White label link-building services: How to do it right

If you’re a marketing or digital agency, you’ll know that link building is the most important part of search engine optimization (SEO), but it’s also extremely time-consuming. That’s where white label link building comes in.

You’ll also know just how time-consuming and resource-intensive it is.

Just building a single half-decent link can take hours of phone calls, planning, writing and follow-ups. 

Unfortunately, your client probably hasn’t asked for just one link. They need tens or even hundreds.

If this happens and you don’t have a dedicated in-house team, link building can quickly start to drain your resources.

White label link-building services are a great way to overcome this. 

At LinkBuilder.io, we’ve developed a process to help some of the world’s best SEO agencies deliver powerful links to their clients to ultimately accelerate their results. 

You’ll place high-quality links quicker, and you’ll be able to spend more time keeping your clients happy.

Key takeaways  White label link building services help agencies to build high-quality links without a dedicated in-house team.Outsourcing link building puts it in the hands of specialists and allows agencies to provide clients with more and better quality links.Agencies should be wary when seeking a white label link builder. There are lots of link-building scams looking to make a quick buck off of inexperienced people.White label link building services use HARO, guest blogs, PR links and linkable assets to place high-quality links.

What is white label link building?

White label link building refers to the practice where a digital marketing agency subcontracts out link building to a specialist agency.

The customer agency presents the links to their client as if they had built them.

White label link building is a common practice because link building forms an essential part of most SEO campaigns. However, it requires specialized skills that many digital marketing or SEO agencies don’t have. 

You should consider using white label link building services if:

✔️Your agency has been asked to build quality links by a client, but you don’t have the in-house skills to do so. 

✔️You have an in-house link-building team but it cannot satisfy the high demand.

✔️You want a low-risk way to test offering link-building services.

✔️You want to offer link building but can’t afford to employ people to do so.

Why use a white label link-building service?

At LinkBuilder.io, we work with some of the world’s leading SEO and content marketing companies to provide incredible backlinks for their clients. 

Some benefits of working with a white label link-building service include:

💪 Access to highly-experienced professionals

Specialist agencies are staffed by people who have been building links every day for years. They instinctively know how to place great links and they can do it fast.

💸 Less investment required

It takes many years to nurture an effective link-building team. Learning to do it yourself or teaching others takes a lot of time and hiring an in-house link-building team is expensive. Using a white label service takes away these issues.

🏗️ Ready-made infrastructure

Link building involves contacting other quality websites, finding the right person to speak to, negotiating prices, and pitching ideas. This is hard work that takes time. Specialist link-building companies are already set up to do these things. For example, they have relationships in place with major websites. And if they don’t, they have people dedicated to forming those relationships quickly and successfully.

👍 There when you need it.

Employing in-house link-building specialists isn’t worth it unless you have a constant stream of work to keep them busy. Using white label link-building experts allows you to access experts as and when you need them.

🚀 High-quality backlinks.

Good link-building agencies get business based on their reputation. Because of this, they only use techniques that adhere to Google’s guidelines. They strive to generate high-quality backlinks that will improve your rankings and last a long time. 

🔍 You focus on what you do best.

Paying someone else to do link building for you gives you more time to focus on your core role. You’ll have more time to keep clients happy.

📈 Scalable

White label link building allows you to take on as many new link-building projects as you like. It also makes it easier to deal with surprise requests from clients. 

🔥 Full-service

Subcontracting specialisms like link building allows you to provide clients with a broader range of services, making you more valuable to them.

Agency or freelancer?

Link building agencies aren’t the only option for providing a white label service. You could also hire a freelancer. 

Hiring a freelancer has both advantages and disadvantages compared to working with an agency.

Here are the pros and cons of using a freelance link builder:

Pros:

✔️Cheaper.

✔️More flexible.

Cons:

⚠️Hard to gauge quality.

⚠️Limited expertise and resources.

A good freelancer can guide you through the link-building process in the same way that an agency would. 

