The ultimate guide to white label local SEO services

White label local SEO services are becoming a popular way for digital marketing professionals to deliver a specialized service without having to manage the work in-house.  
This strategy can give agencies and freelancers a valuable service to upsell to existing clients or a quicker path to onboarding more clients without having to worry about the increased workload.  
To help you decide whether or not working with a white label local SEO reseller is for you, we’ve created this ultimate guide so you know exactly what you’re getting into.

What are white label local SEO services?

White label local SEO services let digital marketing businesses offer local SEO services under their own brand while it’s actually managed by a third-party provider.  
Also known as local SEO reselling, it’s a way to grow an SEO or digital marketing business without needing the resources or know-how to do it for yourself.  
When you use a local SEO white label, everything you present to your clients will have your branding, logo, and colors, from customized dashboards to monthly reports. For digital marketing agencies and freelancers that want to increase their service offerings and revenue with minimal effort and expense, using a local SEO white label might be the way to go.  
Perhaps a client has asked for local SEO and you don’t feel confident you can help, or simply don’t have the time. Rather than letting them go to a competitor and risk them poaching your regular business from you, white label local SEO gives your client what they need while keeping them focused on a single point of contact.  
But with high monthly fees, using a local SEO white label leaves smaller margins than managing the work yourself with the help of tools that free up your time to focus on other areas of your business.

DIY local SEO services: While white label local SEO services are a great way to improve your service offerings to your clients, it might not leave you with the biggest profit margins. Semrush Local's Listing Management tool gives you a set of powerful features that makes managing local SEO for multiple clients a breeze while maintaining control over your services.

Different types of white label local SEO services

White label local SEO services offer everything that a standard local SEO provider does, meaning you can outsource 100% of the work, or just some of it.  
Local SEO resellers usually offer a white labeled domain for the dashboard to present to clients, so for all intents and purposes, it appears to the client to be a service offered by the agency/freelancer and not the reseller.  
Good white label local SEO services start with an audit, which should include (at the very least) an assessment of local rankings, listing distribution and backlinks, and a Google Business Profile score. If it’s a new local SEO campaign, the local SEO white label should conduct thorough local keyword research. White label SEO services may offer packages by the number of local keywords optimized for and tracked.  
Content creation can also be outsourced to white label SEO providers, with a certain number of blog posts delivered per month, as well as on-page local SEO improvements to existing content.  
A good local SEO reseller should also manage local listings distribution and commit to publishing a certain number of local citations ; this is usually done at the beginning of the campaign and monitored throughout. Top-quality listings: Another way to get your clients’ listings distributed to the most important directories is by leveraging Semrush Local's Listing Management tool , which will send out citations to 70+ directories and monitor them for inconsistencies and duplicates. 

Most local SEO white labels will take care of local link building. However, outsourced link building services can be a bit hit or miss, so it’s important to ask how these links will be obtained and get a guarantee that they won’t be low quality.  
White label SEO services might also manage technical SEO for your clients, running regular audits to identify things like broken links, missing meta-descriptions and duplicate content.  
Finally, you should be able to present your clients with regular reports, complete with your branding, that show them what they’re actually paying for. This should include (as a minimum), conversions, traffic data, new links obtained, and rankings. 

Visual reports: Reports are crucial for demonstrating to your clients that their investment is worthwhile. If you’d rather provide local SEO services yourself, Semrush Local's Map Rank Tracker tool offers an impressive set of reporting functions, from tracking Google Business Profile interactions to the Premium Location tool Heatmap, which shows local positions across your target area.

How to choose the right white label local SEO provider

If you’re offering services to clients that trust you to deliver on what you promise, you need to be sure that you’re not short changing them with a mediocre local SEO service—or you could lose their business altogether.  
Check client testimonials and make sure the local SEO white label has a proven track record of delivering results for clients.  
If the white label local SEO provider is eager to sign up with you without asking any questions about your clients, that’s a red flag. They might offer set packages, but they should want to understand a bit about the client they’re working for before agreeing to take them on.  
Assess how good their communication is in the initial discussion. If they take a while to get back to you before you commit, chances are that’s what the relationship will be like going forward.  
Before agreeing to work with a white label SEO service, see if you can get a free trial so you can check you’re happy with their platform and that it’s compatible with your clients CMS. Run an audit for your clients and make sure you’re happy with the customization options and the way the data is presented.  
Ultimately, you’ll be the one presenting the local SEO services as your own, so you have to be happy that the service is one that will maintain your brand's reputation and make your clients happy.

Buyer Beware: Not all white label local SEO services are created equal and some may offer an underwhelming cookie-cutter set of services that don’t consider the needs of individual clients. You might be better off using a local SEO tool from Semrush Local that allows you to manage your clients’ needs yourself, while saving you time on the more intensive work involved.

Growing a white label local SEO business

White label local SEO is a way to help you scale your digital marketing business with minimal upfront costs.  
You can also use white label local SEO to test the viability of offering such a service without having to hire in-house specialists or embarking on a steep learning curve to offer them yourself.  
Pricing is key when reselling local SEO services. You might want to offer pricing tiers depending on the level of service, or tailor your pricing to each client based on their individual needs. Either way, your margins will be a lot lower than if you were to offer local SEO services yourself using affordable tools to help you, so you’ll need a business plan to scale to the number of clients necessary to hit your revenue goals. 
Learn more about all things Local SEO by taking our Semrush Academy course .