A UK agency reselling white-label reports: zero mentions, two invoices

This is a worked example of a typical first month for a UK agency that resells link building under its own name, not a customer story, and every figure in it comes from our own delivery data. The resale price in it is an assumption chosen to keep the arithmetic clear. The costs are ours.

The agency

A UK marketing agency that sells SEO retainers and has never built links itself. Its clients are told link building is part of the retainer, and the agency wants that to stay true without hiring for it. The agency works in pounds, its clients are in the UK and in two European markets, and every report that leaves the building carries the agency's name and nobody else's.

The fear

Two things keep the agency from outsourcing. The first is being found out, not because reselling is wrong but because a client who discovers a supplier starts asking what the margin is. The second is the invoice. If the supplier's invoice has to be rebuilt by hand before it can be explained to a client, the saving disappears into admin.

Week one: who sees what

Clients are registered with the domain, the market, the target pages and any anchor rules. A monthly budget is set for each. From this point the agency's team logs in under the agency, each person with their own account, and the supplier's name is not in the browser bar of anyone sharing a screen with a client.

Publishers are never told who the agency is or who the client is. They receive a topic, a target page and an anchor. Client domains go onto a suppression list that our prospecting reads in code before building any campaign, with no expiry, so a client never receives an outreach email from us for someone else's work.

Week two: candidates and outreach

Candidates for each client's topic go through the five checks: organic traffic of 2,000 or more a month measured in the client's own country, a spam score that was returned and is under 40, numeric relevance of 40 or more, no operator footprint and no rented links. One in twelve clears them. For the UK clients the own-locale check removes English-language sites whose readers are mostly elsewhere, which is most of the ones that look strongest on a global number.

Outreach runs in our name. Across our campaigns: 303 publishers contacted, 598 emails, 27.4% replied, 13.5% priced, 4% bounced. Quotes range from 30 to 1,200 euro.

Week three: the two invoices

This is the part the agency was worried about, so here it is line by line.

The first invoice comes from the publisher, directly to the agency, for the placement. The average paid link is about 210 euro. The publisher invoices in its own currency, usually euro, and the agency pays the publisher. We do not sit in the middle of that payment and we do not mark it up.

The second invoice is ours, for the fee: 25 to 40% depending on the market and the work, averaging 30%, with the article included. On a 210 euro placement that is about 63 euro.

So the all-in cost of an average placement is about 273 euro, on two invoices, each of which says exactly what it is for.

Every order carries its reason: why this publisher, why an insertion or a new article, why this target page, why this anchor. The agency does not approve orders. It reads the reasons at month end, in its own report.

The margin at twice the cost

Take a resale price of twice the all-in cost, which is the assumption in this example and not a recommendation.

• All-in cost of an average placement: about 210 euro to the publisher plus about 63 euro fee, about 273 euro.
• Resold at twice the cost: about 546 euro per placement.
• Gross margin per placement: about 273 euro, or 50% of the resale price.
• For a client receiving four placements a month: about 1,092 euro in costs, about 2,184 euro billed, about 1,092 euro of margin before the agency's own time.

The agency's own time is the reports, which it forwards rather than writes. Multiply the per-client line by the number of clients, and remember the all-in cost moves with the quotes that come back for each topic. The 210 euro average sits inside a 30 to 1,200 range.

Week four: live, watched, reported in the agency's name

Placements go live as publishers deliver. Each one is checked weekly for twelve months across nine failure states, with replace or refund if any trips, and replaced or refunded if not indexed within 60 days. The agency does not need to notice a problem itself.

At month end a report is generated under the agency's name for each client. It lists the live URL, the anchor, the target page, the publisher's own-locale traffic, the reason for each decision and the monitoring status. There is nothing in the file properties, the footer or the email that points to us.

What the client saw

A report from its agency, a set of live links on sites with readers in the client's own market, a reason next to each one written as the agency's reasoning, and one invoice from the agency at the agency's price. The client sees one supplier, and that supplier is the agency.

Where it stands after month one

Budgets run again next month unchanged unless the agency changes them. Every link is under weekly monitoring for twelve months. The agency's accounting for the month is a stack of publisher invoices, one fee invoice from us, and its own invoices to clients at its own price. Nothing had to be rebranded, retyped or explained twice.

The caveat on every worked example: these are the real mechanics and real aggregate figures for a typical agency of this type, with a resale price chosen for the arithmetic, and not a story about a particular client.