The Complete 2023 Guide to White Label SEO (& Benefits)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a known term for most of us. You are probably also aware of the benefits of optimizing your website and increasing its ranks in search engine result pages (SERPs).

However, there’s a chance that not all of you have the ‌resources or the team that can take care of SEO. Thus, you might consider outsourcing it to a white label SEO agency.

If that is the case, this guide is what you need, as we have compiled everything important about white label SEO solutions.

What is White Label SEO?

White Label SEO is the process when a company or an agency (that offers this service) performs search engine optimization activities under the name and the brand of their customers.

The practice of white label services is common in online marketing. SEO white labeling, in particular, is a preference for marketing agencies who decide to outsource the SEO part of their work to a specialized agency.

If the outsourcing is done on a white label basis, the agency teammates will introduce themselves as the employees of the client agency when communicating with partners, such as the editors of other websites for link building services.

Overall, the point of white label SEO services (a.k.a. SEO resellers or private label SEO) is that the outside world will not know that the SEO services are provided by a different company.

Regarding the rationale behind white label SEO, there are many convincing arguments why many marketers and agencies decide not to do SEO themselves but to delegate it to a white label SEO provider. We have compiled a list of the most common reasons for you in our next section.

4 White Label SEO Benefits

So, your team needs to handle SEO optimization, and you don’t know if it is better to develop your team’s SEO skills or outsource that work to experienced professionals?

While developing SEO skills in-house might seem like a great idea, it will require you to invest lots of time, effort, and money. And it will take your team some time to get up to speed.

On the other hand, there is the option of trusting your SEO operations to a white label SEO firm. But why should you go this way? Let’s give you this answer point-by-point.

Benefit #1: It’s cost-effective

The first benefit of hiring a specialized company is the cost you incur.

That’s right, the agency you hire will include their profit margin in the price they charge you for their marketing services. But, even with the added margin, it is still usually cheaper than handling search engine optimization in-house.

The reasons are actually ‌straightforward. If you want to do SEO yourself, you will either need to train your staff or hire SEO professionals.

Training will take considerable money and resources. Your team will need to work on SEO tasks for quite a while to gather the ‌ experience and practical knowledge to give the same output as an experienced SEO consultant.

If you decide to hire a team of experts, you can expect to pay them high salaries. Here’s what a senior specialist’s salary overview looks like:

Therefore, it is a more economical choice to hire an agency. Thanks to having specialized SEO tools, processes, skills, and experience, agencies can get you the same results for much lower costs compared to in-house teams.

Benefit #2: It saves you time

Time efficiency is another good reason to consider outsourcing your SEO operations to a white label company.

As we already mentioned above, it is quite time-consuming to build an efficient and knowledgeable SEO team inside your company. Would you be okay with waiting for months for your internal team to gain the necessary skills? Time is money, and many companies cannot afford to wait for that long.

Instead, you can take the outsourcing approach and access well-trained and effective SEO specialists immediately.

Another factor is the working speed of your internal team versus the agency where the agency is faster, thanks to their tools, processes, and experience.

Finally, agency teams also constantly keep up with the latest SEO trends and can respond to unexpected changes (e.g., algorithm updates) more quickly and effectively.

Benefit #3: It offers flexibility

The flexibility of partnering with SEO agencies instead of building your own team comes in two forms:

• Easier scalability. For more SEO work, you can simply request it from the agency instead of doing hiring and onboarding yourself.
• Quick addition and removal of SEO services. You don’t need link building anymore and want to do technical SEO? No worries, just request these changes from the agency and don’t bother with training your team to handle the new type of SEO service.

Thus, hiring a white label SEO agency will be great if you are working in a dynamic environment.

Benefit #4: It allows you to focus on your strengths

Our final advantage is about the optimal use of the time and skills within your team.

By letting experts handle the search engine optimization work under your name, you free up time on what you excel at. For instance, if you specialize in PPC and increasing eCommerce conversions, it will be a waste of time and talent to delegate your SEO strategy to them.

