Providing quality services as an agency is becoming increasingly difficult. Constant algorithm changes, AI content, finding decent employees, and then, the actual work. If you already offer marketing agency services, you may be struggling with providing backlinks to your clients.
Building backlinks is one of the most difficult and unpredictable aspects of doing digital marketing. But if you want to offer it as a service but don’t have the capacity, you can offload the work to someone else. This is called white label link building and it is a common practice for marketing and SEO agencies.
Today, we’ll show you what white label link building is, whether it’s a good idea and what you should watch out for.
What is white label link building?
White label link building is the practice of outsourcing link building services to an agency partner and charging the work to your own client.
Let’s say that you have an agency that delivers content marketing, design and social media services to Acme Inc. This company decides they want to build some links too, but your agency does not offer that service. Instead of telling them no, you outsource the link building work to a partner in a relationship called white label link building.
They build the links, you submit them to the client as your own work. You help them out with Google search engine rankings and provide a more complete offer and they get backlinks on top of their existing deliverables.
This type of arrangement can work out, provided that several conditions are met:
- You have a reliable partner who uses white hat link building
- You know the difference between good and bad links, and which metrics to track
- You have to monitor the work delivered and make sure the contractors are providing high-quality backlinks
In theory, white label link building sounds like a win-win situation for everyone involved – your clients get great links at a fair cost. But let’s find out if that is really the case.
The pros of using white label link building
If you’re considering using white hat link building to amp up your clients’ SEO strategy, there are plenty of benefits to this method.
Diversifying your offer. Doing link building through various methods (guest posting, outreach, link exchanges, broken link building, and others) requires a large team of people. White labeling helps you offer link building with a smaller headcount.
Saving time. The average link can take weeks to build. Reaching out to bloggers, securing targets, getting posts published – it takes time. White label partners have networks of partners that can build links much faster and at scale, without making the client look spammy.
Upselling your existing clients. You can use white label link building as an upsell to charge your existing clients even more and give them a package deal on content and SEO services.
Having said all of that, there are some downsides to using white label partners for link building too.
Potential downsides
Letting someone else build links for you and presenting them as your own also involves a lot of risk. Here are some potential pitfalls of white label link building.
The contractor may be using black hat building techniques. If your outsourced agency or freelancer is using PBNs, providing links from low quality websites, buying links from a webmaster, spamming blog comments, or something else, it will hurt your reputation as you’re the one reporting to the client.
You have to get up to speed on link building. As the one charging for the work, you need to get familiar with link building as an aspect of search engine optimization. You also need to learn how links contribute not just to SERP but also to brand awareness.
This means you need to understand concepts such as domain rating, website traffic, anchor text, backlink profile, and many others. For many agencies, this is not a possibility because of a lack of time.
You have to know the methods they use to get their links. To get relevant links, you need to understand exactly how the contractor is building them. HARO, infographics, link exchanges, guest blogging, or something else – you need to be in the know.
Some freelancers won’t reveal their link building tactics, and this is a clear sign to look elsewhere because their SEO techniques could do more harm than good.
How to find a white label link building partner
For the typical agency owner, hiring someone to do white label link building has more pros than cons. However, the hardest part of the equation is finding someone who is reliable and provides great work that you can rely on in front of your clients.
Here is how to find that agency or freelancer, while respecting Google’s guidelines on ethical link building.
They are transparent about the links they build
The person or company building links for you uses only white hat link building techniques and they can tell you exactly how they built each link for you. They don’t hide the methods they use for building high authority links and they stand behind every link they send your way.
They focus on the right metrics
A reputable white label link building agency builds backlinks:
- From websites with a high domain rating (DR) and domain authority (DA)
- From websites that are relevant to your clients’ industry and niche
- From websites with a decent amount of organic traffic
In fact, you can see all of these metrics and characteristics in the reports they send you with their links. They avoid building backlinks from PBNs (private blog networks).
They don’t purchase links: they use white hat link building strategies
As we’ve written before, directly purchasing links from website owners and editors can be classified as black hat SEO. Great link builders use a wide range of white hat SEO tactics for building links:
- HARO
- Link exchanges and link insertions
- Editorial links
- Guest posting
- Creating high-quality content that attracts backlinks (link bait)
Depending on the client and the types of links, they adjust their approach to get high-quality links that meet both your and the client’s expectations and help them in search engine results.
They have a great portfolio of white hat backlinks
Before deciding on a white label link building partner, review their case studies, testimonials and backlinks they have built for other clients.
You want to make sure they use white hat methods to build links from authority websites and ideally, that they have worked in niches similar to the ones you need for your clients. If they use guest posting, you want to make sure that they have produced great content for their clients before.
Once you receive a list of links they have built, you can run them through a tool such as Ahrefs to determine if any black hat link building was done.
They have transparent pricing
The typical link building agency has a pricing system of some sort. Usually, they charge clients based on the domain rating of the website that the link is coming from.
At RepordCard, we have an extremely transparent pricing method that you can check out at this page.
You can select the method for SEO link building, the organic search traffic, the domain rating of your target website, as well as the total number of links. Whether you want a link from a piece of content or a niche edit from another valuable content piece, we have your back.
Wrapping up
White label link building can be risky. However, when you find the right partners, you can offer your clients better search rankings and a great price per link. You can build links, but without doing all the time-consuming outreach and hard work that comes with each placement.
Are you ready to give your clients the quality links they deserve? Book a free call with us today to see how we can help with your link building needs.
