How much to mark up white label SEO.

The short answer

2x to 3x wholesale is the common band across published reseller guides, which puts most agencies at 40–60% gross margin. Low-touch productized packages sit nearer 2x. Strategy-heavy accounts where you're on calls every week need 3x to be worth having.

Markup is not margin

On $1,000 wholesale: a 2x markup bills $2,000 and that's a 50% margin. A "50% markup" bills $1,500, which is a 33% margin. When someone says "we target 50%," ask which one they mean before you agree to anything.

The number most guides leave out

Your hours. Gross margin isn't profit — your own servicing time comes out of it first.

Two agencies buy the identical wholesale package at the identical price. One spends 45 minutes a month on the account. The other spends six hours chasing the partner for updates and rewriting reports. Same markup, completely different businesses.

So calculate it per hour: (retail − wholesale − your hours × what your hour is worth). If that lands under what you'd charge for an hour of your own time, your markup is too low or your partner is too much work. There's a calculator for this.

Three rules that hold

• Never quote wholesale to a client. Your cost is your business.
• Charge a setup fee. Month one is two to three times the work of every month after. Burying it in the retainer caps your margin exactly when the work is heaviest.
• Don't race to the bottom. Underpricing is the most common mistake new resellers make, and it's the hardest one to undo with an existing client.

Once you're running several accounts, the conversation worth having with your partner isn't only the rate — it's bulk pricing and less of your time per account.