What Is White Label SEO? A Simple Guide
Want to sell SEO services to your clients but don’t have the resources or knowledge in-house?
White label SEO is the answer.
In this post, you’ll learn exactly what white label SEO is, how it works, and how you can use it to add an additional revenue stream to your current business model.
What is white label SEO?
White label SEO is a service SEO companies offer in which they allow their clients to sell SEO services, such as keyword research, content creation, on-page optimization and the creation of SEO reports, as their own.
White labeling is not exclusive to the web development and marketing worlds. It’s used by all kinds of different industries for physical and digital products and services alike.
For example, when a manufacturer allows another company to sell their product under their own brand name, that product becomes known as a “white label product.”
You might also see white labeling SEO services being described as “SEO reseller services” or “private label seo.”
White labeling in the SEO world benefits both companies involved.
The company selling the original SEO services gets the opportunity to target an entire second group of customers while the company reselling those services gets to offer more services to their clients in a way that’s cheaper and more efficient.
So, you would be the reseller. You’d sell the service to your client and a third-party would take care of the deliverables. You’d just report to your client and take a cut off the top. Nice and easy.
Why use this type of service instead of doing the work yourself?
You may wonder why any company would want to purchase services from another company and pass them off as their own.
Shouldn’t you use a freelancer or expand your business to include this service by hiring additional team members? Can’t you just learn this skill and perform the work yourself?
You can certainly do all of that, but like we said, becoming a white label SEO reseller allows you to extend your services without expanding your business.
These are the benefits of using a white label seo service:
- Cheaper than hiring additional staff. May not be cheaper than hiring a freelancer, though
- Available to use on a case-by-case basis. If you only have a few clients who request SEO services from you, you likely don’t need to hire an SEO professional
- Ability to scale. A white label SEO company will likely have more than a few staff members, meaning they’re able to take on more work as you take on more work
- Ability to pick and choose which SEO services to offer your customers. Do they need an entire SEO strategy? Content creation? An SEO audit? Do they want to market themselves with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising?
- Allows you to keep up with your competitors without having to fully expand your business with a full-fledged SEO team
- The SEO service you work with will have their accounts for SEO tools or may even develop their own SEO tools. Either way, you don’t need to add to your monthly expenses by paying for additional applications
- You’re able to offer more value to your clients, which allows you to secure larger deals
- Gives you and your team the chance to focus on the tasks you specialize in
What tasks do white label SEO providers perform?
White labeling services provide any SEO task a website needs. Here are some of the more common tasks:
- SEO audits
- SEO campaigns
- On-page optimization
- Off-page optimization
- Content writing
- Content strategy
- SEO reports
- Advertising
- Google penalty recovery
SEO audits
As you know, some clients don’t need a new website. They need to revamp their existing site.
This may also involve revamping their SEO strategy in hopes of increasing their organic search engine rankings.
In this case, they’ll need an SEO audit that analyzes the site’s on-page signals, performance, user experience (UX), backlink profile, visibility in search engines, positions of each individual page, click-through rate and more.
This is something you can rely on a white label service to provide.
SEO campaigns
An SEO campaign is an SEO strategy that improves search rankings by identifying a goal and taking specific steps to meet it.
For example, increasing your search visibility for commercial-intent keywords like product reviews is much harder to do after Google’s helpful content update went live in September 2023.
You now need to increase authority across your entire site in order to increase your rankings for such keywords.
This may involve planning out an SEO campaign in which you target non-competitive keywords that relate to your commercial-intent keyword with a lot of content published in a short period of time.
It will involve knowing what commercial-intent keyword to target, which related keywords to target and how to target each.
In short, SEO campaigns are complicated, so you’re better off enlisting the help of experts.
On-page optimization
Improving a site’s SEO strategy sometimes means improving pages that already exist.
On-page optimization involves making sure titles and descriptions are SEO friendly, making sure keywords are targeted correctly, inserting relevant internal and external links on pages, ensuring the site uses pretty permalinks, cleaning up dead links with 301 redirects, inserting high-quality, original images into articles, improving page speed so that individual pages load faster, and more.
If a site has been around for a while and is still struggling to rank, on-page optimization needs to be performed on a page-by-page basis.
This is a lot of work, so you’re better off using a white label SEO provider so you can focus on what you specialize in.
Off-page optimization
This is an SEO strategy that’s meant to improve your search visibility. It’s especially important for local businesses hoping to increase their local SEO rankings.
Off-page optimization is everything you do off site that increases your site’s traffic and authority well enough to increase your rankings over time.
Tasks involve link building, guest posting, social media marketing, influencer marketing, claiming business listings, fixing business citations across all relevant directories, creating positive PR and more.
Again, all of these strategies are a lot of work, and they can be pretty damaging if you don’t do them right, so you’re better off letting high-quality SEO services handle these tasks for you.
