So your marketing agency just signed a new client, and they tell you they want you to focus on link building. In other words, they want you to place links on other websites, which point to their website and increase their authority and search engine rankings.
Easy, right? All you have to do is:
Conduct thorough keyword research, perform comprehensive competitor analysis, create high-quality content, identify link prospects, craft personalized outreach emails, manage relationships, monitor link placements, perform regular link audits… aaaaand the list goes on.
If doing all that on your own sounds like way more work than you can justify for what your client is paying you, I have good news for you:
You don’t have to tell them no.
And you don’t have to hire an entire link-building team either.
With white label link building, you can cut your costs, increase your revenue, and provide your clients with top-tier links that actually help them meet their SEO goals.
White label link building involves outsourcing your clients’ link building needs to a specialized link-building agency.
White label link building is usually much cheaper than building links in-house, with per-link costs usually falling somewhere in the range of $150-$300.
White label link building allows you to tap into the expertise of link-building specialists, resulting in more authoritative, higher quality links for your clients.
White label link building is when a digital marketing agency wants to provide link-building services to their clients, but instead of building the links in-house, the agency hires a link-building agency to build the links on their behalf.
From the client’s point of view, their marketing agency is building the links for them—as all good online marketing agencies do. But in reality, a dedicated, third-party link-building agency is doing all the grunt work, and the digital marketing agency is just the middleman.
Usually, the process goes something like this:
Link building is identified as a needed service. Maybe this was the client’s idea, or a suggestion from the marketing agency.
The marketing agency finds a specialized link-building agency, and hands them a commission to build a specified number of links for the client.
The link-building agency uses its team’s expertise to build quality guest posts, niche edits, or HARO links for the client.
The marketing agency communicates with the client during the link-building process, updating them on progress and managing timelines and deliverables as though they were the ones performing the work.
There’s one thing we need to take note of before moving on, and it’s this:
There’s nothing dishonest about white label link building.
At first, it may feel like a scam—aren’t you just repackaging someone else’s services and selling them for a profit? Well, when you think about it, that’s what almost all businesses do.
Retailers buy products from manufacturers and sell them at higher prices. Restaurants purchase ingredients from suppliers, prepare meals, and charge extra for the final dishes. Event planners hire vendors for catering, decor, and entertainment, then package the services into a cohesive event that earns them more than the sum of their expenses.
The point is, white label link building, and outsourcing in general, are common practices in the business world. So if you want to take the plunge and start offering link-building services to your clients, know you can do it with zero moral qualms.
Opting for white label link building can provide numerous efficiency benefits compared to hiring an in-house team. But before we go over these particular benefits, let’s take a look at what’s usually the most compelling one for most agencies: cost savings.
Below is a quick cost guide you can use to compare building links through an agency vs. building them in house. For a more in-depth analysis, check out our full article on link building pricing.
When outsourcing to an agency, you’ll find there’s a lot of variability in the price range. This is because link-building is a strategic endeavor, and not all links are created equal. That said, here are some pretty standard numbers you should expect from white label link building:
Per-link costs are around $100-$1,500, though $150-$350 is more common.
You could also pay a monthly flat fee of around $10,000-15,000, though this pricing structure usually comes with social media marketing, SEO analytics tracking, and other perks that your agency probably already offers to your clients.
For the per-link pricing above, there’s one main factor that drives the price up or down: whether the link is for a guest post or niche edit.
Guest posts: These usually cost around $300 per link at the absolute lowest, because guest posting usually requires entire articles to be written on behalf of the client.
Niche edits: These usually cost around $225 or more per link, because they need little (if any) content creation. Instead, they’re usually pasted directly into articles that have already been written.
Like all good things in life, the really high-quality link-building agencies are going to charge a bit on the higher side, since they’ll (hopefully) be conducting manual outreach, creating high-quality content, and building relationships with authoritative sites.
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As you’re about to see, in-house link building tends to cost significantly more than white label link building. Here’s a high-level monthly cost breakdown:
Personnel costs (salaries for at least one link-building specialist and one content writer): $10,000-$27,500
Tools and software (subscriptions for content creation tools, outreach software, and SEO tools): $250-$850
Training and development (costs for initial and ongoing employee training): $333-$833
Miscellaneous costs (expenses for outreach campaigns, office supplies, and utilities): $667-$1,917
Grand total monthly cost: $11,250-$31,100
It’s pretty clear that white label link building is almost always the right choice for digital marketing agencies—that is, unless your agency is planning on building a massive amount of links every month.
