I’ve had conversations with companies and SEO agencies directly outsourcing their white-label link building projects to developing countries like the Philippines, where a skilled team can deliver topically relevant backlinks at a lower cost.

Without building an internal outreach team, these agencies want to scale fast, meet client demands, focus on their core SEO strengths, and keep profit margins healthy. 

White label link building services allows them to do exactly that. They focus on client relationships, strategy, and reporting while their offshore team handles the heavy lifting: prospecting, outreach, content writing, and link placement. This setup works well for both sides and is becoming a common business model in the sEO industry.

In this guide, we’ll cover what white label link building is, who uses it, how it works, and waht to look for in a provider. If you’re an agency looking to grow without hiring, this guide is for you. 

What is White Label Link Building? 

White label link building is an offshore service where the SEO provider builds backlinks on behalf of another agency. The agency delivers the results to its client under its own brand, putting all the legwork for its link-building partner. 

Who Uses White Label Link Building Services?

White-label link building is widely used by service-based agencies that want to offer SEO without doing the actual link building work. These businesses resell link building under their own brand while a third-party provider does the research, outreach, and content placement.

Here are the most common types of users:

1. SEO Agencies

Some SEO agencies handle keyword research, technical audits, and content strategy but outsource link building to save time. Instead of fully hiring an outreach team, they work with a white-label partner to build the right types of backlinks at scale.

2. Digital Marketing Agencies

Agencies that focus on social media marketing, paid ads, or email marketing often add SEO to their mix of services. Since link building requires a separate skill set, they use white-label providers to deliver results without hiring more people and creating a new set of in-house processes to train link buliding specialists.

3. Web Design and Development Companies

Web agencies build websites and often get asked by clients how to rank better on search engines like Google (and show up on LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity). Instead of saying no or referring the client elsewhere, they offer link-building through a white-label provider and keep the business in-house. They operate this way to increase their client base and get more margins.

4. Freelancers and Solo Consultants

Freelancers who manage SEO for clients may not have the time to do outreach or write external content (“guest posts“) to acquire backlinks for their clients. With white-label support, they can take on more clients and deliver results faster.

5. Startups and Niche Service Providers

Smaller agencies or startups that are growing quickly may not yet have full SEO capabilities, as many are focused on product or service delivery, other marketing channels, and customer service. 

White-label link building lets them offer results-driven services while focusing on client relationships and sales. It also enables another B2B type of service (offering SEO services besides their core product offerings).

white label link building

Benefits of White Label Link Building for Agencies

White label link building gives agencies a clear path to grow their SEO services without increasing internal workload. It’s a practical way to meet client demands, keep operating expenses low, and improve performance—all under the agency’s brand. 

Below are the most important benefits of hiring a white-label link-building partner. 

Scale Without Hiring

Many agencies hit a ceiling because they lack the resources, team, and capabilities to handle high-volume link building. Hiring, training, and managing a full-time outreach and content team takes time and money, let alone taking months to fully systematize the process and quality of results.

White-label link building actually removes this barrier. Agencies can serve more clients, take on larger projects, and expand their offerings. This makes it easy to grow from 3 to 50 clients without changing internal operations. The partner handles execution, while the agency focuses on client acquisition, account management, and reporting.

Faster Project Completion

Link building involves many steps: link prospecting, backlink qualification, outreach, content creation, and outreach follow-ups. By leveraging white-label link building services, you take these steps systemized. They have outreach templates, active contact lists (relationships with publishers, bloggers, and journalists), and content teams ready to work.

You can report all lives links at the end of each month (as part of your SEO reports), avoiding delays that comes with lack of manpower and capabilities for in-house link building. 

Lower Costs and Better Margins

Building an internal team involves fixed costs: monthly salaries, software subscriptions (e.g., Ahrefs), training, and management overhead. White-label providers operate on a per-link or per-campaign basis, making the costs of outsourcing more flexible and predictable. 

Agencies can simply mark up the service and offer it to clients at a profit, increasing the overall revenue without adding extra burden to the team. 