If you want to assess freelance link builders, websites like Fiverr and Upwork are great places to start.

How to choose a white label link-building agency

Here are three steps for finding a good quality white label link-building service.

1. Understand link building.

A good link-building agency will do everything for you. But it’s still important to understand the basic ideas and processes behind link building. 

This way, you can communicate better with the agency and your client. You’ll also be able to tell if you are getting value for money. 

You should understand how the following terms are relevant to link building:

✔️Domain Authority.

✔️Organic traffic.

✔️Site relevance.

✔️Search intent.

✔️Nofollow/dofollow.

✔️Quality/poor quality links.

2. Check that your client is ready.

Before you contact a link-building agency, you need to be clear about what you and your client want to achieve. You need to have a clear SEO strategy and know how your link-building efforts will contribute to it.

It’s also useful to understand why your client’s site isn’t ranking higher. Reasons for this could include:

• Their content is good but needs to attract more links.
• Their competitors have higher Domain Authority and they need an alternative way to rank.
• The pages that rank above them have more links.

If most of your client’s content ranks outside the top 100 pages on search engines, this is a sign that it is too early for link building. 

There are two things you could do to help them in this situation.

✍️ Improve their existing content: Do this by seeing what content currently ranks for the keywords they want to target. Try to work out why Google likes this content and then work out how your own website can improve on this.

🔑 Find better search terms through keyword research: Use an SEO tool and do keyword research to find high-traffic, low-competition search terms. Produce content that targets these keywords. It takes around six months for content to rank properly on search engines, so it’s important that your clients don’t expect instant results.

3. Find a good link-building agency.

Next, we’re going to look at some of the key criteria for finding a good link-building agency.

✔️Case studies

Does the agency have a proven track record of placing high-quality links?

At LinkBuilder.io, we showcase some incredible link-building case studies and have a Clutch profile with verifiable reviews from clients.

It’s important to select a company not just based on cost, but someone who can deliver exceedingly high-quality links that you’re proud to show off to your clients. 

It’s imperative to ensure that your partner has a tried & tested link-building process when it comes to delivering links for your clients. 

✔️Real-time reporting

If you’re trusting another agency to produce work for your clients, then you need a way of checking in on them. The best white label link-building agencies provide reporting systems that demonstrate the value of links built so far and provide progress updates. 

✔️End-to-end service

A good white label link building service should be able to take all aspects of link building off your hands—from strategy and research to placing links and reporting their value. 

✔️Good links pointing to their own website

Link-building agencies should practice what they preach. They should have many quality niche-relevant links pointing to their domain. You can check this by using an SEO tool like Ahrefs and looking at the number of referring domains they have.

✔️Realistic guarantees

A good white label link-building agency can rely on its process to build links. They should guarantee a minimum number of quality backlinks per month. But be wary of agencies that promise to place links on certain websites or whose guarantees seem too good to be true.

✔️Demonstrates best practices

Take a look at the agency’s blog and check that they are writing about the latest link building tactics and best practices. 

✔️Realistic prices

Link building services are expensive. If a link builder’s prices seem too good to be true then they probably are. A reasonable cost per link is between $300 and $500.

Beware of scams

Link building services are one of the most effective ways of improving a website’s search rankings. 

Because of this, there are lots of link-building scams looking to make a quick buck off of inexperienced people. 

Here are some common tactics from low-quality link builders:

Public Blog Networks (PBNs): These are networks of websites used to generate a large number of links to sites.

Link farms: These are websites that exist only to host links that people pay for. They are usually low-quality and full of irrelevant content.

Directory, comment or forum links: These kinds of links usually have no impact on your client’s rankings. They won’t harm it, but they’re certainly not worth paying for. 

Fake guest post services: These services build links by placing guest posts on PBNs and link farms. 

Conclusion

White label link building is a great way for agencies to outsource this key SEO component without having to manage it all in-house. 

It can make your agency’s workload more manageable and allows you to focus on keeping clients happy.