The Challenge
The agency was great at technical SEO and content strategy, but the link building was always a bigger challenge. They had only two in-house link builders, who could handle only 8 clients at a time.
The problem was that outsourcing hadn’t worked well because the freelancers built links from irrelevant websites, and the agency had to disavow them. The agency partner kept missing deadlines, which affected the relationship with the clients.
The third delivered decent links but couldn’t scale beyond 30 placements per month without quality dropping. Because of the limited link building capacity, the founder estimated they were losing $40k-$60k per month. Clients choose large agencies offering link building as a full-service package. The agency needed a partner who could handle various industries such as SaaS, professional services, healthcare, and finance, without requiring different outreach strategies for each niche.
The Strategy We Used
We provided a complete white label link building infrastructure that operated under the agency’s brand. The agency’s client never knew a third party was involved.
- We provided white label delivery across 8 initial client accounts spanning B2B SaaS, legal services, healthcare, financial advisory services, and real estate.
- Provided editorial briefs with niche-specific targeting, anchor text planning, and priority page mappings per client, created collaboratively between the agency’s strategists and campaign managers.
- Delivered 15-25 placements monthly per client on the site with DR 40-70, with complete documentations reporting delivered in non-branded spreadsheets that the agency could present under their own templates.
- Our dedicated account managers serve the agency’s internal link building team on Slack, joining weekly syncs and responding to urgent requests within 4 hours during business hours.
- 95% of placements meeting the agreed DR range, 100% niche relevance, replacement guarantee for any link removed within 6 months.
The agency marked up our link cost by 60-80%, depending on the client’s practice and link specifications, maintaining healthy margins while offering competitive pricing to end clients.
The Results
The agency’s growth changed fundamentally. Before the partnership, onboarding a new client required 2-3 weeks of ramp-up for the link builder. The new client’s campaigns launched within 5 business days. This speed became the agency’s competitive advantage in sales cycles; they should promise faster time-to-results than competitors still building in-house teams.
The 94% clients retention rate validates the quality. Only 2 of 31 clients churned during the 14-month period, both due to budget cuts unrelated to performance. The agency’s NPS score increased from 38 to 62, with clients specifically citing link building results as the reason for the higher satisfaction.
The financial impact was transformative. Link building went from the agency’s weakest service line to its highest margin offering. The founder estimated that 40% of the agency’s total revenue growth during the period was directly attributed to the white label partnership.
AI visibility improvements across the portfolio became a new selling point. The agency began including an AI citation metric in its client reporting, showing clients that their brands appeared in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI overview results. This differentiated the agency from competitors, still reporting only traditional SEO metrics. The average client saw 9 AI overview appearances and 6 ChatGPT citations, giving the agency a forward-looking narrative about search evolution that strengthened retention conversions.
