The Ultimate Guide to SaaS Link Building

For software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are effective ways to boost organic traffic. These two avenues of digital marketing are crucial ways to sell their offerings. 

For SaaS marketers, getting high-quality and relevant backlinks remains one of the most critical SEO ranking factors. But the link-building process can be more challenging than it seems. Read on to learn effective link-building strategies that can help you improve your content marketing campaigns.

What Is Link Building?

Link building refers to any efforts aimed at getting backlinks to a site. For SaaS companies, link building aims to get potential customers to visit their SaaS website.

Over the years, link-building strategies have evolved because search engines like Google changed how they value backlinks. 

Before, link building was all about quantity, meaning the more backlinks pointing to a site, the higher the site will rank on the search engine results page (SERP). But now, search engines value the relevance and the quality of the backlinks. 

This shift made link building more challenging for modern marketers. Now, they cannot just produce high volumes of content without considering the relevance of posts to searchers.

Today, marketers can use three approaches when developing a link-building strategy: outreach, broadcast, and paid categories. Learn more about these below.

Outreach

This approach refers to the manual process of reaching out to a potential source of quality links. The procedure involves building relationships with site owners and influencers relevant to your industry.

The most basic form of an outreach campaign involves reaching out to an influencer and asking for a backlink. But, outreach efforts can come in different forms, including social media mentions or comments on a blog post. 

Broadcast

Also known as the cold-calling version of link building, broadcast campaigns involve announcing your request for backlinks. For this content strategy, the goal is to reach as many people as possible in the hopes that some of them could give you backlinks. 

For example, you can promote your quality content through an email newsletter to your 10,000 subscribers. You can even link your content to press releases or guest posts.

Paid

Paid link building uses various paid promotional channels, like Facebook ads or Google Ads, to promote great content with the aim of getting relevant backlinks. 

When designing your link-building campaign, remember to consider the three approaches given above. If you need help getting more backlinks, you can get professional link-building services from SearchEye.

Why Is Link Building Essential for SaaS Companies?

There are many reasons why establishing a solid backlink profile is crucial for many modern marketers. Read more to discover why link building is essential for SaaS companies today.

Improve Site Rankings and Visibility

When search engines assess your website, they consider which sites link back to yours when they try to rank your content. If you have more quality links that lead to your site, you have a higher chance of ranking high in Google search results.

This is why a solid link-building campaign is important. It can help drive more organic traffic to your SaaS site from potential customers who may not know about your existence otherwise.

Establish Authority as Brand Leader

If you have backlinks from credible and authoritative websites or resource pages, you increase your brand’s authority. If your audience views your website as credible, they can bring in quality referral traffic and make your SaaS company an industry leader.

Being an industry leader can show that you are an expert in your field. This advantage can help build trust with potential customers and helps boost sales in the long run.

You can position your SaaS website as leaders in your industry easier by using an effective link-building strategy.

Boost Conversion Rates

One crucial advantage of link building is that it can help you boost your brand’s conversions. When potential customers see your content rank well in search results, they will have more confidence in your services and are likely to convert.

Organic links can be the best way to ensure your target audience views you as an authority figure. The more people trust your SaaS company, the more likely they will become customers.

So, if you are aiming to take your marketing strategy to the next level, consider backlink acquisition. If done right, the process could make all the difference for your SaaS brand.

How Does Link Building Work for SaaS Brands?

SaaS companies today span a wide range of industries, including marketing automation, SEO, sales customer relationship management (CRM), and even document signing. The business model for each firm is essentially the same across the board, charging clients a recurring annual or monthly fee for the use of the service. 

Link building SaaS companies help clients get more backlinks, so they do not have to do the process themselves.

When ranking content, search engines only looked at the number of backlinks. But now, they also determine the relevance and context of the backlinks. They also look at the quality of the source. 

This change means your site will not rank higher than your competitor’s because you have more backlinks. Now, you have to focus your efforts on link acquisition from high-quality sites relevant to your services.

To determine the relevance of a site, Google looks at its Domain Authority (DA). This metric demonstrates a site’s relevance for a specific industry or a subject area. 

Although knowing your site’s relevance is crucial, you should refrain from solely focusing on what your DA is. Instead, you have to understand how your site can be more powerful in terms of SEO. You also need to determine how to rank for more competitive keywords as you get more high-quality backlinks to your site from more authoritative sources. 

