Depending on which industry report you believe, the size of the SEO market is roughly $80 billion.
It’s never been easier to start your own digital marketing agency, but that doesn’t mean you should.
The very fact that the market has such low barriers to entry should have you questioning how you might come into a very saturated space and carve out an effective niche such that you could make ample revenue to scale. Low barriers to entry and high competition were listed as industry “weaknesses” in the SWOT analysis provided in our recent digital marketing industry report.
But, for the savvy salesperson and experienced marketer there are always opportunities, particularly where poor execution has soured the taste for businesses who may have hired fly-by-night service providers in the past.
If you have a unique edge, a story, a competitive advantage or a network of connections in a lucrative niche, then there may be a justifiable entry into the digital marketing fray.
And, if you’re looking to scale your digital marketing business processes immediately and quickly, so you can focus ON your business, rather than working IN your business in the early days, it may make sense to outsource SEO functions of client service execution and management. That’s where white label SEO and white label digital marketing come in.
In this post, we discuss the eight best digital marketing services you can outsource via white/private label via an experienced SEO reseller.
Anyone who has spent time in content marketing knows that it’s very tough to find a good blog writing service, especially if you want to do it right and do it well.
This is one of the reasons it can be expensive.
But, the understanding that new, fresh and engaging content is critical for SEO & digital marketing should make you–the marketer–the chief evangelist of writing custom content for blog posts, landing pages and case studies.
However, if you’re the chief evangelist, when are you going to have time to devote several hours a day to plunking your keyboard?
That’s where custom private label content writing services come in.
Outsourcing your blogging and other content writing is a great way to get the content you need while still managing and growing your business.
You may find yourself asking,
What should I be paying my blog writers?
Numerous platforms exist for finding outsourced content (e.g. Upwork, Freelancer, etc.). However the range in the price of content can range widely, especially if you’re paying a per-word content rate.
You’ll see ranges from $0.02 per word to $1.00 (not kidding) per word and everything in between.
And while the mantra, “you get what you pay for” applies here, don’t forget that when hiring from freelancer websites, you’ll need to spend time vetting and filtering for things like quality, timeliness, responsiveness and overall contractor fit. Sometimes agencies can be the faster route as they have done this already.
However, don’t forget, they also take their cut, so a premium will be baked-in. However, they will also likely be more able to scale when client demand, processing complex project requirements with an entire partner team, rather than a one man band.
Like its more legitimate sister content writing, quality link building also requires quality content writing, but its so much more than that. So, as a digital agency owner, once you’ve fully mastered the art of hiring the best content writers, if you don’t work through a private label provider, you will need to implement even more internal processes to scale up your link building, including:
Not to worry, we discuss this process in greater detail in our Ultimate Link Building Guide for SEO.
Perhaps the biggest issue with quality link building is finding quality publishers without spam issues and whose sites don’t sit on some massive private blog network (PBN).
The solution for the would-be digital marketing startup: hire a white label link building provider and resell SEO.
When we first started in this business (even before social media and certainly before mobile marketing), there were only a couple of true market leading pay-per-click providers in the industry that truly added value.
Paid digital media is more than just Google and Yahoo these days.
Today’s media landscape is far more complex. Knowing where to put your client ad dollars will require a detailed understanding of both your clients’ ideal customer persona, including where they are spending their time and how to target them.
Furthermore, you’ll be required to not only know everything about the client so you can target them with paid media on the platforms they are using, but also be able to report back to your client the ROI and other KPIs of the campaigns you are running on various platforms and mediums.
And, did we mention today’s paid ad mediums could include:
Each platform will require its own expertise for things like retargeting and persona matching, making it impossible for a single operator to be a true expert in any one platform.
This is where hiring a paid digital media management firm will be essential to meet your client needs while still scaling your digital marketing agency.
Shameless self promotion: take a look at our solutions for paid marketing by visiting PPC.co.
An SEO audit is like a health and wellness check for your client’s website. A complete audit is the first step in on-boarding and processing of new accounts.
Starting a client SEO campaign without an SEO audit is like treating the symptoms of a malignant problem (in this case, lack of site traffic) without running a full check-up to find out what disease(s) need to be targeted. It’s like suggesting medication for malaria when someone has COVID.
First, discover the malady, then treat, not the reverse.
What’s included in a white label SEO audit?
Any good SEO knows that an extensive SEO audit is great for the following reasons:
Finally, any good white label provider will not only perform the audit, but provide an extensive audit report on the findings, including suggestions on how the audit data can be used to improve a website’s performance. The best providers of such reports will give them in a sexy format with a completely editable PPTX file, devoid of any identifiable information, allowing an agency owner to simply include a logo and send the report findings to the client in a PDF format. We report all of our findings through our clients’ custom SEO drive account.
Once an initial audit is performed, there are typically dozens of areas that will require technical on-site assistance, including:
When a full SEO audit reveals issues in nearly every area listed above, no single culprit may be the cause of an indexing and ranking issue. Therefore, all issues should be addressed before any off-site work occurs. You have to clean up your site before others may find it valuable. And while most of these areas are to play to the search engines, many impact the user experience, which can have an impact on leads and sales, depending on the business.
A full white label solution should be able to not only help make the suggestions, but dive deep into code-level issues, extracting needed fixes that may be complex (e.g. 301 redirects and mixed HTTPS content issues).
With the proliferation of digital experiences, there is no shortage of what even the smallest businesses with minimal budgets can accomplish. For instance, today’s SMBs can more easily create websites and mobile applications than ever before. Here are some considerations when choosing a white label website development or application development agency:
When it comes to digital marketing and online experiences, there is often a split between the technical (left brain) and the creative (right brain). Without both, a client’s digital strategy will be dead before it begins.
Some agencies will focus on the creative (website look, feel and experience) to the exclusion of the technical (see on-site optimization above).
Both are critical for winning in today’s heavily-crowded online world.
We have taken over the digital marketing of sites that look fantastic, but are missing all the technical SEO. So, if you find a website design agency you are comfortable white labeling, make sure they also have the SEO chops to execute on more than just a pretty face. You want the site’s beauty to go skin deep.
While we are not in the SEO or martech software game, a host of solutions are available via white label to make your reports, analysis and even your website be the best client experience possible. Here are a few of the white label SEO & digital marketing software solutions we have used and suggest for scaling your agency:
While this list is not exhaustive, we have personally experimented and used each of these providers in the past and have found each to have their own strengths and weaknesses, which we will expound on in future blog posts here on the blog. It is sufficient to note that a myriad of existing solutions exist for making your client management in SEO and digital marketing a breeze.
For instance, we use SEOptimer for many of the SEO tools available on our site. While it has its deficiencies it remains one of our biggest sources for top-of-the-funnel leads.
We have tried to compartmentalize many of the pieces that should be included in a holistic digital marketing campaign, fully white-labeled. However, solidifying on a solution for each will take time and effort in its own right.
You’ll need to vet providers and experts in each of the areas mentioned above, plugging each in to your own client processes. Or, you could go with a fully-managed digital marketing service, allowing you to manage your clients in a hands-off way.
When it comes to private labeling as an agency owner, there are a myriad of available options. Finding the client who needs digital marketing services is the first and most critical step, but executing on an overall SEO and digital marketing strategy for the client is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. Once you learn how to sell SEO, let us be your digital marketing back-office!