Your clients keep asking for SEO. You can turn the work away, hire a specialist you cannot keep busy across three accounts, or have someone deliver it under your brand. This is how the third option works in practice.
The two delivery models
Fully white label. Everything arrives unbranded. Reports in your template, audits as editable documents, recommendations in your voice. The client never learns a third party exists, and all communication routes through you.
Best when you have account management capacity and want a clean margin. The cost is that you are the interpretation layer — every technical question passes through you, and if you cannot answer it, the round trip is visible to the client.
White label with client-facing support. The same delivery, but the specialist joins client calls under your brand, with your email address, introduced as your SEO lead. Common for pitches and quarterly reviews.
Best when the client needs technical depth you would rather not improvise. The risk is thin: the specialist is contractually representing you.
Most partnerships end up mixed — fully white label for routine months, specialist on the call for the quarterly review and any new pitch.
How the margin works
You buy wholesale, you sell retail, you keep the difference. Typical markups run 40% to 100%, driven mostly by how much account management you are doing.
Worked example on a £2,500 retail retainer:
- Wholesale delivery cost: £1,400
- Your account management time: roughly 3 hours a month
- Gross margin: £1,100, or 44%
That is a healthy number for revenue you were previously declining. The mistake to avoid is pricing off the wholesale cost plus a fixed percentage without accounting for your own time — clients who need weekly hand-holding erode the margin quickly, and the fix is pricing rather than resentment.
Sense-check your retail price against market benchmarks rather than against wholesale alone. Charging £1,800 for work that competitors sell at £3,000 leaves money on the table and can make the client suspicious.
What to put in the contract
Mutual non-solicit. They do not approach your clients; you do not approach their staff. Should survive the partnership by twelve months.
NDA covering client identity. Signed before you share anything about the account.
Defined scope per account. What is included, what is extra, how out-of-scope requests get priced. Ambiguity here is where partnerships sour.
Response time commitments. You have made promises to your client. Those need to be backed by commitments from your supplier.
Clear IP ownership. Content, audits and deliverables should belong to your client on payment, without ambiguity.
Exit terms. Notice period, handover format, and who holds account access. Assume the partnership will end at some point and write it accordingly.
What reliably breaks partnerships
1. Deals sold without consulting delivery. By far the most common cause. Someone promises page one in ninety days, the delivery team was never asked, and the miss damages your brand rather than theirs. Bring your supplier into the proposal — even fifteen minutes — before it goes out.
2. Margin pressure passed downward. Squeezing wholesale after signing means fewer hours on the account, which means worse results, which means a lost client. The saving is never worth it.
3. Unmanaged expectations about communication. If your client expects same-day answers and your supplier works to 48 hours, you absorb the gap personally until you burn out. Align these at the start.
4. No single point of contact. Partnerships with a different account manager per client generate exactly the coordination overhead white label was supposed to remove.
How to start
One account. Ideally a fixed-scope project rather than a retainer — a technical audit, a schema implementation, an internal linking audit. You find out how they think, write and communicate for a bounded amount of money and with limited client exposure.
If that goes well, move a retainer across. If it does not, you have lost one project rather than a client relationship.
Our white label programme is built to start exactly this way — one account, wholesale rate card up front, mutual non-solicit before anything is shared.
