What is white label SEO, and why the reporting decides whether it works
Published by the Passieon team
White label is a plain arrangement wearing a fancy name. Another company does the SEO work, you sell it under your own brand, and your client never hears the other company's name. Names aside, it is how a large share of the SEO sold by design studios, web agencies and marketing consultancies actually gets done, and most of the time it works well for everybody in the chain.
It goes wrong in two specific ways, and both of them are visible early if you know where to look.
What the partner does, and what stays yours
The partner does the work: the audit, the profile, the pages, the technical fixes, the monthly cycle. You keep the client. The relationship, the strategy conversation, the invoice and the accountability stay with your agency, and the partner is only ever a name on your side of the arrangement.
That split is the whole point. It lets an agency offer SEO without hiring for it, and it lets the partner do one thing well without selling it. It also means the client is buying your judgement about who to trust, which is a fair thing to charge for and a real thing to get wrong.
Why agencies do it
Your agency may not do SEO. Or not local SEO. Or not the technical half of it. But some of your clients need those things, and no agency wants to turn a good client away because one line on the proposal is missing. Given that hundreds of SEO providers exist, some very good and some worthless, there are advantages and risks in handing the work over, though for a focused agency the advantages far outweigh the risks.
The quieter reason is cash flow. An SEO specialist on the payroll costs the same in a month with two clients as in a month with ten. A partner costs what the clients pay for.
The two ways it goes wrong
Be warned: the work is invisible to you until a client complains, and by then it has been invisible for months. The first failure is a partner who does very little and reports a great deal. Rankings for words nobody searches, a hundred citations on directories nobody visits, and a report with a green arrow on every line. Your client's phone does not ring any more than it did, and one day they say so.
The second failure is worse, because it is not passive. A partner who buys links to show quick movement can get your client's site penalised, and a penalty arrives with your agency's name on the invoice. Recovery is slow and it is your reputation that pays for it. If you ever need it, the guide to Google penalty recovery explains what it takes.
Why the reporting decides it
The report is the only part of the work your client ever sees. The pages they may not read; the profile changes they will not notice; the report lands in their inbox every month with your logo on it. If it shows positions, it shows something the client cannot spend, and a report about positions is the report that gets the retainer cancelled in a quiet month.
A report that keeps a client shows what the work produced: calls from the profile, enquiries from the site, and sales where there is a shop, all drawn from accounts in the client's own name so that nothing in it has to be taken on trust. That is the standard to hold a partner to before the first client is handed over, because a partner who cannot report the enquiries is not measuring them, and a partner who is not measuring them is not working towards them.
How to choose a partner
Ask who owns the accounts, and the answer must be the client. Ask what happens when you part company, and the answer must be that everything built stays. Ask whether they will ever contact your client directly, and the answer must be never. Ask to see the process written down; a provider without a checklist is improvising on your client's site. And ask how they measure, then check the answer against the paragraph above.
What we do
We work behind agencies under their brand, on the terms above: the client's own accounts, a report built on enquiries and calls, and no contact with your client unless you ask for it. The white label SEO page sets out how the engagement runs, and white label local SEO covers the map-pack work most agencies are asked for first. The local SEO service page describes the work itself.
Want this done for your site? See what the SEO services covers or read the client results.
Read next
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- Local SEO citations: which ones matter, and how to fix the wrong ones What a citation is, why a wrong phone number on an old directory costs you calls, the short list of listings worth keeping accurate, and how to clean up the rest.
- An ecommerce SEO audit, in the order that finds the money How to audit an online store: indexing and crawl waste first, then the category pages, duplicates from filters, speed, and the tracking that proves sales.