Choosing the Right White Label SEO Partner

Author: Dan Fallon, Board Advisor

When clients want to increase their online visibility, one of the most obvious ways to achieve this is through SEO. However, SEO is increasingly labour intensive, specialist and consequently the vast majority of marketing agencies struggle to offer a strong in-house SEO solution that they can sell with confidence to clients.

A marketing agency’s choices are to:

1. Sell a sub-standard solution and hope it doesn’t damage the client relationship
2. Be open that it’s not in their agency skillset and allow the client to go elsewhere (losing the revenue and allowing another agency to sit with the client)
3. Subcontract to a specialist white label SEO provider.

Given SUSO’s specialism in white label SEO, we clearly recommend option #3!

The white label SEO firm (i.e. SUSO) specialises in working for other marketing agencies who want to deliver SEO services either under their brand, within their billing and under their control. Whilst more generalist SEO agencies who don’t understand the restrictions or operating white label might say they are willing to do this to get the billing and their foot in the door at the client or agency there is a strong chance they’ll misbehave. 

Typical misbehaviour is trying to trumpet their achievements into the client, publicly disagreeing on strategies/priorities and potentially trying to go direct into the client financially. Good white label SEO agencies recognise the primacy of the agency that introduces them. They know when to do what they are told and when to disagree respectfully. They are comfortable with the fact that they get reduced or zero visibility with the client. 

You might ask why they have chosen to specialise in white label rather than building relations directly? Why be a white label SEO agency rather than a conventional SEO agency that deals with clients directly? The honest answer is that the white label agencies have recognised the huge business savings they get from not having to find clients directly and the margin efficiencies that can bring. Their account management costs are minimised and typically they focus instead on superlative SEO results delivery. 

It is common also for whitelabel agencies to have an element of their service delivery in lower cost locations. They are trading proximity to the client pool for the ability to recruit higher quality staff at a lower cost. 

In SUSO’s case we have all our technical, content, SEO strategy and account management teams based in Poznan, Poland. It’s a university town with a well educated and ambitious talent pool. Our marketing and new business team is based largely in the UK with ownership split between the UK and Poland.

For example, a digital marketing agency may have 120 clients. Each of these companies requires three blog articles per month. The agency may then approach a white label SEO service provider to help them produce the 360 articles that their clients need per month under their brand name. It’s like ghostwriting, but specifically for SEO.

So if you don’t have the expertise to provide a full SEO service in-house, you can’t deliver it at the scale required then consider using a white label and outsource SEO firm like SUSO.