To wrap up, getting white label SEO reseller services gets more results in less time and for lower costs. But what can they handle for you? Our list up next includes some of the main services.

What Services do White Label SEO Agencies Offer?

As we understood already, white label SEO agencies focus solely on the craft of optimizing websites for search engines and gain considerable experience and knowledge in that sphere.

An advantage of this specialization is that these agencies can offer a wide variety of SEO-specific services, which would require you to hire an entire team of experienced SEO experts if you were to handle them yourself.

Let’s take a look at those services.

Service #1: On-Page SEO

This type of SEO is about improving your website. The goal is to make sure that your website’s structure, navigation, and content are appealing to both your visitors and search engine crawlers. On-page SEO is among the most important tactics as around 60% of marketing managers have reported it as adding the most value.

As part of this service, the white-label agency does content creation relevant to the preferences and needs of the audience that your website is targeting.

High-quality content that follows content best practices is a key ranking factor for search engines. Still, there is also the additional benefit of having lower bounce rates and longer session times as people are interested in what you are writing about. And the last two are ranking factors as well.

The agency will also improve the structure of your website, making it easy for both humans and search engine bots to find the pages they are looking for. One practice for improving structure is to create a hierarchy and group related pages into categories. Below are examples of flat and deep website hierarchies.

Finally, on-page SEO is about internal linking. Internal links are the ones taking to other pages on your website. With internal linking done right, you ensure that readers visit other pages and the search engine bots better crawl your website.

Service #2: Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO includes all the activities that the white label agency performs to increase your website’s  authority, influence, and popularity among other sites on the internet.

The first and most important part of off-page SEO is link building. This is the process of getting other websites to refer to and mention your site. They mention you by placing your website’s link in their content. These links are also known as backlinks.

The backlink profile is another key ranking factor for your website and is essential to increasing organic traffic and generating leads. As evidence of that, the chart below shows a direct correlation between the number of backlinks and the size of organic search traffic.

In the eyes of search engines, if many reputable sites refer to you, you probably have valuable content and are an authority in your niche

White-label SEO agencies will work on creating and improving your backlink profile by:

• Performing outreach to authoritative websites and offering to write guest posts for their blogs with your links in the content.
• Finding websites and pages talking about you without linking to your site and asking them to add the link.
• Submitting your site to business directories and many other approaches.

As part of off-page SEO, white label agencies will also do social media postings for you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other channels.

Service #3: Technical SEO

Technical SEO is another service that many white label SEO agencies offer. This service is about improving the technical aspects of your website to help it rank better in search results.

Here is what white label agencies usually include in their technical SEO package:

• Testing the clients’ website and its content for mobile responsiveness and guiding your engineering teams to make it responsive and fix any issues with mobile-friendliness. Search engines usually rank mobile-friendly pages better than others.
• Finding technical issues, such as orphan pages, 404 pages, and bad links, and either fixing them or giving instructions to web design teams to get them all fixed.
• Telling search engine bots where to go and what to ignore with robots.txt and robots meta tags.
• Increasing content accessibility with alt descriptions.
• Helping crawlers understand your web page content with title, meta description, open graph tags, and schema markup, as these are important ranking factors too.

Search engines also give preference to websites that load quickly. Thus, you can expect the white-label SEO agencies to test your site speed and give you recommendations on improving that as well.

Service #4: Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of identifying the search terms and the SERPs that are the most relevant to your service or product.

Finding the right keywords is an essential part of SEO. With keyword research, you uncover opportunities for terms (i.e. keywords) that people performing a search use to find solutions and answers to their problems and concerns. Sometimes the terms identified do not have a direct correlation with your product. This is when you create content that ‘supports’ your main pages.

By creating content that supports the terms identified, you get organic visibility for those that are semantically relevant to our product and thus get visibility for your main keywords, which are usually harder to rank for.

White label SEO partners will analyze your website and identify the right keywords. They will select keywords based on their difficulty, intent, search volume, and many other metrics.

