21 Warning Signs You Are Dealing With a Low-Quality White Label SEO Reseller
If you are a marketing agency owner you know how much hard work goes into building your business in order to continue to grow and expand. Eventually, you get to the point when you start thinking of investing in digital marketing to increase your reach to new audiences and bring in new clients.
Perhaps you could spend the time learning how to do it yourself and even taken strides to improve your ranking through hiring an in-house SEO specialist, but do you really have that kind of time and money when you have a business to run?!
So you decide it’s best you leave it to the professionals, however, finding the right white label SEO reseller in the United States or Canada is no easy task! Every white label SEO agency will try to assure you they are the experts, and a lot of them will even make big promises, but to really know which company is best for your clients, it helps to recognize some of the warning signs.
What Are The Red Flags You Should Look Out For To Avoid Dealing With A Shady White Label SEO Reseller?
Selecting credible and qualified white label SEO experts can be a bit of an overwhelming task, and you may not know what qualifies the agency’s work as good or bad quality. Here are some warning signs the white label SEO company may not be as professional as you would expect and may just be giving you a run for your and your client’s money:
- Guarantee rankings on the 1st page of Google. Nobody can guarantee rankings! So if your white label SEO reseller is doing it, run away.
- Are underpriced or offer free trials. The reality is, SEO specialists like in any other field, get paid for the quality of work carried out. If white label marketing agency’s prices are too low, the margins just aren’t there to provide a quality effort.
- They do not answer your questions regarding technical or on-page SEO work or refuse to explain what they have been doing to your client’s website.
- They offer a cookie-cutter package without regard to your client’s specific business, industry or website needs. While this approach may work for certain smaller sites, it is recommended that each SEO campaign be at least somewhat tailored.
- Boast about getting thousands of backlinks for a certain amount of money. How they do this is mostly by paying other shady SEO companies that use black hat tactics to obtain them. In today’s search environment, the rule of thumb is Quality + Relevance > Quantity.
- Claim they can’t reveal their ‘trade secrets’ or over-rely on technical-sounding jargon. What’s the big secret? The answers should be easy to understand. There’s no need for long, drawn-out answers and the confusing terminology. You aren’t SEO-proficient, which means they should be able to explain to you what each tactic entails.
- They do not ask questions about your client’s business, industry, target geography or possible competitors (these are all important search factors).
- They plagiarize or duplicate content. Your white label SEO seller should provide your client with an effective and engaging reading experience for humans with content that is original, unique, relevant, and valuable. Not just for the sake of your SEO, but for the sake of your client’s website visitors.
- They claim to “know someone at Google”… *shrugs off*
- They insist on installing a link directory on your client’s website (Google wouldn’t like this, and it is a red flag for mischief)
- “One time” SEO website fix with no maintenance or upkeep.
- Use of ‘keyword stuffing’ in meta tags, titles, URLs, or content – another discredited practice.
- Pushes the importance of consistent blog articles for a local business, selling the idea that more content = more rankings. It takes unique blog content to rank high on Google. Crafted writing, helpful experience, or both, are a must. Good blogs require thoughtful and usually expensive writers. If their plan is to post a bunch of crappy blog posts, send them packing.
- Agreeing with everything the clients want: truth is, at the end of the day, white label SEO specialists are being paid to work with you and sometimes even with your client as consultants to recommend the client is moving in the right direction.
- Propose targeting easy SEO keywords your client is already rank highly for (such as their business name)
- Target keywords for SEO that no one is searching for, and have low or no search volume, then claiming this as a “win”.
- Creating links on webpages irrelevant to and outside your client’s geography (“Yelp in Kyiv, really?”)
- Creating profiles on community forums to create a link profile.
- Submitting your client’s site to ‘link farms’ or private blog networks – this is so 1990s and long since discredited.
- No monthly reporting. White label SEO providers should be accountable and should show you monthly reports on how their services that you hired them for are helping your client’s website get more traffic.
- Your client’s website gets penalized. A manual penalty from Google occurs when a website is in violation of Google’s recommended webmaster guidelines. This is the most obvious sign, and the hardest to come back from. If your client’s website has been penalized because of your white label SEO partner’s shady tactics, all you can do is find someone who can help you fix it.
Choosing the right white label SEO reseller can be one of the most pivotal decisions for your marketing business, as it can be a large commitment of resources and time. Since discovery through search is inherently vital to growing business success, you should keep an eye out for these warning signs, and permit asking lots of questions. The white label marketing agency you choose should want to work alongside you and have no problem answering any questions you might have. Otherwise, run!