What Is White Label SEO?
A business can hire one agency and have the work delivered by another entirely, under the first agency's name. This is common and mostly undisclosed. We supply this service to other agencies ourselves, which is stated before the risks below rather than after them.
Somebody Else May Be Doing The Work
The agency you pay may not be the firm doing your work. Another business may be producing the content, running the technical work and writing the reports, with everything arriving under your agency's name.
How common this is. More than most clients assume.
It is a normal way for this trade to operate rather than an exception. Firms of every size use it, including ones you would not expect to.
Why you probably would not know. Nothing surfaces it.
The reports carry your agency's name. The emails come from their address. There is no point in an ordinary month at which the arrangement becomes visible. There is also no obligation on anybody to mention it.
Why it is worth understanding anyway. It changes what your questions can reach.
If your agency is managing rather than delivering, then a detailed question about the work has to travel to somebody you cannot speak to and come back. That affects what you can find out and how quickly.
What this page is not saying. That it is wrong.
The arrangement is legitimate and can produce better work than the alternative. What matters is whether you know, which is block six.
How The Arrangement Works
One firm sells the work and manages the relationship. Another firm delivers it. Your contract is with the first. The second has no agreement with you at all.
What the selling firm does. Everything you see.
Wins the client, agrees the scope, handles the invoicing, presents the reporting and manages the relationship. From your side this is indistinguishable from an agency doing the work itself.
What the delivering firm does. Everything you do not see.
The research, the writing, the technical work and usually the underlying reporting, which is then presented under the other firm's branding.
What contractually invisible means. The precise position.
The delivering firm has no relationship with you, no obligation to you and frequently no idea who you are beyond a site address. You have no claim against them and no route to them.
Why that structure exists. It suits both firms.
The selling firm offers a service without employing specialists. The delivering firm gets work without selling. Neither of those motives is improper and both are entirely about their businesses rather than yours.
What varies between arrangements. How much passes through.
Some managing agencies understand the work in detail and add real value in translating it. Others forward emails. That difference matters enormously to you and is invisible from outside.
Who Uses It
Three kinds of firm. None of them is doing anything unusual. This is worth stating plainly before the risks, because the practice gets discussed as though it were a scandal and it is not.
Web designers and marketing agencies. The largest group.
Firms whose actual trade is design, advertising or general marketing, offering search as an additional service because clients ask for it. Buying that capability rather than building it is a reasonable commercial decision.
Firms without in-house capability. Straightforward.
An agency that has not hired specialists, either because it is small or because the demand is inconsistent. Employing somebody full time for intermittent work is difficult to justify.
Firms managing overflow. The temporary case.
An agency with its own team using a supplier to handle more work than it can currently absorb. Frequently the least visible version, because it applies to some clients and not others.
What none of this makes them. Deceitful.
Buying in capability is ordinary across every trade. A builder subcontracts electrical work, an accountancy firm uses specialists. The arrangement is familiar everywhere and only feels strange here because nobody mentions it.
Where the actual issue sits. Not in the model.
It sits in whether you were told, what you can find out and what happens if the arrangement ends. Those are blocks five onwards.
We Provide This Service
We act as a white label supplier to other agencies. Some of the work we produce is delivered to businesses who have never heard of us and who believe their own agency is doing it.
What that means for this page. A direct interest.
We benefit from this arrangement existing and continuing. A page written by us describing its risks is written by somebody with a reason to describe them mildly. You should read it knowing that.
Why the disclosure comes before the risks. Deliberate ordering.
Placed afterwards it would read as an admission the structure forced out of us. Placed here it is what it is, which is us telling you our position before making our argument.
What we have written this page to do. Describe rather than sell.
Nothing on this page recommends the arrangement. It does not link to our own service for it. If you follow the advice here and start asking your agency direct questions, some of those questions will land on suppliers like us.
What we will not tell you. Who we supply.
Those relationships are confidential and that is a contractual matter rather than an editorial choice. It is also, as block five explains, part of the difficulty in checking anybody in this trade.
What you should do with this. Weigh it.
Discount what follows if you wish. A page that concealed this and was later found out would deserve more discounting than one that says it.
The Risks To A Client
Four genuine risks. They are worth stating fully, including the ones that reflect badly on suppliers like us.
You cannot assess who is actually doing the work. The foundational one.
Everything you would normally check, being experience, approach and standards, applies to a firm you cannot see. You vetted one business and are receiving the work of another.
Quality depends on a relationship you cannot observe. The one that decides outcomes.
How well your work goes depends on how well those two firms work together, what they pay each other and how much attention your account receives within the supplier's own workload. None of that is visible or influenceable from where you sit.
Communication passes through an intermediary who may not understand it. The everyday friction.
A detailed question goes to somebody managing rather than doing. Some translate accurately and some do not, so answers can arrive vague, delayed or subtly wrong without anybody intending it.
If the arrangement ends, the knowledge frequently leaves with it. The one nobody anticipates.