Service #5: Website and Content Audits

Creating well-optimized and targeted content is only part of the content marketing job. As time passes, some keywords you are targeting might lose traction while other better keywords appear. To make sure that your content is up to date, white label SEO agencies also offer a service called a content audit.

During a content audit, the agencies monitor the performance of your content pages and identify the ones that are either underperforming or have a good visibility but for irrelevant keywords. Then they come up with a recommendation to do page optimization, leave it as is, or remove that page.

Service #6: Local SEO

Local SEO is an optimization service for companies that have a physical location. It can be a lawyer’s office or a pet shop. If you have a local business, other than following general business best practices, you also need to promote yourself online.

By working on local SEO, white label agencies make sure that if someone in your business neighborhood types “pet shops near me”, it is your shop that will appear on the top of search results.

This service includes setting up your Google My Business page and submitting your address, phone, and working hours to the search engine so that this information shows up in search results and on Google Maps. 

White label agencies also manage the reviews that your customers leave on Google about your business.

To sum up, the best white label SEO agencies can provide you with a variety of specialized search engine optimization services. But what is the cost of these services? Do they charge by project or by the hour?

Let’s move on to the pricing of white label SEO and figure that out.

White Label SEO Pricing

White label SEO agencies can use different pricing models based on factors such as the partnership length and the type of services.

Here are the four most common ways that agencies price their services.

Pricing plan #1: Monthly packages

With this model, the agency will charge you a fixed price every month. They will have several packages that include a specific set of services.

Charging clients each month is common among mid-to-large size white label agencies, and prices can range from $8,000 to $200,000 depending on the package and amount of work they do.

You can go for this method if you plan to create long-term relationships with the agency and you have a constant flow of SEO tasks to outsource to them.

Pricing plan #2: Hourly packages

With the hourly model, you will pay based on the number of hours worked on your projects.

Unlike the monthly payment model, there are usually no packages with a list of services with this model. Hourly pay uses a more straightforward approach of simply negotiating a price, depending on the contractor’s expertise and skills.

This method is popular with SEO freelancers and small white label agencies. You can find them on freelancing platforms like Upwork, Freelancer.com, and Fiverr.

In terms of prices, you can expect to pay between $25 to $300 depending on your requirements and the contractors’ capabilities. Here’s the distribution of hourly SEO costs.

An hourly model is a great option if you have little SEO work to do or there are a couple of small one-off tasks on your plate.

Pricing plan #3: Project-based pricing

The next approach to pricing SEO services is based on the entire project scope.

In this case, the customer and the person from the account management of the SEO agency will discuss and prepare a project scope document, where they will list the full service list and all the activities and deliverables needed to complete the project. Afterwards, the two parties will agree on a price for completing this project.

Usually, customers will make a prepayment at the beginning of the project, then make installment payments after each milestone is completed.

This approach is an excellent option if there is a one-off task or project that is considerably large (e.g., content audit of the entire website).

Pricing plan #4: Custom pricing

For most cases, you will be working with SEO agencies using one of the pricing methods mentioned above. However, there are cases when it is hard to determine the timing, scope, or the frequency of SEO tasks that you want the agency to handle.

This is when agreeing on a custom pricing model makes the most sense.

Sometimes the custom plan will be a combination of the ones we already listed. For instance, if you want to perform search engine optimization on a website from scratch, you might agree to do keyword research and content audit with the project-based approach, then perform link building with a monthly payment model.

You might also agree on a custom reporting schedule. For instance, instead of getting monthly reports, you might get a white label SEO report at the end of the project.

To conclude, all the pricing models mentioned are common and acceptable in the SEO market. Your choice boils down to your specific case and requirements.

Now Over to You

Getting a white label SEO reseller program can be beneficial for your company and help you save time, cut costs, and focus your efforts on your strengths.

We hope ‌our guide helped you better understand how white label SEO works and if it is worth it for your company to hire one.If you liked our content, check out more of it in our blog.