Content writing & content strategy
SEO involves producing a lot of content.
If you specialize in web design, you’ll likely produce better results for clients by passing off content marketing tasks to experts.
A white label SEO agency can develop an entire content strategy for your clients, which may be all they need if they have their own writers. They can also produce a lot of content in a short period of time.
SEO reports
Clients like to see evidence of the progress you’re making with their sites.
If you’re improving their website to fix performance issues, they’re going to want to see better page load times in tools like Pingdom and GTmetrix.
If you’re improving UX, they’re going to want to see better engagements.
If you’re improving SEO, they’re going to want to know that they’re receiving higher search engine rankings, high click-through rates and more backlinks.
SEO reports let your clients know exactly what you’ve been up to and how much you’ve improved their numbers.
White label services can create professional, client-friendly SEO reports for you and even slap your brand name on them.
That said, you may not need to outsource this service at all. There are SEO reporting tools that can automate this for you. You’ll just need to make sure the tool you use offers white label reporting.
Advertising
Some SEO strategies do away with organic efforts and use paid efforts instead.
This is known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. It involves purchasing ads for keywords you want to rank for, allowing you to advertise your page so they appear higher than organic search results.
Most sites prefer to rank organically, but if your competitors are ranking organically and ranking in the sponsored section of Google search engine results pages (SERPs), you’re better off launching a few PPC campaigns yourself.
White label SEO services will know exactly which keywords to target with PPC advertising and how to target them.
Google penalty recovery
A Google penalty is a manual action Google takes to decrease a site’s search engine rankings or remove their site from search altogether.
These penalties are given out to websites that violate Google’s webmaster policy guidelines.
If your client is hit with a penalty, they’ll need to take action quickly and immediately in hopes of recovering from it.
In this case, enlisting the help of a white label SEO firm can help you identify what needs to be fixed as well as implement that fix as efficiently as possible.
How to choose a company that offers white labeling services for SEO
Look for these aspects when shopping for a white label SEO provider:
- Positive reviews
- Trackable case studies
- Well-optimized website
- 24/7 customer service
- Transparency about work processes and delivery
- Suitable pricing
When you find a white label SEO service you want to work with, start by looking up reviews for them from a variety of different sources.
These include Google, Facebook and Trustpilot for agencies and sources like Fiverr and Upwork for freelancers.
You may also want to look the business up on the Better Business Bureau website as well as Reddit and other forums.
If all looks good, move on to the company’s website, and look for case studies.
Case studies prove the effectiveness of their work. Use them to review websites they’ve worked on. Check their speed and UX, and run them through a competitive analysis tool to see how they rank, how much organic traffic they receive and their backlink profile.
You should also run the company’s own website through these tests. After all, if they can’t optimize their own website, how can you expect them to optimize your clients’ websites?
The company should also have 24/7 live chat and/or phone support, especially if that’s something you offer your clients.
Disasters can happen anytime, and you’re going to need quick access to your white label provider to find out what’s going on.
When you start interviewing the company you’re interested in working with, they should be transparent about how they work and how they deliver their work.
You don’t want to work with a blackhat SEO company that uses spammy SEO tactics like keyword stuffing and buying backlinks.
Ask them about how they deliver their work and whether or not they deliver updates. Plus, how do they deliver updates? Monthly emails? One-on-one meetings?
It’s good to know these details before you start working together.
Finally, make sure you choose a white label SEO service that works with your budget.
Freelancers are cheap but can’t handle large projects. Large agencies can handle large projects but are expensive. Choose the one that fits your needs and budget.
White label SEO services
- HigherVisibility – All around SEO agency that offers PPC advertising, local SEO, ecommerce SEO and link building.
- Linkology – An industry-leading link building agency that supports a lot of marketing agencies with white label link building.
- The HOTH – A well-known SEO service that performs content creation, link building and citation building.
- Vendasta – All around SEO agency that offers SEO snapshots, optimization, content creation and advertising.
- Contentellect – Offers white labeling content and link building services.
- ConciergeBee – Offers a variety of marketing related services, including content writing. Their content writing offering includes the creation of SEO-optimized content with keyword research. They don’t publicly offer white label services but this is something that they can offer if you request it.
How to offer white labeling as a service
If you’re pretty good at your craft, you can offer white label SEO services yourself.
The best way to offer these types of services is to offer regular SEO services to clients directly. Once you build up your reputation, you can start offering white label services for businesses who want to offer SEO services to other businesses.
It’s important to understand what this means for your business. It requires a humble attitude toward your work as you’ll get no credit for the success you bring to websites you work on under a white label.
Once you establish yourself in the SEO world, add a White Label or Reseller page to your website, and include it in your navigation menu.
If you don’t see results, launch cold outreach campaigns that target web design and content marketing agencies.
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