TL;DR
The common model is to take the specialist’s price, add a percentage and quote it. It is simple, it feels fair, and it caps you at the lowest margin available while carrying all the accountability. Cost-plus prices your input. The client is buying an outcome, so price against their alternative.
The most common white label pricing model is: take the specialist’s price, add a percentage, quote it. It is simple, it feels fair, and it caps you at the lowest margin available while carrying all the accountability.
Here is why, and what I would do instead.
Why cost-plus caps you
Cost-plus prices your input. Your client is buying an outcome, and the two have almost nothing to do with each other.
If the specialist charges you £1,200 a month and you quote £1,800, you have earned £600 for owning the relationship, the reporting, the accountability and the risk. Meanwhile the value to the client might be a single additional case worth several times that.
You have priced the labour instead of the result, which is the same mistake your clients make when they ask what an hour costs.
What the outcome is actually worth
The advantage of SEO in commercial verticals is that the comparison is public.
WordStream’s 2026 benchmarks, from 13,474 US search campaigns, put the median cost per lead in legal at $131.63, with a median CPC of $9.87. In personal injury specifically, First Page Sage tracked 49 firms across 36 states and put the average lead at $442 through Google Ads against $183 through SEO. Their data, their clients, and they sell SEO, so weigh it accordingly.
Either way, the client has a number for what a lead costs them today. Price against that, not against your input cost. An engagement producing ten leads a month in a vertical where a lead costs $200 is worth a great deal more than the specialist’s invoice.
Three models, and where each fits
Cost-plus. Fine for genuine reselling where you are adding little. Not fine if you are accountable for the outcome.
Fixed retainer, value-anchored. The default. Price it against what the client’s alternative costs: their current agency, their ad spend, their cost per lead. Your specialist cost is a cost line, not the basis of the quote.
Tiered by scope. Three packages where the difference is real work rather than a bigger number. This works because it moves the conversation from “is this expensive” to “which one”, and it lets the client self-select.
The costs that eat the margin
These are what actually determine whether an arrangement is profitable, and none of them appear on the specialist’s invoice.
Relay time. Every question going through you twice. On a chatty client this is hours a month and it is invisible until you count it, which is why the boundary is a pricing question as much as a working one.
Reporting. Reformatting somebody else’s output into your template, monthly, forever.
Scope creep. The commonest killer. “Can you also look at” arrives free and lands on your margin, because the specialist will charge for it and the client will not.
The client who cannot implement. Recommendations go out, nothing happens, results do not come, and you are managing a dissatisfaction that no amount of good work fixes.
Price for the first three. Screen for the fourth before you sign.
What I would tell an agency starting out
- Do not quote until you can evaluate the work. If you cannot tell a good audit from a bad one you are guessing at what you have bought, and the margin is the least of your problems.
- Charge a separate onboarding fee. The first month is always the most work, covering access, discovery and the initial audit, and folding it into a monthly retainer means you fund it yourself.
- Put a scope boundary in writing. Not to be difficult. Because “can you also look at” is how a profitable retainer becomes an unprofitable one over six months.
- Review pricing annually. Nobody does this and it is the easiest margin available.
The short version
- Cost-plus prices your input. The client is buying an outcome.
- Price against their alternative: current agency, ad spend, cost per lead.
- Median legal CPL is $131.63; PI runs $183 to $442. Those are the numbers to anchor to.
- Value-anchored retainer is the default. Tiers work because they change the question.
- Relay time, reporting and scope creep eat the margin, and none appear on the invoice.
- Charge separately for onboarding. Month one is always the heaviest.
- Screen out clients who cannot implement. No amount of good work fixes that.
This is the arrangement I offer agencies. invisible, unbranded, and the client never knows. White label SEO covers how it works.
