White label SEO can be a great solution for small digital marketing companies that can’t afford the in-house expertise to perform all of the SEO services their clients want. There’s a lot that goes into SEO both on and off the page – it’s not just using search keywords anymore. If your marketing company has a small SEO team or no SEO team at all, you could use the expertise of a white label SEO agency.
But white label SEO agencies aren’t perfect. They have their good and bad points like everything else. For example, while they can save you time and money, you also need to work harder to keep the lines of communication open. You can get access to the in-depth expertise of a large team of SEO specialists, but you have to give up control of the work to them. And while white label agencies will use the latest SEO tools, managing your workflow together presents different challenges than managing your workflow in-house.
You Could Save Time and Money
This is one of the biggest benefits of using a white label SEO agency for services like pay-per-click (PPC), content marketing, link building, and keyword research. You can save the time you would need to spend on hiring someone and bringing them up to speed with your business, and just go right ahead and start getting the work done. You’ll get it cheaper than you would get it from an employee, since you can just pay an hourly rate for however many hours of SEO services you need. And since the white label agency will have a larger team of professionals to assign to your tasks, they’ll get done faster, too.
You Need to Work at Maintaining Communication
However, you need to work harder at maintaining open lines of communication with a white label SEO agency, because they’re not working in your facilities. Don’t make the mistake of handing off your SEO work and then not following up until deliverables are due. Keep a regular, open meeting with the white label agency so you can talk over any issues as they arise, or merely keep communication flowing between your two teams.
White Label SEO Agencies Leverage In-Depth Expertise
You can only afford to hire so many SEO specialists to work in-house – and the smaller your company, the smaller that number becomes. Some marketing agencies can’t afford to hire any SEO specialists, or can’t find any to hire. When you work with a white label agency, you should ideally get access to a much deeper pool of expertise than you could afford to hire on your own.
You Have to Give Up Control of Your SEO Work
Of course, when you hand over your SEO work to another company, you do just that – you hand it over. You can no longer exercise control over how that work gets done or even what timeline it gets done on. The white label agency is going to do it in the manner they see fit, and all you can do is hope they meet your deadlines. That can be a difficult prospect for some small business owners to face, but it’s usually worth the psychological work of relinquishing control. Once you get comfortable with signing over control of your clients’ SEO work to a white label agency, you’ll be able to offer your clients a larger number of SEO services and bring in more business as a result.
White Label Agencies Will Use the Latest Tools
One of the problems with SEO is that it’s an ever-evolving beast. It changes so rapidly that if you’re not paying close attention, it’s easy to fall behind with the latest in best practices. Staff at a white label SEO agency will have the resources to keep up with changes in the SEO space, including learning to use new software tools and techniques to produce high-quality SEO deliverables.
Workflow Management Can Be Differently Challenging
The challenge of managing workflow between two agencies can be unlike any other you’ve come across in getting your digital marketing company off the ground. You need to make sure you know how the agency you’re working with manages their strategies, including how they coordinate and record their processes, so you can meet them where they are in terms of mutually managing workflow.
Using white label SEO services has its pros and cons, but for many small digital marketing companies, the pros outweigh the cons. Make sure you understand what issues you’ll have to deal with when working with a white label agency, so you’ll be able to deal with them when they crop up.
