You launched a marketing firm of your own because you are passionate about providing a specific type of marketing service — not SEO. However, most single-channel marketers eventually expand to offer multiple types of services that complement one another — and SEO is always a critical service to offer clients in the digital age. Because you cannot afford to hire a full staff of SEO experts, you use SEO resellers to deliver clients the high-quality white-label SEO services they need and deserve.
SEO reselling is a major development in the world of digital marketing because it allows marketing agencies like yours to improve their offerings and ensure greater success with marketing strategies and campaigns. Unlike SEO freelancers or consultants, SEO resellers are fully equipped SEO agencies of their own, which can offer a diverse range of SEO services and scale their service as your agency grows. Often, resellers lack the infrastructure to attract and maintain clients, so they benefit from your relationship by gaining access to your paying clients.
In most cases, SEO partners have no contact with a firm’s clients. Your agency will continue to interact with your clients as usual, but you will have the opportunity to sell your clients SEO services that they want and need. Your SEO reseller might task you with collecting certain types of information or drafting specific reports to help guide their SEO strategies and practices, but in general, you will have full control over communications with your clients. As a result, it is unlikely that your clients will realize that the SEO you are providing comes from a third-party provider — so, should you tell them?
You Might Want to Tell Your Clients If…
There are a few instances when you might want to maintain ultimate transparency with your clients with regard to your use of an SEO reseller. Those instances include:
1. You Want a Partnership With Your Reseller
Most marketing agencies that utilize SEO reselling services want full control over the client relationship, but some marketers simply do not have enough SEO experience to sell SEO packages to their clients let alone integrate an SEO strategy into a broader digital marketing campaign.
If you need more SEO knowledge, you might want an SEO partnership where your SEO partner can explain different SEO services, collect useful information from clients, and support your business. Because clients will be working with your SEO provider, you must be clear about using SEO reselling services.
2. You Don’t Trust the Quality of Your Reseller
Not all SEO resellers are created equal. Unfortunately, many marketing agencies sign contracts with resellers before they understand their practices and processes, which means that their clients could already be suffering from unreliable reselling services. If you have any reason to doubt the quality of the reseller you are working with, you might let your clients know that you are working with a new service provider. Then, clients might be more forgiving of SEO mistakes, as they know that it is not your agency but your provider that lets them down. To account for any loss in quality of service, you might discount your SEO rates.
3. Your Clients Have Exceedingly Specialized Needs
Plenty of marketing agencies specialize within certain industries to ensure they acquire the knowledge and skill their clients need to accomplish goals. Even so, some clients have such small niches that they require unique services from their marketing partners. In these instances, you might want to reveal to your clients that you utilize an outside provider of SEO which might have less familiarity with their niche than your agency. Then, you and your client can work more closely with the SEO reseller to ensure that strategies and practices are appropriate to the industry and the individual client’s goals.
In most cases, you do not need to reveal to your clients that you participate in an SEO reselling program. As long as you and your clients are happy with the SEO services provided by your SEO reseller, everyone can benefit from the extra success.