Doing some quick math, we can see that, at the average price of around $300 per link, you’d need to build almost 40 links per month for your clients before hiring an in-house team begins to save you money.
So here’s the bottom line:
If you want link building to be a main part of your agency’s services, then hiring an in-house team will pay off over time with enough client volume.
However, if you need to build links here and there for some select clients, white label link building will save you tremendous amounts of time and money.
As it turns out, white label link building comes with a host of benefits beyond just saving money—both for your clients, and for you.
Elimination of Hidden Costs
People often wonder why a client would choose to build links through a digital marketing agency, if that agency is just going to outsource anyway. Wouldn’t it be much cheaper for the client to cut out the middleman and just work directly with the link-building agency? In many cases, yes—but in others, it’s not exactly that simple.
Working directly with a link-building agency incurs a whole host of hidden costs, including:
Time spent finding and vetting agencies;
Ensuring the strategy fits with overall marketing goals;
Monitoring the quality of links;
Dealing with communication issues.
If a client instead chooses to work with a broad digital marketing agency they can trust, all of these annoying administrative tasks will be taken care of for them. For many clients, the additional monetary cost easily justifies the reduction in coordination and overall hassle.
And that brings us to another important point: If you do decide to outsource to a link-building agency, don’t feel like you need to keep it a secret from your clients. As long as you make the value-add crystal clear, most clients won’t have a problem with you outsourcing.
Now let’s come at this from your point of view. Why would you choose to pay someone else to build links for your clients, when you could probably just have your in-house team get it done for less money?
In the same way we saw above, the benefits that come with outsourcing to a link-building agency usually more than make up for the extra monetary cost.
When you outsource link-building, you’re tapping into the knowledge of a team of experts who quite literally do nothing but build links for a living. This is by far the biggest benefit of white label link building.
Let’s imagine you were going to try and build all your clients’ links in-house. Unless you and your team are all 200+ IQ geniuses (which, hey, you might be), you’re going to have to do a lot of learning. What types of links work best for building authority? Which work best for increasing page views? And so on.
In fact, the learning curve might get so steep that you look into hiring a team who specializes in link building. But unless link building is a service you want to offer all your clients all the time, that will be a lot of onboarding and a lot of paychecks, just for a couple of links here and a couple of links there.
With white label link building, you’ll have access to a team of bona fide link-building experts whenever you need them, without the added burden of hiring the team yourself. So, not only does white label link building allow you to build top-quality links that accomplish your clients’ marketing objectives—it allows you to save money while you do so.
White label link building can also give your agency much faster turnaround times—which is never a downside as far as your client is concerned. This is because it allows both your agency and the link-building agency to focus on your core competencies.
For you, that would be communication with your client, overall strategy, and standard online marketing methods like ads. For the link-building agency, that would be crafting guest posts, finding opportunities for niche edits, and reaching out to the linking websites for placements.
By dividing responsibilities, both your agency and the link-building agency can work simultaneously without overburdening your team. This parallel workflow speeds up the entire process, leading to quicker project completion, faster delivery of results to your clients, and increased time savings.
Finally, white label link building allows you to easily scale link production up or down depending on the specific needs of your clients. This gives you the flexibility to handle large projects and build links for multiple clients at a time.
If a client requires an intensive link-building campaign to boost their SEO, you can easily ramp up efforts without the need to hire additional staff or train existing team members. This flexibility allows you to handle sudden increases in demand without compromising on quality or turnaround times.
With white label link building, you’re effectively shifting the burden onto the link-building firm to allocate resources, prioritize tasks, and ensure that all clients receive the attention they need. This means you can take on more clients and larger projects without the risk of overextending your team.
White label link building offers digital marketing agencies a cost-effective and efficient way to provide high-quality link-building services. By outsourcing to specialized agencies, your marketing agency can save on the annoyingly high costs of in-house link-building teams and tools.
This white label approach also gives your agency the ability to provide your clients with higher quality links. You’ll be able to work with expert link builders, achieve faster turnaround times, and scale demand up or down without the need for additional hires.
Clients will benefit from reduced administrative burdens and elimination of hidden costs, while agencies will make their clients ever happier by delivering top-tier results.
Overall, white label link building is a smart choice for agencies looking to enhance their services without incurring high costs or compromising quality.
Leaning towards white label link building?
As it happens, that’s a service we provide at Profit Engine.
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