To help you in this effort, you have to conduct thorough competitive research. Doing so can help you determine if your rival’s website is better than yours and where to make adjustments in your link-building strategy.

Effective keyword research is also vital to successful link building. Keywords are words or phrases that potential customers type into a search engine to find specific services that address their needs.

You have to ensure that your backlink’s anchor text is a relevant keyword when link building. Remember to keep your anchor text natural and relevant when linking back to the desired webpage. 

Additionally, be careful from using a single source that links to your site more than once. This mistake can result in the loss of ranking power. Remember that the total number of sites and DA is the most important, not the number of times they link to your site. 

Types of Links You Should Know

When developing an effective link-building campaign, you need to focus on two types of links: dofollow and nofollow.

Dofollow Links

Follow links drive SEO link juice, which is the amount of authority and value a link can provide a website. These links boost the page rank of the website they link to. 

Dofollow links help websites rank higher and are the best links you can acquire. The more reputable the site, the more significant boost of SEO link juice the linked-to site gets. 

For example, if you get a good backlink from sites like Forbes or BBC, you may get more link juice.

Nofollow Links 

On the other hand, nofollow links do not boost link juice. They also do not improve a site’s page rank or a site’s placement in the results of search engines. 

You can create nofollow links using the nofollow link HTML tag, <a rel = “nofollow.” This specific tag functions as an indicator for search engines, so they do not pay attention to the links.

You can use nofollow links if:

• You sold a particular link
• Someone asked you to post their content on your site
• You are concerned about possible penalties for a link
• You have widgets on the page

 

Effective SaaS Link-Building Strategies

Your SaaS link-building strategy has to get you relevant and high-quality backlinks to your site. Here are some examples of the tactics you can use for successful link building.

Guest Posts

Guest posts are a simple yet excellent way to improve your backlink building. This process involves promoting your brand in a guest post for a website relevant to your industry. 

If done right, this strategy can be one of the easy ways to gain high-quality backlinks. You have to look for high-tier and mid-tier publications in your field and request to publish a guest post. 

Guest posting can make your company look active on industry news in the eyes of your audience. Additionally, it allows you to underscore exciting takes on your business.

When writing a guest post, you write about any topics that will put your SaaS in the spotlight. Write about what you discovered as you’ve built your SaaS business. You can also create how-to guides on SaaS marketing.

Remember to focus your efforts on high-authority and reputable websites that will add more value to your backlinks for this strategy. Refrain from writing hundreds of guest posts for every website out there.

If you want to earn backlinks with guest posts, you must produce quality content that your readers will value on referring domains. 

Resource Pages

Resource pages refer to websites that provide readers with several resources on a specific topic. These pages have curated lists of the best blog posts, tools, communities, or websites a particular audience may find useful. 

The purpose of resource pages is to link to other sites that offer products or services that their audience may find interesting.

If you produce link-worthy content, you can reach out to high-authority resource pages within your SaaS industry and request a link.

To find resource pages, you can reverse engineer the resource page links of your competitors. Find the resource pages driving the audience to your client’s competitors and try to use the same links.

Another way to find these pages is by using the search queries below:

• SaaS useful resources
• SaaS inurl:roundup
• SaaS helpful links
• SaaS best resources
• SaaS intitle:links
• SaaS inurl:resources

With high-quality content and the right strategy, using resource pages can help provide new paying customers for your business.

Create Linkable Assets

If you want to acquire high-quality backlinks, write content that influential bloggers and authoritative websites would like to link to. Two things that make a post linkable are uniqueness and usefulness. 

Unique content is a post that provides new perspectives on common topics. Most of these types of content are mission or value-driven content, thought leadership, or opinion pieces.

Mission or value-driven content can be an article telling readers what made you create your product. You can also talk about how you address your customer needs differently than your competitors.

Meanwhile, thought leadership pieces offer readers fresh perspectives or insights about topics relevant to a specific industry.

Finally, opinion pieces present contrary angles that argue against an industry’s status quo. These articles stir emotions and readers, whether they disagree or agree with the author’s point, feel compelled to share them with others.

Aside from unique articles, you can also write useful content. Most authoritative sites will be more likely to agree to link to your site if you have shareable, comprehensive, and valuable content assets. These assets can include surveys, studies, tools, and guides. 

If you publish surveys and studies, you can post statistics that matter to your industry, which can help establish authority. These types of helpful content provide a way for other people within your industry to cite your statistics in their content.