Everything learned about your business, your customers and what has been tried sits with the supplier. If those two firms part company, your agency continues and the accumulated understanding does not.
What makes all four worse. Not knowing.
Each risk is manageable if you are aware of the arrangement. Undisclosed, they are four things you cannot plan for.
The Question That Settles It
Ask whether the work is delivered in-house or subcontracted. You are entitled to know and a straight answer is reasonable to expect. An evasive one is itself the answer.
Why you are entitled to ask. You are buying a service.
Knowing who performs work you are paying for is an ordinary commercial question. Nobody would consider it intrusive in any other trade.
What a good answer sounds like. Direct, in either direction.
Either we do it all in-house, here is who, else we use a specialist supplier for these parts, here is how that works and here is who you deal with. Both are perfectly acceptable answers.
What an evasive answer sounds like. Reframing.
Being told that everybody uses a team, that it depends on the project or that the work is managed by them regardless. Those responses avoid a question with a simple answer. The avoidance tells you the answer.
The follow-up if they subcontract. Three things.
Who you speak to when something is wrong, whether the arrangement is long-standing or recent, then what happens to your account if it ends. All three are answerable by anybody running it properly.
Where this sits among the other questions. Near the front.
It is one of the first in questions to ask an SEO agency, because how it is answered predicts how the rest will be.
When It Is Genuinely Fine
A well run arrangement with a capable supplier can deliver better work than an agency doing it badly in-house. The objection throughout this page is to concealment rather than to the model.
Why it can be better. Specialisation.
A firm doing only this work, across many clients, accumulates more experience than a general agency doing it occasionally. In-house is not automatically superior and frequently means one person learning as they go.
What a good arrangement looks like. Disclosed and stable.
You were told, the relationship is long-standing rather than assembled for your job, your managing agency understands the work well enough to discuss it, then you know who to reach when something matters.
What the managing firm should be adding. Something real.
Understanding your business, deciding what should happen, translating between you and the specialists, plus holding the supplier to a standard. Where all of that is happening, you are paying for coordination rather than for nothing.
Where it stops being fine. When nothing is added.
A firm passing work through untouched, applying a margin and forwarding emails is charging you for a postal service. That is the version worth objecting to. It is not the model itself.
What that means for you practically. Judge the arrangement.
Not whether they subcontract. Whether the firm you are paying is contributing anything you could not have got by finding the supplier yourself.
What Should Stay The Same Either Way
Whoever delivers the work, three things should hold. If they do, the arrangement behind the scenes matters much less than it otherwise would.
You own the website and the work. The one that traps businesses.
The site, the domain and the content produced should belong to you regardless of who made them. Subcontracting adds a layer to that question rather than changing the answer. The contract page covers how it should be written down.
The reporting is real. And answerable.
You should be able to ask a question about a report and receive an answer that makes sense. If your agency cannot answer without going away, that is worth knowing. If the answer never comes back clearly, the intermediary is not adding what block seven describes.
You are not locked in. Particularly here.
This matters more with subcontracting rather than less, because your ability to leave is the only real protection against a relationship you cannot see. A tie-in in this situation is protecting the arrangement rather than the work.
What to secure specifically. Accounts in your name.
Analytics, search reporting and your business profile in your own name with access granted to whoever is working, rather than the other way round. That single arrangement removes most of what could go wrong at the end.
Why these matter more here. An extra party.
Every exit problem in this trade becomes harder when there is a firm involved that you never had a contract with.
If You Are The Agency Considering This
Some readers here run agencies and are weighing whether to buy this capability rather than build it. This block is for you. It deliberately does not point at our own service.
What to look for in a supplier. Four things.
Whether they will explain their work to you in detail, whether they will speak to your client if needed, how they handle a month that goes badly, then whether they are transparent about their own capacity.
What to be careful about. Volume suppliers.
A supplier priced far below what the work costs to do properly is producing something automated. You will be putting your name on it. Their risk is nothing and yours is your reputation.
What to be candid with your client about. More than most firms are.
You are not obliged to name a supplier. Being straight when asked costs you very little. A client who discovers it later reacts far worse than one who was told.
What you should still be doing. The managing part.
Understanding the client's business, deciding what matters, checking the work before it goes out and holding the supplier to it. An agency doing none of that is charging for forwarding.
Why we are not pitching here. It would spoil the page.
A page advising you about suppliers that then offered itself as one would be an advertisement rather than advice. Everything above would be worth less. The full series is on the hiring an SEO agency guide.
Ask us who
does your
work.
You are entitled to a direct answer about who performs work you are paying for, from us or from anybody else. We supply other agencies as well as working directly. We will tell you plainly which applies to your account before you commit to anything.
What we commit to in writing:
Our prices are published rather than quoted on request, so you can compare us against anybody else before speaking to us.
Every guide.
One practice.
What an agency is, whether to buy at all, which model suits you, how to vet one, what things cost, what should be in a contract and how to work with them afterwards.
