White-label SEO

White-label SEO that does not embarrass you

Most agencies have tried a white-label partner and stopped. The reasons are consistent: the work was templated and shallow, the reporting needed rewriting before a client could see it, deadlines moved, and quality changed depending on who happened to be assigned that month.

All of those are process problems rather than skill problems, which is why the first phase of any arrangement I take on is standardisation rather than delivery.

Standardisation is the actual fix

When an agency tells me delivery is slipping, I usually find that every account is being run differently. Different audit format, different reporting, different implicit definition of what the retainer includes. Nothing can be systematised, so everything takes as long as it takes, and the founder becomes the only person who knows what is owed to whom.

So we agree one audit format, one report template and one written definition of a monthly retainer at each service tier. That alone usually resolves half the problem before I have done any search work at all.

What monthly delivery looks like

Technical

Crawl and indexation monitoring, Core Web Vitals tracking against field data, structured data maintenance and fixes shipped or written as developer tickets with acceptance criteria. Technical work is where most agencies are thinnest, because it needs someone who can read a stack trace as well as a rankings report, and it is the highest-value part of most retainers.

Content

Briefs your writers can execute against, or drafts if you would rather I wrote them. Either way, briefs specify the search intent, the questions to answer, the entities to reference and the internal links to include. A brief that says “write 1,500 words about X” produces content that ranks for nothing.

Reporting written for a client

This is the part that decides whether an agency keeps a white-label partner. A report should say what was done, what changed, what it means commercially and what happens next, in language a business owner reads without translation.

Rankings belong in an appendix. Sessions and enquiries belong at the top. And every report I send is accompanied by a short briefing note for the account manager: the two or three things worth mentioning on the call, and any question the client is likely to ask with the answer already written.

Escalation with recommendations

When something needs a decision, it comes to you as a recommendation with reasoning and a cost, not as an open question. Account managers should be able to take a decision to a client in one message rather than convening a technical discussion.

How the commercial side works

Per account per month for retainers, fixed price for one-off audits, migrations and recoveries. You mark it up however suits your business. I do not price by the hour and I do not want visibility into your client pricing.

I will sign a non-solicitation agreement without being asked twice, and I will never contact a client of yours directly. The arrangement only functions if you never have to think about that, so it is worth stating plainly.

What I need from you

A clear scope per account, a single decision-maker on your side, and honesty about what has already been promised to the client. The one thing that reliably breaks a fulfilment relationship is discovering in week three that the client was sold something outside the agreed scope. Tell me and we will work out how to cover it.

Access, without a shared password document

Fulfilment arrangements often start with someone emailing a spreadsheet of logins, which is a problem for both of us. The workable pattern is that every account belongs to the client, your agency holds owner or admin rights, and I am granted named access at the level the work actually requires. Nothing is shared, everything is revocable in one click, and when an account leaves you there is no cleanup beyond removing a user.

It also means I can never accidentally become a single point of failure. If I am unavailable, you remove my access and hand the account to someone else without needing anything from me, which is a reasonable thing for you to insist on and something I would want in your position.