Choosing the Right SEO Partner for Your Agency

Author: Dan Fallon, Board Advisor

When clients want to increase their online visibility, one of the most obvious ways to achieve this is through SEO. However, SEO is increasingly labour intensive, specialist and consequently the vast majority of marketing agencies struggle to offer a strong in-house SEO solution that they can sell with confidence to clients.

A marketing agency’s choices are to:

1. Sell a sub-standard solution and hope it doesn’t damage the client relationship
2. Be open that it’s not in their agency skillset and allow the client to go elsewhere (losing the revenue and allowing another agency to sit with the client)
3. Subcontract to a specialist white label SEO provider.

Given SUSO’s specialism as a white label SEO partner, we clearly recommend option #3!

An SEO firm (i.e. SUSO) that specialises in working  “white label”  knows the challenges of working for another marketing agency under their brand, within their billing and under their control. Whilst more generalist SEO agencies who don’t understand the restrictions of operating “white label” might say they are willing to do it, to get the billing and their foot in the door at the client or agency, there is a strong chance they’ll misbehave.

Typical misbehaviour is trying to trumpet their achievements into the client, publicly disagreeing on strategies/priorities and potentially trying to go direct into the client financially. Good white label SEO agencies recognise the primacy of the agency that introduces them. They know when to do what they are told and when to disagree respectfully. They are comfortable with the fact that they get reduced or zero visibility with the client.

You might ask why they (we) have chosen to specialise in white label rather than building relations directly with clients? The honest answer is that the white label agencies have recognised the huge savings they get from not having to find clients directly and the margin efficiencies that brings. Account management costs are minimised and typically they focus instead on superlative SEO results delivery.

It is common also for whitelabel agencies to have an element of their service delivery in lower cost locations. They can trade proximity to the client location for the ability to recruit higher quality staff at a lower cost.

In SUSO’s case we have all our technical, content, SEO strategy and account management teams based in Poznan, Poland. It’s a university town with a well educated and ambitious talent pool. We also have a smaller team in India. Our marketing and new business team is based largely in the UK with ownership split between the UK and Poland.

So if you don’t have the expertise to provide a full SEO service in-house or there are elements of the service you’d consider outsourcing then please consider using a white label and outsource SEO firm like SUSO.