White Label SEO Pricing: The Real Reseller Margin Maths

A client pays you £1,500 a month for SEO. Your delivery cost is £752. You did none of the work yourself.

Those aren't made-up numbers. They come off a live wholesale price list, and by the end of this article you'll know exactly how the build was put together.

Most articles about white label SEO pricing stop at "mark it up 2x and you'll be fine." That's useless when you're sat in front of a proposal working out whether £1,500 a month is a good deal or a slow way to lose money.

So here's the actual maths: what to charge, where the margin comes from, how to package it, what to tell your client, and the point where hiring beats buying wholesale.

Key Takeaways

• Wholesale SEO is priced per unit, not in monthly tiers. That means you set the retainer and buy delivery against it, so your margin is a decision you make rather than a number your supplier hands you.
• A £1,500 retainer built from six DR 30+ placements and two 1,000-word articles costs £752 wholesale. That's a 49.9% gross margin with zero headcount.
• Markup multiples should go up as unit price goes down. A £99 citation package can carry 3x. A £5,499 PR campaign cannot.
• Publishing your client-facing prices doesn't expose your margin, because clients can't see your wholesale cost. It does shorten your sales cycle.
• Hiring only wins once you're spending roughly £3,500 a month on one service line, consistently, with a full pipeline behind it.

Forget Retainer Tiers. Wholesale SEO Is Priced Per Unit.

Most people looking for white label SEO pricing expect a Bronze, Silver and Gold table. £500, £1,000, £2,000 a month, tick the boxes.

Good wholesale suppliers don't work that way. Everything is priced per placement, per article, per campaign or per package. No contracts, no minimums, no monthly commitment.

That looks like missing information. It isn't. It's the whole reason reselling works.

When your supplier sells you tiers, your margin is fixed by whoever wrote the tier. You buy the £1,000 package, sell it for £2,000, done. Your ceiling is their pricing decision.

When your supplier sells you units, the retainer number is yours. You quote the client, decide the delivery mix, and keep the spread. Two clients on £1,500 can have completely different cost bases.

You stop being a middleman on someone else's product and start being the one who prices the work.

The £1,500 Retainer, Costed Line by Line

Here's the build from the intro, using real wholesale figures.

USD figures throughout are indicative only. We converted at £1 = $1.27; check the live rate before you quote.

That £1,500 (roughly $1,900) sits right in the middle of the market. Ahrefs surveyed 439 SEO service providers and found agencies charge an average of $3,209 a month, with the single most common band being $501 to $1,000. You're comfortably sellable at this number and still well below what a mid-size agency asks.

One thing that trips people up: a 100% markup is a 50% margin, not a 100% one. In the table above, £748 profit on £752 of cost is a 99.5% markup. Same money, two different figures. Never mix them up in a forecast.

Push the retainer to £2,500 for a local client and the maths gets better, not worse:

Local SEO carries fatter margins because the delivery units are cheap and the perceived value is high. A client who gets found in the map pack does not care that the citation package cost £99.

Markup Ranges by Service (And the Rule Most Agencies Get Backwards)

These are starting points, not survey data. Adjust for your market and your positioning.

Now look at the pattern. The multiple falls as the unit price rises.

Most agencies do the opposite. They apply one flat 2.5x across the board, then wonder why nobody buys the digital PR campaign. At 2.5x, that £5,499 campaign lands at £13,750, which is a number that goes to a procurement committee. At 1.82x it lands at £9,995, which a marketing director can approve on their own.

Here's the principle: cheap units can carry big multiples because the client is buying an outcome, not a line item. Expensive units get scrutinised, compared and negotiated. Price them on absolute profit instead of percentage.

That £9,995 PR campaign still nets you £4,496 on a single sale. A 45% margin on a big number beats a 60% margin on a number nobody signs.

If you also want the buyer-side view of these figures, our guide to what link building costs breaks down what clients pay for links and why. This article is the other side of that same table.

Retainer or Per Project? Package It So the Margin Survives

In the Ahrefs data, 78.2% of SEO providers charge a monthly retainer and 48.9% do per-project work. Most do both, and there's a clean split.

Retainer for anything ongoing. Link acquisition, content, local SEO maintenance. Predictable revenue, and it lets you smooth delivery across months.

Per project for campaigns with a defined end. Digital PR, a one-off citation build, a content sprint before a launch. Clients accept a bigger single number when it's tied to an event.

Three packaging rules that protect the margin:

1. Sell a scope band, not a unit count. "Authority building, 6 to 8 quality placements a month" gives you room to shift the mix when a DR 30+ site turns you down and you need a DR 20+ instead. "10 DR 40+ links a month" hands the client your cost structure and locks you to one supplier's price forever.
2. Never itemise wholesale units on the invoice. Your invoice line is "Monthly SEO retainer." One line. The moment a client sees "6 x blogger outreach," they will google what that costs.
3. Build in a buffer month. Placements slip. A DR 50+ site takes six weeks instead of three. If your retainer maths only works when every unit lands on time, it doesn't work.