Collaboration With Bloggers

It can take up much of your time to send pitches to the websites where you want to post your content. You can skip this step by reaching out to influencers or bloggers already posting their content to your target sites. Ask them to feature your SaaS offering in their posts.

This way, you do not have to come up with the article pitches and wait for them to get approved. This advantage can help you save time and energy in the long run.

You can pay your partner blogger a fee or a free subscription to your service in exchange for the feature. When working with a writer, you have to give them the technical data they may need when they are writing an article promoting your product.

If you are looking for a blogger, go to the website where you want to publish your content. Look for authors who write about the topics relevant to your business.

Check their author page, if there is any, and see if they are a regular contributor to the site. You can reach them on their website or through social media. If they answer your inquiry, you can make them an offer and request a feature article.

To increase your chances of getting a positive response, you can compile a list of link-worthy posts on your site and send it to them.

This process is much easier than trying to do the writing yourself and reaching out to your target websites to pitch your content.

Broken Link Building

This simple yet effective tactic is one of the most common link-building strategies today. The process involves finding broken links or inactive links on a website relevant to your industry. 

A broken link occurs when a website has links that redirect to pages that no longer exist. These links can be bad for the user experience because when the reader clicks on the links, they are taken to an empty page. It can be annoying for the reader expecting to see additional information on what they are reading.

These broken links present an excellent opportunity to boost your link acquisition. If you find a broken link on your target website, let them know and offer your content as a replacement link. Suppose you do not have a post with a broken link that can be redirected; you can create one.

This strategy can get you relevant backlinks and boost the rankings of your replacement content on search engines.

SaaS Directories

Getting your brand featured on SaaS review sites and directories can help you get links, potential customers, and social proof. Most of these sites get lots of traffic from people exploring different options for products. Examples of these websites include:

• Top Ten Reviews
• Capterra
• SaaS Genius
• GS Crowd 
• TrustRadius

If you want a more comprehensive review of your product, you can reach out to bloggers who review SaaS within your industry. This content can be much like a feature article, but it will focus on the efficacy and the pros and cons of using your service.

If you choose to work with a blogger who will review your product, you have to give them two months to use your service for free. This way, they will have enough information about your offering, which can help them create a more accurate review.

Another alternative is to launch an affiliate program for your product. Doing so can give you a consistent source of backlinks while also boosting sales.

When affiliate bloggers sign up for your new program, they can publish posts and reviews on their websites about your offering.

Brand Mentions

Backlink mentions can be an excellent way to make use of the website, services, and companies you mention in your posts. You can try to use three methods for this strategy: mention-me-back, co-mention, and unlinked brand mention.

• Mention-Me-Back

When writing your content, you may mention a fair number of other brands, websites, products, or services. While you might not be directly partnered with these other businesses, you can try to reach out to them for backlinks.

These companies may not always respond, but if they do, then it is an avenue for easy and quality backlinks. 

• Co-Mentions

Co-mentions involve looking for a few contacts who do guest blogging and then asking them to mention your brand or product on some of their posts. In exchange, you offer to mention their company in your guest posts. 

• Unlinked brand mentions

If another website mentions your brand with no links or attributions, you may reach out to them and request a backlink. Because the site is already familiar with your brand or service, they will likely agree to link to your site.

Backlink Exchange

Backlink exchange involves partnering with another company and agreeing to link to them if they link to you. Although this strategy seems lucrative, you should not rely on this link-building tactic alone to be the foundation of your whole SEO campaign.

Under Google’s link scheme, excessive exchange of links between partner websites can negatively impact ranking in search results. This does not mean you cannot use backlink exchange altogether. You only need to avoid overusing it.

If you use this strategy, remember to use it sparingly. Ensure the links you are using make sense for your SaaS product and provide value to your content.

Examples of Effective SEO Backlinks for SaaS

Remember that SaaS SEO backlinks can come in different shapes and sizes. No one type of backlink will provide you with the most value. While you will most often see links as hyperlinked text, they can also be in the form of:

• An image on a homepage 
• A URL on a social media post, a website, or a description on a podcast
• A video with an embedded link
• An infographic with an embedded link

Additionally, backlinks come in different values. If a link comes from a high-authority website, like The New Yorker or The New York Times, it will be more valuable for your site. This is compared to the value you get on the links from a small local newspaper. 

A site with a high DA means it is a trustworthy and influential website. If a high-DA site links to your website, you can get more attention for backlinking.