Access to Experienced Link Building Experts

White label providers specialize in link building, many are fly-by-night companies, but there’s still a handful of best white label link building agencies like SharpRocket that truly has mastered the craft of link development. 

They have rigorious processes, systems, high-level capabilities, and inside-know hows for every industry, that strengthens their core service in providing the highest quality of backlinks. 

So, agencies gain access to this type of expert-level service without spending months building even the basic skills themselves, which ensures links meet the quality standards. 

Your Branding, Your Reputation

White label means the client never sees the third-party provider, this both takes pros and cons scenario, where if the agency fails to meet the link requirements, it could negatively affect the branding of the agency and failing to meet desired expectations and results.

However, if they hire the right white label link building partner, and it delivered what they agreed upon, it significantly impacts the agency’s reputation, building client trust even more, and avoids any confusion about who’s doing the work—this keep the agency’s brand front and center.

How It Works: The White Label Link Building Workflow

There’s nothing complicated with white-label link building. If follows a clear process, where the agency manages the client, the provider manages the links. The clients sees the results, but only the agency’s brand is visible. 

Here’s how the process usually works, step by step:

Step 1: The Agency Signs a Client for SEO Services

The agency offers SEO services to its clients, or upsells it from another service they already render. For instance, after working on a website revamp, they found issues to solve, by optimizing better their client’s website to help them gain more search traffic. 

As such, they offer a full SEO package that includes technical SEO, on-page SEO, content strategy, and link building. When a client signs up, the agency includes link building as part of the package, even if they don’t handle it in-house, or if they do, they don’t have the capability to scale the work.  

Step 2: The Agency Submits a Link Building Request to the Provider

The agency sends a request to the white label partner, which includes links that pass on certain link metrics (e.g. Ahrefs’ Domain Rating, organic traffic (estimate), topical relevance), as well as the number of links pointing to desired target pages. 

Some providers, with SEO consultants, suggest link targets or provide recommendations as to how many backlinks to build each month based on the client’s website domain authority and how fast to acquire links (“link velocity”). 

Step 3: The White Label Provider Handles Prospecting, Outreach and Content

The white-label link-building agency starts and executes the actual link building process, which includes:

  • Finding relevant websites in the client’s niche (link prospecting)
  • Qualifying backlink sources based on set link metrics
  • Reaching out to editors or site owners (email and other forms of link outreach methods.
  • Pitching for either link inclusion, link request, or value-add outreach forms (i.e. content, data, visual assets, co-marketing, etc..).

White label partners share a live dashboard or spreadsheet that shows every live link each week and provides a detailed backlink reporting at the end of every month (or agreed timeline for reporting). 

Different agreements between agency and provider has unique expectations, timelines, and deliverables in their own right. However, having a good workflow will help agencies stay efficient and effective, so they can focus more on agency growth, communication, and strategy. 

Risks and How to Avoid Bad Link-Building Providers

White label link building can certainly help your agency, but only if the provider delivers top quality. Bad links can negatively affect your clients’ rankings, trigger penalties, or lead to lost trust (and of course, waste of money and resources). 

Below are common risks and how to avoid them:

Spammy or Low-Quality Links

There are many fly-by-night agencies that offer cheap links, mostly placed on PBNs (private blog networks), link directories, or websites with poor content and low authority. These sites often exist only to sell backlinks and have no real audience or actual organic traffic (they’re not ranking by themselves for any relevant keywords). 

Make sure you ask for real examples of live backlinks before committing to a white label link building agency. Visit the websites to see if they are active, and topically relevant. You can use tools like Ahrefs to check the sample’s link hosted website, and see if they have organic traffic and decent backlink profiles. 

Irrelevant or Off-Niche Placements

Connected to what we mentioned earlier on link metrics, getting backlinks from unrelated websites weakens any SEO strategy and is only a pure waste of time. 

So, confirm if the white-label link-building service can provide backlinks that are topically relevant to your industry (either giving you actual live backlinks or case studies with industry-relevant clients). 