The Transparency Play That Wins Deals

Here's the counterintuitive bit, and it's the one most agencies get wrong.

TrustRadius has run its B2B Buying Disconnect research for years, and the number one thing buyers say they want changed about the buying process is the same every time: more transparent pricing. Not better features. Not faster demos. Prices they can see.

Most agencies still hide behind "contact us for a custom quote." That's a filter, and it filters out the wrong people. The prospect who can't find a price doesn't email you. They find a competitor who published one.

Publishing your client-facing prices does not expose your margin. Your client sees £249 per placement. They have no idea whether you paid £99 or £199 for it. The only person who could work it out is a competitor who's already in the same market and already knows.

What you get instead is a shorter sales cycle, fewer unqualified calls, and a much easier conversation when someone does book. They've already accepted the number.

Note the distinction that matters: transparent about price is not the same as transparent about supplier. You can publish a full rate card and never mention who fulfils the work. Those are separate decisions.

This is also why the maths in this article is possible at all. Wholesale prices published openly, per unit, no gate.

Have a look at the full white label SEO rate card and run your own numbers against your current retainers.

What You Actually Have to Tell Your Client

There's no legal obligation to disclose that you use a white label partner. That's the plain answer, and most articles refuse to give it.

But there are three things worth getting right:

Check your own contract. Plenty of agency MSAs contain a subcontracting clause the agency owner has never read. If yours requires notification, follow it.

Never claim it's in-house when asked directly. If a client asks "do you do this yourselves?", lying is the only genuinely damaging move here. "We deliver through a specialist partner network, and we manage quality and strategy" is true, professional, and ends the conversation.

Own the quality control. You're the one on the hook. Review every placement before it goes to the client. If a link lands on a site you wouldn't be happy explaining, that's your problem to fix before anyone sees it.

Clients rarely object to outsourcing in principle. They object to surprises and to being oversold. Handle those two things and the delivery model stops being a risk.

When Hiring Beats Reselling

There is a point where in-house is genuinely cheaper. It's further away than most agency owners think.

An SEO executive in the UK averages £27,384 a year according to Indeed's salary data, drawn from 368 reported salaries. Add employer National Insurance, pension contributions, software, a desk and the management time you'll spend, and the real fixed cost clears £2,500 a month before that person has built a single link.

That same £2,500 buys you 25 DR 30+ placements at wholesale, with change left over. Every single month. No sick days, no holiday cover, no notice period.

The agency profitability data makes the same argument from the other direction. Promethean Research found the average digital agency ran a 13% after-tax net margin in 2025, while the average project margin among agencies that track it was 35%. That 22-point gap is overhead. And the pattern by size is stark: studios under 10 employees averaged 19% net margin, while agencies with 50 or more averaged 8%.

Headcount is the thing that eats agency margin. Reselling is how you grow revenue without growing that cost base.

So when does hiring actually win?

• Consistent volume in one service line. If you're reliably spending £3,500 or more a month on link acquisition alone, and your pipeline says that continues, a hire starts to compete.
• Work that needs deep client context. Technical SEO on a complex platform, CRO, migration planning. Anything where knowing the client's business is most of the job.
• You're building something to sell. Delivery capability shows up in a valuation. A supplier relationship doesn't.

Everything else, particularly anything commoditised, repeatable and volume-driven, is cheaper to buy than to build. That's most link building, most content, and nearly all local SEO. Our SEO reseller programme exists for exactly that gap.

FAQ

What margin should I make on white label SEO?

Aim for 50% gross margin as a floor on retainer work. Anything under 30% leaves no room for account management, revisions or a client who churns in month three. Small-unit services like citations and content can comfortably hold 60% or more.

Do I have to tell my clients I use a white label supplier?

No, unless your own contract requires it. But never deny it if asked directly. Framing it as a specialist partner network with you managing strategy and quality is honest and lands well.

Should I mark up every service by the same percentage?

No. Use higher multiples on cheap units and lower multiples on expensive ones. A flat markup makes your small services underpriced and your big campaigns unsellable.

Is it cheaper to hire an in-house link builder?

Only above roughly £3,500 a month of consistent link spend. Below that, the fixed cost of salary, National Insurance, pension and tools buys you fewer placements than wholesale does, and it doesn't flex when a client leaves.

How do I stop clients from working out my markup?

Don't itemise wholesale units on invoices, and sell scope bands rather than fixed unit counts. Your client sees a retainer and a set of outcomes, not a shopping list.

The Short Version

Reselling works because wholesale is priced per unit and retainers are priced by you. That gap is your business. A £1,500 retainer built for £752 is a 50% margin with no headcount attached, and the numbers get better as you move into local SEO and content.

Run your own retainers against a real wholesale rate card and see where you actually sit. You can price a build in about ten minutes using our link building pricing.

Which of your current clients would look different once you've run the maths?