Best Link-Building Tools You Should Use

The process of link building can boil down to sending emails to other websites and asking them to add links to your content. This means you have to build relationships and understand the owners’ needs of relevant websites. Your partners will only add links to their site if the links enhance their value.

Since there are a lot of complicated steps involved in the link-building process, you have to use different SEO tools to make it easier. Here are several tools that you can use to improve your link-building strategy.

SearchEye

SearchEye is an SEO tool that offers link-building services. The tool aims to help its users visualize how the target keywords affect each element of their website. It also identifies the areas where you can make adjustments and optimize your website’s content better.

Aside from link-building services, SearchEye also offers content ordering services. The company has a team of writers who produce high-quality content focusing on SEO. Each article from SearchEye comes with a comprehensive guide outline. 

Ahrefs

Ahrefs offers a Content Explorer service that makes finding suitable links easier for link builders. You can find fresh links that match all your requirements with this tool. 

The tool gives you the most popular articles on any given topic. It allows you to filter the results depending on the following factors:

• Organic traffic or the estimated monthly traffic of the article from search engines
• Referring to domains or the number of unique sites linking to the page
• Domain rating or the popularity of a website
• Traffic value or the pay-per-click value of the organic traffic
• Social shares or the number of shares on Twitter, Pinterest, or Facebook

Ahrefs also supports advanced search and helps users find broken links. You only need to combine the live or broken and referring domains filters to look for dead pages on a topic with backlinks.

Google

If you are looking for a source of link prospects, Google is the tool for you. Although some may not see the search engine site as a link-building tool, it has an extensive index of web pages, making it one of the best sources of link prospects.

If you know how to use it the right way, you can find thousands of relevant link prospects without spending a single dollar.

Google has a search operator feature that can help you filter search engine results. Some are unique to the site, but not all of them. Even the ones that are not unique to Google can still be powerful there because you can combine them to find exactly what you need from its massive index of web pages.

But, the downside of using Google for prospecting is there is no way to download the results. You can try to use Chrome extensions to download SERP data.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a keyword research tool that collects data about online keywords from search engines, including Google and Bing. 

The brand’s Competitor Gap Analysis solutions allow you to find where your competitors are acquiring their valuable backlinks. With this tool, you can monitor your rivals’ link-building strategies and study their backlinks to find ones you can use.

You only have to provide your domain and your competitors’ domains to use the tool. The solution will generate a list of sites that link back to them. With Competitor Gap Analysis, you can see if your rival sites are using citations, guest posts, or sponsored posts.

The solution provides good prospects that you can pitch to link to your website. By default, it shows the “best” links, which are the sites with links redirecting to your competitors and not to you.

You can also view weak, shared, and unique domains with this product. Shared sites are those that only link to both of you, while weak sites are those that link only to your competitors. Finally, unique sites are those that link to only one domain.

You can use this new data to address the backlink gap in your link-building efforts by finding new sites that do not link to your competitors. This SaaS product allows you to stay ahead of your competitors, regardless of their SEO strategy.

BuzzStream

When creating an SEO strategy, you often check a site and ask yourself if anyone from your marketing team has reached out to them. Contacting bloggers and writers featured on authority sites is a part of the link-building process. You can make this process easier and faster by using BuzzStream.

This tool produces contact information for online accounts. It can give social media profiles and email accounts if they are available from a website.

With BuzzStream, you do not have to leave the software to do your own research. It can help you find and build the connections you need to acquire quality backlinks.

For example, you want new bloggers who can feature your SaaS business on another site. So you read an article with the list of top bloggers in your niche. BuzzStream has a highlight tool that tells you which authors you are already in contact with and which ones are new.

This feature allows you to manage your connections easier and make the link-building process less stressful.

Improve Your Link-Building Strategy with SearchEye

SaaS link building can be challenging and time-consuming if you do not know where to begin. The process can be more overwhelming if you do not have enough content or if you are only a startup.

Fortunately for you, there are several link-building tools today that can address your SEO needs. With these tools, you will get your hands on relevant and high-quality links for your site.

If you want to improve your SaaS marketing and SEO strategy, SearchEye is the best tool for you. The brand’s unique offerings can solve the challenges you are facing in your SEO campaigns, 

So reach out to SearchEye and get high-quality backlinks for your SaaS website today! We can effectively help you in every stage of your SEO campaign, from content creation to link building.

Need help building links to your site to increase your website’s authority? Schedule a free consultation with SearchEye today!