a look.
What is white label SEO?
White label SEO is the process of outsourcing your SEO work to a third-party provider. This can be to a singular point of contact such as a consultant or agency, or you can white label individual elements of your campaigns to individual providers. For example, choosing one option for white label link building, one for content and blog writing, and another for reporting.
How does the white label SEO process work?
The process typically works as follows:
1. Researching providers
It’s important that you do your research on providers before you agree to anything, and also establish work processes (in terms of brief templates and how you want to work). Establishing processes means that, if you need to switch providers, you have what are essentially onboarding documents for another third-party without having to completely start the process all over again.
Like any form of outsourcing, there’s an inevitable amount of documentation required to ensure they’re working in a way that aligns with your business, but you’re going to need to do that regardless of whether you’re outsourcing or hiring, so best to do it from the outset.
Explore the providers available to you. Do you want a freelancer who is going to be cheaper than agencies, but might have a finite amount of time depending on how busy they are? If you work with an agency, are you going to expect them to manage all client communications too? Do some consultants price per day, versus agencies which price per SEO ‘product’?
2. Contacting a shortlist of providers
When you’ve got your shortlist down, make sure you reach out to the providers and get on a call with their team. Ideally, this needs to be a talk with someone who is going to be close to your account, and can demonstrate the knowledge and insights of exactly what it is you’re looking for.
You want to ideally be contacting multiple providers, just based on the likelihood that some may be too busy to take any more work, and others who may simply not reply at all.
3. Agreeing on terms of work
This is a crucial part of white label SEO that cannot be overlooked.
Like I mentioned in the first point, you can’t just assume that any external provider of SEO is going to work exactly how you need them to and in the manner that matches your current processes, if you’re not providing documentation from the outset.
For example, when I work with agencies, many of them are happy for me to use my current approaches and apply their agency branding to any documents that are going to be client-facing. This covers things like keyword research docs, content strategy briefs, SEO audits and reports.
Other agencies are clear from the outset that they require each piece of work to be done a certain way. This might not suit some white label providers, whereas others are happy to work in the exact terms you specify. So, just make sure you’re clear from the outset on what you expect.
It’s also likely you’ll need to get the provider to sign an NDA, as well as agree on turnaround times for each piece of work.
Another critical element on expected work is how the provider interacts with your clients, or whether that’s actually going to be the case at all. From my experience, client communication is typically done by the agency rather than by the third-party provider. It’s simply too ambiguous to price from a service perspective in terms of ad-hoc time and, if you’re dealing with a smaller team, then expecting client comms for free on top the work being completed may not be realistic if you haven’t confirmed this before any work begins.
My recommendation is to keep all client comms in-house, so that your account managers and internal team members are always there and ready to get back to clients as quickly as possible. Focus on outsourcing the strategy, the campaign or the individual elements to a provider that you trust.
4. Providing smaller tasks to see how the provider operates
Instead of giving all of the work upfront, it’s best to give an initial task to whoever you choose, just to make sure that their output aligns with exactly what you’ve agreed.
This means the work being up to the standard that you expect, that communication with the provider is good (internally with your team), and that work is sent to you on time.
5. Expanding tasks or retainer offerings to the provider once all initial work is approved
If you’re happy with the initial offering, then it would make sense to start sending more work across based on what is required and, again, based on how work has been agreed between the provider and the agency.
What to expect from a white label SEO provider
You should expect that whoever you’re working with can work to your agreed terms, it really is that simple.
If it’s an SEO product rather than a retainer, then you should be expecting the work to be to the standards that have been set out, and that these metrics or standards are met each time. For example, if you’re outsourcing an SEO audit and have agreed on specific elements to be covered, then a generic audit that just touches on those elements isn’t going to cut it for you or for your client receiving the audit.
The same goes for things like blogger outreach. If you’ve ordered a DR30+ package with 500+ traffic and get a backlink which is DR15 with 25 traffic, that’s obviously not going to work.
What not to expect
If you’re agreeing on set terms, then you shouldn’t expect a provider to go outside of those terms. And that works both ways. Like with the example above, if you’re ordering backlinks within a certain DR or traffic range, then you expect them to be within those ranges.
On the other side, if you’re white labelling specific tasks and expect the provider to handle all client communication without being upfront that this is what expected, then that’s not going to work for either party.
Examples of SEO work that can be outsourced
Link Building
This is easily one of the most common SEO tasks that is outsourced to a white label provider. Link building can be a hard sell to clients so, naturally, agencies aren’t going to hire link building teams unless they’re really sure of the consistency of the work coming in and the types of campaigns they’re working on.
For most agencies, it then makes sense to outsource link building requirements, either indefinitely or at least until they’ve met campaign/order requirements to justify having a link building team.
Usually, link building that is white labelled falls under blogger outreach and digital PR, although there are many agencies also offering things like directories for local SEO, passive link building via statistics pages, and even things like broken link building based on your link history and that of your competitors.
SEO Audits
With SEO audits typically being a one-off piece of work, they make a lot of sense to outsource. Agencies tend to use audits as a method of getting clients on board initially, however many also use audits as a strategic starting point before any work can begin (and I fully agree with this).
If you’re outsourcing your audits, just make sure you’re clear about everything that needs to be covered, and whether you want your templates/processes to be used, plus the deliverable format that is expected.
Copywriting
For agencies, their requirements for copywriting can vary. Sometimes, clients will have in-house teams ready to complete all copywriting work. Other clients might not have any copywriting capacity at all. Or, agencies themselves may even want to outsource copywriting for their own website.
Whichever it is, copywriting as an offering for agencies is very common, but like with link building, if you don’t have a consistent need for it then your best option is to outsource.
Technical SEO Tasks
Following an audit, there are likely specific technical SEO tasks split across the SEO team and client developers. This usually works first by the SEO team actioning each task, to then be sent to the developers, or to be put live by the SEO team.
Like with the audit, these initial tasks could be ‘one and done’, at least for a certain period. Again, it makes sense to outsource if you’re not going to hire for one-off pieces of work, or shorter campaigns overall.
General SEO Strategy
I’ve personally worked with many agencies over the years, specific to helping them with the general SEO strategy of their clients. It’s essentially having an outsourced SEO manager to ensure campaigns are set up correctly, processes are in place and everything makes sense in the ever-changing world of SEO. This is also a really common element of SEO that gets outsourced to freelancers.
How to get started
Hopefully this guide gives you some insights into white label SEO from someone who has been offering it both as a consultant and white label agency owners for years.
My parting advice would be to make sure you do as much research upfront as you can, and have processes in place to find and vet new providers so that you’re not relying entirely on just one person or agency to complete all of the required work.
