Edmonton White Label SEO Services: Key Things to Consider

What Are White Label SEO Services?

White label SEO services are “behind-the-scenes” Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services that are provided to your company by a third-party partner, so that you can offer these services to your clients.

This arrangement allows you to provide your clients with SEO services using your own brand name, rather than the brand name of your white label SEO service provider.

What Are Some Key Benefits of White Label SEO?

Partnering with a white label SEO provider is a great way for a company to expand its service offerings and focus on its core strengths, without adding staff, paying for expensive SEO tools, or making common SEO mistakes. Let’s discuss these benefits in greater detail.

Offering More Services to Your Existing Clients

For example, let’s say that you’re running a virtual assistant business, and your clients have been asking you for various digital marketing services. You may already be helping them out with things like e-mail marketing and social media management, but what about their website? Could you also be helping them out with getting noticed online so that they can attract more customers?

If a client were to ask you tomorrow about SEO services, and you don’t already have in-house SEO resources, your best option might be to refer them to another business. But now the conversation has shifted from “Yes, we can definitely help you with that!” to “I’m sorry, I can’t help you, but I know someone else who might be able to.”

Teaming up with a white label SEO partner allows you to meet your client’s SEO needs and (even more importantly), it turns this type of “no” into a “yes” for you, benefitting both you and your client.

Flexible Resourcing Options

One of the challenges associated with deciding to offer a new service such as SEO for your clients is that your current team probably doesn’t have the required expertise.

You could potentially address this through training, but you’re unlikely to see quick results with this approach, because SEO is a fairly technical topic. Another option would be to add an SEO expert to your team, but can you truly justify adding a full-time employee (FTE) for this, especially if it’s for a service that you don’t currently offer?

Partnering with a white label SEO company provides you with access to flexible SEO resources, without the commitment of hiring a permanent FTE.

Not Needing to Pay for Your Own SEO Tools

Some of the key data sources that SEO specialists use are free, such as Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics, but an intentional, data-driven approach to SEO also requires the use of at least one professional SEO tool.

These tools are not cheap, with each one typically costing thousands of dollars annually, but they are absolutely crucial for SEO tasks such as keyword research, competitive analysis, and keyword rank tracking (plus so much more!).

This is another benefit of white label SEO services, because your SEO partner pays for these tools, rather than your company.

Focusing On Your Core Strengths

It’s tempting to say yes to everything that a client asks for (believe me, I know!), but the problem with doing this is that your focus can drift away from your core strengths over time.

For example, your company might absolutely excel at producing beautiful, bespoke websites for clients, or doing a fantastic job of managing their social media accounts. But when those same clients begin asking you for additional services, you realistically need to draw the line at some point about just how broad you want your service offerings to be.

The next time one of your clients ask you about SEO, why not tap into your relationship with a trusted white label SEO service provider, instead of trying to figure out SEO on your own or referring that client out to another business?

Avoiding Common SEO Mistakes

Another risk associated with offering SEO services on your own without the expertise to do so is that your company is likely to make one or more common SEO mistakes, and these types of mistakes can negatively impact your client’s online search visibility.

Your client may not be aware of these issues in the beginning, but what happens if another company completes an SEO audit for them and points out a bunch of basic mistakes with your work?

Your relationship with the client would now be negatively impacted, despite all of the other stellar non-SEO work that you’ve been doing for them, and you might even lose the client!

Key Things to Consider When Choosing a White Label SEO Partner

Now that we’ve discussed some of the benefits of partnering with a white label SEO company, it’s also important to cover some key things to keep in mind when choosing the right fit, such as their location, communication, SEO knowledge, SEO philosophy, and confidentiality.

Location

I would argue that the location of your SEO provider is an important consideration, because working with a nearby company has its advantages. Working in the same time zone is a nice perk, and it’s also great to be able to meet up in-person from time to time for things like coffee, drinks, or lunch.

If your company is located in Edmonton, your clients are probably located nearby too (e.g., Edmonton, Sherwood Park, St. Albert, Nisku, Leduc, etc.), so why not choose an SEO partner that is located in Edmonton as well, rather than another province or even another country?

Communication

There are a few key things to consider about the topic of communication, including internal interactions between you and your SEO provider, as well as client-facing communication.

Unlike larger white label SEO agencies, Elevate Your Tech is currently a one-person shop, which means that you get direct-to-expert access for the best possible communications experience.