No Transparency in the Process

Some white-label link-building providers do not share where the links are placed, how they do outreach, or what the content looks like—all look suspicious. This lack of visibility makes it hard to measure the quality of their work or explain actual results to your clients. 

Work only with providers who offer full link reports with URLs, anchor texts, domain, relevance, organic traffic metrics, and placement context. Avoid providers who withhold key information. 

Missed Deadlines and Poor Communication

A provider who delays delivery or fails to respond to emails can hurt your workflow. Your client expects regular updates. If you don’t receive links on time, your agency’s credibility takes a hit.

So, start with a small test in order to evaluate responsiveness. You can ask about delivery timelines before signing any agreement. Check if they have a dedicated account manager or support channel, or directly you to talk to their agency’s founder or CEO, much like with how SharpRocket operates their white label link building services. 

Duplicate Content or AI-generated Junk

Some providers obnoxiously use low-quality AI content or duplicate articles to get links placed quickly, and more often than not, these articles are rejected by editors. They don’t contribute any value to the website’s SEO and its ability to be recognized as helpful content. 

Ask who writes the content (if they’re written by native English writers or are done in-house or completely outsourced). Review sample guest posts to check writing quality.

Best Use Cases: When White Label Link Building Makes Sense

White label link building fits where it needed the most. Here are some common scenarios where white label lin kbuilding provides strong support and practical advantages. 

During High-Growth Periods

When your agency signs multiple new clients in a short time, link building can become a bottleneck. Prospecting, outreach, and content creation all take time, resources, and capabilities; even with a solid SEO team, delivering quality links for several clients at once can overwhelm your internal resources.

Outsourcing link building makes sense if you want to handle a higher volume without missing deadlines or lowering quality.

When Launching New Services

Many agencies start with services like web design paid ads or content writing, then offer to cater more with SEO and link building. Building an in-house team for a new services takes time (than people expect it to be), and the learning curve can be steep. 

White-label link building gives you the confidence and the ability to launch an SEO offer right away (of course, with the right market fit and expertise). But for link building alone, you don’t need to hire outreach specialists and writers. You get a complete execution system under your brand, allowing you to test, improve, and scale the new service faster. 

When Clients Expect Faster SEO Results

Some clients expect noticeable SEO progress in the first few months. While content and on-page work take signficant time to show results (usually 6 to 12 months), high-quality backlinks can speed up rankings and visibility (with the right technical SEO, on-page SEO and content foundation in place).

White-label providers already have systems in place—relationships with publishers, active outreach pipelines, and writing teams. They can deliver links faster, enabling you to meet client expectations and show early quick wins in your search engine optimization campaigns by tapping low hanging fruits.

When Quality Control Becomes a Priority

As your agency grows, maintaing consistent link quality becomes more difficult. Different team members may use different link building strategies and outreach methods, content may vary, and results may not align with the SEO strategy.

A strong white label SEO partner uses a tested and repeatable system, follows guidelines, uses approved anchor text mixes, and provides full-detailed reports. You need this consistency across all your client campaigns. 

When Entering a New Geographic Market

If your agency is expanding to a new country or region, you may not have local contact or publlishers to support link outreach. 

It makes sense to have a white-label link-building provider with global reach or region-specific link sources that can help you build location-relevant backlinks, especially if they already operate in that target region (e.g., UK, US, AU, or Asia-based placements).

When Competing for Highly Competitive Keywords

As obvious as it may sound, ranking for competitive keywords often requires authoritative and robust backlinks from high-authority websites. 

Generally, white-label providers have existing relationships, ongoing outreach campaigns, or a solid strategy to tap these A-tier publications that can help place your links faster on high-DR websites—helping you close authority backlink gaps quicker. 

SharpRocket, The Philippines’ Top White Label Link Building Provider

Since 2015, SharpRocket has been delivering quality link-building services to SEO agencies, eCommerce founders, and enterprise in-house SEO specialists. We’ve helped clients from startups to Fortune 500 companies scale their link building projects with topically relevant and authoritative links.

Need help with link building? See our link building services and schedule a strategy call.