In an SEO relationship, it is essential to strike a deal that works as a win-win situation for both the business owner and the SEO provider.

Mostly it trickles down to addressing significant factors that will govern an SEO relationship.
– Firstly, choosing the services either as a package deal, or on an individual basis;
– Secondly, whether to provide services direct to the business owner, or work as an SEO reseller and provide the services indirectly.

Let us analyze each factor in more detail to see how it applies to a particular situation:
Services rendered as a package deal versus services rendered on an individual basis:
In an SEO relationship, a packaged deal means providing all SEO services that increase the number of visitors to a website. These services are mostly listed as menu items and offered as a pre-bundled SEO package. They also include non-SEO related items like social media services.

It is akin to ordering food at a fast food restaurant. You can either order a combo meal that has everything – main course, a side dish and drinks; or you can pick up individual items on the menu. For example, if you have $10 to spend on food, you can buy a burger for $5, fries for $1, soda for $1 and a dessert for $2. Individually the items cost $9, but a combo would cost you only $7.99.

Here comes the important part. If you already have dessert and soda at home and are not keen to eat fries, then you can simply order the burger for $5 and save $5. Or you can order 2 burgers and ignore other items. Comparing this to SEO services, this could mean buying two social media posts instead of one, or getting twice the hours of service.

Pros and cons of individual services
– Analysis of data
A packaged deal will appear better if you are making your decision based on data analytics since it will provide a more granular insight into services that are most in demand and for which you can command premium prices. This happens mostly in case of packaged services that are bundled together and it is difficult to make out which offering is better than the other.

– Bring scale
Owner driven small businesses are more likely to purchase individual services. That is because their owners tend to do several SEO related tasks on their own and only critical parts are outsourced. Hence, they tend to keep away from package deals.

– Taking a decision
Offering a package deal to customers can sometimes prove challenging as it offers them too many choices to decide from, which tends to be overwhelming for them. For example it is better to offer them services in content creation rather than two separate services such as content writing and content editing.

Pros and cons of a package deal
– Growing revenue
Even if you focus on individual services, you can still offer packaged deals. Taking the fast food restaurant example, with $10 you can still buy the fast food items individually, but getting the full combo for $7.99 might not be a bad idea.

– Avoiding waste
The biggest disadvantage is that over a period of time, the services bundled together in the package deal may appear to be wasteful and the customer might feel dissatisfied. For example, the task of sourcing images for an article might be getting done in-house in an organization, but if it is also being offered by your company as part of a package deal, then the resulting surplus of photos might appear as wasteful expenditure.

Providing services directly to the business owner, or working as an SEO reseller and providing services indirectly
In many situations companies prefer to work under the SEO reseller model. Under this model they don’t do the SEO work themselves, rather they outsource the work to a specialized SEO services provider who provides the white-label SEO service. In other situations, companies work directly with business owners without involving the SEO reseller model.

Pros and cons of a direct relationship
– Control over quality
Quality is easier to control in a direct relationship as you are able to micro-manage your employees and have total control over them. However, in a white-label SEO service you are reliant upon quality standards of the SEO services provider.

– Contractual obligations
Some companies have rules around sub-contracting and do not allow work to be outsourced. In these instances you have to work directly with the companies.

– Limitations
Working directly with the customer is advantageous when you have SEO skills in-house. Even if you don’t, you can still take up projects by working as a white- label SEO-reseller. However, you might have to decline projects if the work is too much, and these projects might then get taken away by your competitors.

Pros and cons of a direct relationship
– Meeting delivery dates
Rush hour projects are easily handled if you work as a white-label SEO reseller. That is because you don’t have to utilize all your resources for this work. This ensures consistency in quality. When the rush hour subsides, you can continue to do the work with your own resources.

– Economies of size
Initial start up costs associated with SEO services do not arise. White-label SEO vendors bring to the table economies of scale and lower costs and both these advantages are passed to you, enabling you to charge more competitive prices to the business owners.

– Size advantage
There is optimum skill utilization under white-label SEO reseller. As a vendor you are able to focus on your core work and the SEO services provider focuses on SEO activities. This ensures work quality is high.

– Key dependencies
There is a high dependency on communication and quality assurance to ensure that work quality is consistent and as per expectations of the business owner.

Conclusion
All in all, getting the best SEO deal requires planning and preparation, but more than that, important is to have a robust white-label SEO reseller in place to pick up SEO projects and deliver them in a timely and cost-effective way.