Somewhere between 50% and 100% on top of the wholesale rate is the honest short answer, with the right figure inside that range depending on how much your agency adds around the work. I deliver white-label SEO for agencies, so I sit on the wholesale side of this arrangement, and I'd rather my agency partners price their resale properly than squeeze themselves into an unprofitable retainer and quietly resent the whole thing six months in. A well-priced arrangement lasts; an under-priced one churns.
I've already written about how the margins behave across the different engagement models. This post takes the one question that comes up most, how much to actually add on top, and works it through with real numbers.
Markup and margin are not the same number
This trips up more agency owners than anything else in resale pricing, so it's worth thirty seconds. Markup is the percentage you add to your cost. Margin is the percentage of the final price you keep. A 100% markup gives you a 50% margin, not a 100% one. If your specialist charges £1,000 a month and you bill the client £1,500, that's a 50% markup but only a 33% margin, and it's the margin that has to pay for your sales time, your account management, and your risk.
When someone tells you their target is "50%", ask which one they mean. The difference between a 50% markup and a 50% margin on the same wholesale cost is the difference between billing £1,500 and billing £2,000.
Common markup ranges, and where you should sit
Published reseller pricing guides put common markups anywhere from 50% up to 200%, meaning agencies bill between one and a half and three times the wholesale rate. That's a wide band, but it narrows quickly once you're honest about what your agency contributes beyond passing the work along.
| Markup | Resulting margin | When it's defensible |
|---|---|---|
| 25 to 50% | 20 to 33% | You're a thin pass-through: forwarding reports, minimal account management. Fragile, and below 25% you're working for free once overheads land |
| 50 to 100% | 33 to 50% | The sensible default. You own the client relationship, present the work, translate findings, and handle strategy conversations |
| 100 to 200% | 50 to 67% | You add significant value on top: paid media integration, CRO, creative, or a brand strong enough to command premium fees |
Worked through on a £1,200 a month wholesale retainer, that's a client price of roughly £1,800 to £2,400 for most agencies. On a one-off £1,500 technical audit, you'd typically bill £2,250 to £3,000, and the presentation of the findings is where you earn that difference. If you can't articulate what the client gets from you that they wouldn't get going direct, your markup has no floor under it, and that's a positioning problem before it's a pricing one.
What the gap has to pay for
The markup isn't profit, it's gross margin, and three costs come out of it before anything reaches you. Client acquisition first, because the client came through your marketing and your sales conversations, and that cost has to be recovered over the life of the retainer. Account management second, which on a typical SEO retainer runs a few hours a month of meetings, translation, and reassurance, every month, whether the specialist needed you that month or not. And risk third, because your brand is on the work, and if it goes wrong you fund the repair of the relationship.
Price those at zero and a 30% markup looks generous. Price them honestly and you'll land somewhere in that 50 to 100% band without needing a guide to tell you.
Cost-plus or value-based billing
Cost-plus, taking the wholesale rate and adding your percentage, is the right model when SEO is a bolt-on to your core service and the client is price-anchored to market rates. It's simple, predictable, and easy to defend in a renewal conversation.
Billing on value, setting the client price by what the outcome is worth and treating the wholesale cost as an input, is better when SEO drives measurable revenue for the client and your agency owns the strategy. An ecommerce client making an extra £20,000 a month from organic doesn't care whether your delivery cost £1,200 or £2,000, and pricing against the wholesale number leaves money on the table.
Most agencies should run cost-plus on retainers and move towards value pricing on project work, where the outcome is concrete and the anchor is weaker. What I'd avoid is mixing the two on the same client, because a retainer priced one way and projects priced the other invites the client to compare the implied rates.
Keep the wholesale layer invisible, not the involvement
One caution from the delivery side. The markup conversation tempts agencies to keep the specialist as far from the client as possible, in case the client works out the arrangement. In practice the opposite protects your margin better. The agencies I work with who sustain healthy markups are the ones who stay genuinely involved, who understand the work well enough to present it convincingly, and who choose the white-label route over hiring deliberately rather than as a way of disappearing from delivery. Clients pay the premium for an agency that owns the outcome. They resent it when they discover a forwarding service, and how the white-label relationship works day to day is what determines which of those they experience.
White-label markup FAQs
Is a 100% markup on white-label SEO too much?
No, provided you're doing the work that justifies it. Doubling the wholesale rate gives you a 50% margin, which is a normal gross margin for an agency service once account management and acquisition costs are counted. It becomes too much only when the agency adds nothing beyond an invoice, because sooner or later the client notices.
Should I tell clients I use a white-label provider?
You're not obliged to volunteer the mechanics, and most white-label arrangements run under NDA precisely so the agency can present the work as its own. My advice is to never claim an in-house team you don't have. "We work with specialist partners" is true, defensible, and almost never questioned, whereas a discovered lie costs you the client and the referral pipeline behind them.
What margin do I need for reselling SEO to be worth it?
As a working floor, treat 33%, which is a 50% markup, as the minimum for a managed retainer. Below that, one awkward month of extra client hand-holding wipes out the profit. A thin pass-through with genuinely minimal involvement can survive on less, but at that point you should question whether you're adding enough to be in the chain at all.
Do markups differ between retainers and one-off projects?
They should. Projects carry more estimating risk and more intensive presentation work in a short window, so they justify the upper end of your range. Retainers spread the account management load and reward predictability, so most agencies sit slightly lower on recurring work in exchange for the compounding lifetime value.
Want wholesale SEO worth marking up?
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