It’s also important to think about how you will approach the client-facing portion of the relationship. Your client will likely want to have some direct interactions with your SEO specialist, such as periodic online meetings, and there also needs to be a mechanism for handling e-mails (e.g., monthly SEO reports, client questions, etc.).

For example, will someone within your company act as an intermediary between your client and your SEO provider, or is there enough ongoing work that it may make sense to create a dedicated e-mail address for SEO (e.g., [email protected])?

SEO Knowledge

SEO is bit of a quirky area of knowledge, because it’s not something you can go get a degree in at a university, and there is no single definitive source of information about how to improve the search rankings for a website.

While Google does publish helpful information online with their Google Search documentation, this resource doesn’t tell you how specifically to get your website ranking at the top of the results for a given search. Instead, it provides generalized guidance about things to do (e.g., publishing “compelling and useful content”) or to avoid doing (e.g., “creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users”).

SEO experts tend to learn what works (and doesn’t work) over the years through a combination of experimentation, data analysis, subscribing to industry newsletters such as Search Engine Journal, and participating in online communities with other SEOs (e.g., LinkedIn, Reddit, private Slack channels, etc.).

And just to make life interesting, Google likes to keep all of us SEOs on our toes by making significant changes to their search ranking algorithms on a regular basis (often multiple times per year), and these changes often target SEO strategies that are perceived to be “gaming” their algorithms to rank unusually well in online search results.

My point with all of this is that it’s relatively easy to learn some of the basics of SEO, but it realistically takes years of learning and real-world experience to truly develop expert-level knowledge about SEO.

SEO Philosophy

As with many other things in life, there is generally a “right way” to do SEO (i.e., “white hat SEO”) and a “wrong way” to do it (i.e., “black hat SEO”).

White hat SEOs focus on things like researching keywords, publishing high-quality content, building legitimate backlinks to your website, and ensuring that various technical SEO items are taken care of properly (e.g., HTML page titles, headings, ensuring that website content is being indexed by search engines, etc.).

For comparison, a great example of what would likely be considered as black hat SEO recently has been what is referred to as programmatic spam, such as using AI chatbots to publish hundreds or even thousands of low-quality articles on a website each month, with the sole goal of attracting as much organic search traffic as possible.

Black hat SEO techniques often generate successful results in the short term, but they typically get addressed by Google over longer periods of time, and the penalties can be very severe (e.g., algorithmic or even manual interventions that basically wipe out your organic search traffic and are very difficult to recover from).

The key takeaway from this section is that your SEO partner’s approach and overall philosophy regarding SEO is very important when you’re selecting a white label SEO provider, because your choice of partners could be the difference between helping or harming your clients’ online visibility in the long run.

Confidentiality

Our clients place a great deal of trust in all of us as service providers, and it’s reasonable for them to have some expectations about confidentiality. Just as you would require your employees to respect confidentiality, it’s also reasonable for you to expect the same from an external partner.

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) can easily get very long and complicated if you involve a lawyer (not to mention expensive!), so I would recommend being careful with going down the proverbial rabbit hole, but at a minimum it’s a good idea to document some basic, clear expectations for both parties to abide by.

How Much Do White Label SEO Services Cost?

The cost of white label SEO services is dependent on which specific services are included. For example, some key SEO services typically include SEO audits, developing initial SEO strategies, SEO content writing services, and ongoing monthly SEO advisory services.

Pricing is also influenced by the size of the SEO agency. I can personally offer much more attractive pricing for my clients than a larger SEO agency, because I don’t have to cover the significantly higher overhead expenses associated with that type of agency (e.g., office space, account managers, admin staff, etc.).

Conclusion

I hope that this article has provided you with a comprehensive overview of the benefits associated with engaging a white label SEO service provider, as well as some key things to consider when doing so.

If you would like more information, our SEO services page includes an option to book a free initial consultation with me.

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About the Author

John is a multi-disciplinary professional who has spent twenty years mastering the intersection of business, finance, and information technology. His technical journey began with building and repairing computers, a foundation that led to him being recruited by a pioneering video alarm monitoring startup as a network administrator and web developer. He subsequently attended the University of Alberta, discovering a passion for finance while completing his Bachelor of Commerce degree, and he later became a CFA charterholder.

He has over a decade of experience in the finance industry, including roles with Canada’s largest independent mortgage finance company, a highly successful private lender, and a boutique private equity firm. John also previously owned and operated a dedicated IT consulting practice, and he was the sole web developer and SEO specialist for an online media company that he co-founded.