What is White Label SEO (SEO Reselling/SEO Reseller)?

White label SEO, also known as SEO reselling, allows you to offer SEO services without building an in-house team. You sell SEO to your clients under your agency’s brand, but another SEO agency actually does the fulfillment work. This takes most of the burden off your plate, so you can focus on other tasks like closing more sales and client management.

How Do You Resell SEO? 6 Easy Steps:

1. Educate Yourself

If you’re considering becoming an SEO reseller, the first thing you need to do is educate yourself on SEO. The more knowledge you have, the better you can sell. Just because you’re outsourcing SEO doesn’t mean you don’t need to understand it. In fact, you do.

You’re the one selling it. You’re ultimately going to be servicing these clients and explain the progress. Your brand and reputation are at stake. Education is key.

Not only do you need to explain SEO when selling to leads and managing client expectations, but you also need to have enough understanding to determine which SEO resellers are best. If you do not have SEO knowledge, it can be hard to gauge the quality of work and results. It’s crucial you set yourself up for success.

As you research and evaluate white label SEO partners, we highly recommend working with a company that publishes a lot of training resources and materials. You want an SEO partner that is invested in educating and providing value to their partners.

Some resources we provide include:

• Our Knowledge Base – filled with helpful guides, resources, and other blogs. Some of our favorites are:
  • Complete Local SEO Ranking Guide
  • Multi-Location SEO Framework
  • Explore a variety of SEO Tactics
  • Ultimate Guide to Press SEO
  • Location Page Audit Checklist
• The SEO Mad Scientist SEO Testing (weekly)
  • Our Annual SEO Testing Report
• The SEO Vault Podcast

The ideal white label SEO partner is willing to educate you and help you really understand this product so when you bring it out to your clients you’ll have a great outcome.

In addition to training and resources, you’ll also want a company that provides demos and/or recommendations – not all white label companies do this. When you’re first starting out, it can be hard to identify which type of SEO or which services the client needs. You don’t want to waste money on the wrong type of SEO…

That’s why we offer free, custom campaign recommendations! You can be sure you’re purchasing the right services for that specific client. We are also launching can free link recommendations soon to identify the exact links your clients need to rank higher.

2. Find an SEO Reseller Who Follows Google Guidelines

Before you begin selling SEO, we strongly recommend you read the Google Webmaster guidelines. Any high quality white label SEO company, will have a very clear alignment with what Google’s says is okay and how that SEO company approaches optimization. Make sure you educate yourself and understand type of SEO you want to offer your clients and what shortcuts you want (or don’t want) to take.. Make sure you do some education, read those Webmaster guidelines and then talk to your SEO outsourcing company.

Remember, there are different types of SEO – white hat, gray hat, and black hat. White hat SEO follows all of Google’s guidelines to a “t”. Black hat SEO exploits search engines to rank higher more quickly. While you can get results faster, it is much more risky. Gray hat SEO is a combination of both of these types.

3. Establish Your Pricing & Service Structure

One of the biggest decisions you’ll need to make when setting up SEO services is how to practice your packages. If you price your SEO services too low, there’s not enough profit margin for you. You’re not going to be excited about selling it. If you price it too high, your clients won’t buy the services. They could even seek services somewhere else where they get a better deal. 

With white label SEO, you get the wholesale price. Then, you markup the services to give you a profit margin. But knowing what to charge your clients can be challenging. How much should you markup SEO? You want to find that perfect sweet spot where you aren’t charging too much but there’s still money to be made…but that can be difficult to determine.  

Generally SEO markup is anywhere between 70% and 120%. The “correct” markup will depend greatly on how much the SEO reseller is charging. That’s why we built our own Pricing Calculator Tool. You can get an accurate pricing estimate that takes into account our actual prices, as well as your client’s niche, population size (competitiveness), and number of listings.

You also need to determine how you will structure your SEO services. Are you going to sell a la carte, or are you going to sell only pre-packaged campaigns? Will there be custom campaign offerings? Are you going to bundle SEO with other marketing services you offer? There are great opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and bring added value to your clients. You just have to determine your service structure and pricing.

Ultimately you know your clients best. You understand their budget constraints, pain points, and end goals. Only you can know what will work best for your client base. Be sure to keep them in mind when creating your packages and pricing to maximize sales. 

4. Establish Customer Service & Workflow Guidelines

This is critical when you’re reselling SEO. Regardless of the white label partner you select, you’ll still be responsible for selling SEO services, client communication, and reporting (among other things). You need to map out standard processes for customer service and workflows to set yourself up for success. 

Having consistent customer service guidelines ensures every lead and client has the best experience. You’ll be able to reduce friction with clients, address issues better, and retain more clients, It also allows you to bring on additional client support as your SEO client base grows. 

You’ll also need clear workflows for SEO fulfillment. Make sure you understand what work your SEO partner will handle and what they will not. How often do they report to you? What types of reports do they provide? What reports will actually be sent to the client? Having a standard workflow allows you to streamline reporting and meet client expectations. You also need to know the workflow of the SEO company to expedite results. What information do you need to provide? How quick are the turn around times (TAT)? Where you can get questions answered about various projects?

Be sure to ask yourself all these questions when creating your standard practices.

5. Monitor & Track Campaigns

Many think they can just sell it, set it, and forget it when it comes to SEO. However, that’s not really how the white label business works. You still have to maintain customer relationships, manage communication, and keep clients updated on campaign performance. 

If you’re not monitoring and tracking your campaigns, it’s hard to keep clients updated and show them ranking improvements. You need to know where each campaign stands. Remember, this can be a valuable revenue stream for years to come if you do it right, so don’t slack on tracking campaigns.

While most white label SEO companies have their own campaign tracking, we recommend setting up your own SEO monitoring to ensure you have all the information you need. Most SEO companies will not monitor every single KPI. Generally, there will be standard campaign tracking setup for every campaign, which may not capture all the data your clients need.

You also need to have a strategy in place for reporting what you see. You want to report wins and improvements, but not too frequently that it eats up your time. There also needs to be a process for reporting campaigns progressing slower than we’d like. This ties into the expectations you set with the customer and talking them down off the ledge if they call in 60 days and say, “Oh I’m not on page 1 yet, I want to cancel.” Hopefully, you’ve done a good job up front and you didn’t set that expectation, but if you did, you need data to back up the performance progress thus far…

Remember, SEO is a long term strategy. You’re going to need strategies in place to show the work is getting done and the progress made so far. For example, you could highlight we’ve moved from page 88 to 15. No, the phone’s not ringing yet, but foundation is being built and we see strong movement. The process is working.

6. Be Ready to Communicate

When you’re reselling SEO, it’s even more important to manage client communications. There’s going to be a lot of communication – both with the white label SEO company and your clients. Again, think about what you want to do from a client standpoint. Are you going to have a monthly meeting? Are you going to have a monthly report that goes out?

Ask the company you’re interviewing to understand what types of support they can provide in communication. Do they provide campaign review calls? Do they send out an automatic report or you have to compile the report? Are there other correspondence that can go out throughout the month?

You need a clear communication plan with your clients so they know what to expect. You will also need standardized reporting and communication in order to scale.

Clear communication with your white label partner is also important. What happens when there is a client question you can’t answer? Are you going to have a direct contact with that company? Is that a pooled support group? What are the hours of operation? Is it in your time zone or not? What are the response times? How confident are you that the response you’re going to get is something you can turn around and give back to your client?

These are all things you really want to consider, because once you have clients and you’re working with a white label SEO company, there will be questions that need to get answered. You will need support at some point.  You want to make sure you have a team that’s going to be able to support that.