The SaaS industry is booming and gaining more recognition recently. And while that might be good news for top brands like Hubspot, it’s almost impossible for new startups struggling to gain traction to say the same thing. Moreover, there are probably dozens or hundreds of competitors offering the same product as you. So, how do you scale your SaaS brand and steal the spotlight for your presence on the internet despite these odds?
The answer is link building for SaaS!
In this article, I’ll go over what SaaS exactly is, how SaaS link building plays into that, why it’s important, and some key case studies to prove the point.
What Is SaaS & Why Is It So Popular?
SaaS, or Service as a Software, is a rapidly growing business delivery model used by public cloud providers to create and deploy software to their customers. Cloud providers manage the bulky hardware, middleware, and other traditional aspects of software while offering the ready-to-use product to the customer on a subscription basis.
Software as a Software model is very popular and important because it helps many businesses save capital and avoid going bankrupt – and here’s how:
- Business owners don’t need to pay huge upfront for any SaaS software. They can simply pay per usage, number of users, or value, depending on which one the cloud provider chooses.
- You don’t have to worry about software maintenance and security. Public cloud providers take care of that. And this saves you from maintenance budget load.
- More features can be added to your SaaS software without a hitch or any requirement from your side. So there’s no need to worry about hiring a software developer who will charge you hundreds of thousands of bucks.
- There’s an easy opt-out option for every SaaS business owner. Anytime you feel a SaaS product is no longer vital to achieving your goals or you want to switch to another platform, simply cancel your subscription and seamlessly move your customers.
Why Is Link Building For SaaS Important?
One big problem faced by virtually all SaaS businesses is Growth. It’s definitely not easy to compete against thousands of existing and new brands, each with a uniquely different strong point, especially on the internet.
The truth doesn’t change even if you have the best SaaS product. What you need more is exposure and authority on the internet.
And that’s where SaaS link building comes in.
SaaS link building is a marketing strategy that involves acquiring quality backlinks from high-authority and relevant SaaS websites or high authority domains in the similar niche.
Here’s how these links really impact your SaaS business:
Increased Exposure And Search Engine Recognition
Let’s say you offer email marketing software like MailChimp for email marketers and the likes.
In order to efficiently scale your software’s website on the internet and gain real exposure on search engines, you can get sites like Forbes to link back to you through strategies like guest posting, niche edits, and editorial mentions.
What technically happens is that these backlinks send a signal to search engines such as Google and let them know the quality of your website. Then search engines use the report gotten and other SEO criteria to determine your page ranking.
That means it’s safe to say the more and better links you build, the higher you rank on SERPs – provided you implement other SEO practices.
More Traffic, Hence Leads, Hence Sales
My popular quote is, “more traffic means more sales”. And here’s why:
- If no one sees your website, then no one can see your product.
- If no one sees your product, you can forget about even getting a prospective lead.
- If you don’t have leads, how will you make sales?
Getting quality and quantity links is one of the proven SaaS lead generation techniques. Good backlinks will easily propel your website up search rankings. And this leads to more exposure that brings in more traffic. Moreover, a study by Backlinko shows that website results on Google’s first page have an average of 27.6% clickthrough rate, while another report says almost 71% of Google’s traffic comes from its frontpage.
When your website ranks on the frontpage, that’s like taking up at least 70% of the total internet traffic (since Google is the most used search engine). And this in turn leads to more visitors to your product pages or content.
With proper nudging and marketing techniques, you can easily convert these visitors to hot leads and eventual customers in the short or long run.
Easily Catch Up With The Big Brands
SaaS link building is a proven technique that has become a staple in the marketing world over the last decade as the internet has become a real powerhouse in the service and retail industries, and it is pretty much necessary for any new company to use if it wants to get the number of site clicks and conversions necessary to thrive in the long term.
In fact, some of the top SaaS companies started out with abysmal numbers, and within just a few years, they turned into the massive powerhouses they are today because they implemented SaaS link building into their SaaS marketing strategies.
Without quality link building for SaaS, we probably wouldn’t have juggernauts such as HubSpot around, or they’d be so obscure that we wouldn’t know they existed in the first place.
Affordable If Done The Agency Way
While most brands see SaaS link building as a million-dollar investment, that’s actually far from the truth and usually happens when you work with in-house experts instead. On the other hand, If you outsource to affordable link building agencies like Digital Gratified, you can get value for the money spent without breaking a bank.
Moreover, link building cost is somewhat cheaper in the long run when you factor in the amount spent on other SEO practices, such as creating quality content – sometimes as high as $3,000 per piece (with high-end freelancers). When you compare it to the cost of building one link, which is usually an average of $200, it’s clear that SaaS link building is affordable and even more profitable. You can use our link building cost calculator to estimate how much outsourcing Digitial Gratified for SaaS link building will cost. Also you can use our SEO cost calculator as well to get an estimate of our complete SaaS SEO services.
SaaS Link Building Case Studies To Understand More
Of course, we can say that SaaS link building is key, pulling statistics from thin air and generally pushing them on our audience, but we prefer to take a different route.
To prove how necessary link building is for SaaS businesses, we’ve gathered some of the top case studies, including from companies our audience has probably heard of or used below.
Let’s take a look.
Case Study #1: Signaturely Success Story
Signaturely is a SaaS brand that makes e-signatures a breeze. Not only that, but the signatures processed through Signaturely are verifiable and legally binding. That is key for any business selling a service or product that requires a contract to protect both sides of the transaction.
So, it might be a bit of a shocker to find out that Signaturely wasn’t always a success story. In fact, they had zero net traffic and were pretty much dying on arrival.
That was until they invested in SaaS link building.
Now, there are many different types of backlinks that can help SaaS, but in this case, the golden ticket was HARO.
We’ll talk more about HARO later on, but it’s essentially a tool that connects a business with high-profile journalists and sets up the connection to get content posted in some of the largest publications out there.
This method was the primary SaaS link building strategy for Signaturely, and within just a single year, Signaturely gained backlinks on numerous high-profile sites. One of those sites happened to be Forbes; one of the largest and most trusted e-publications out there.
Those HARO backlinks not only started boosting Signaturely’s web traffic almost immediately after they were created, but they quickly snowballed the activity until the site began seeing more than 150,000 organic site visitors per month. That’s almost 2 million visitors who came to the site naturally, without ads or redirects pushing them there!
Without the implementation of HARO backlinks to build the service up relatively quickly, it’s highly likely that Signaturely would not be serving us all today.
Case Study #2: 2000% Traffic Boost For David Farkas
Already in the business world, a curious man by the name of David Farkas decided to put the larger case studies on link building to the test and find out for himself if their findings were replicable.
The process to do this took a considerable amount of time, his own small team, and the skills he’d already acquired managing other websites in the past. However, it’s fairly simple to follow.
First, Farkas created a niche website similar to sites we’re all likely to turn to for general information on the niche.
This part of the experiment took roughly six months to accomplish, as he and his team spent the time not only creating a professional website but also outfitting it with 26 pieces of high-quality SEO content. These were long-form pieces that matched the general criteria Google shows as popular among searchers.
For the latter half of the first year of experimentation, Farkas did nothing. He didn’t add content, utilize link-building techniques, or anything else. The site simply stayed up with the original 26 pieces of “perfect” content.
After one year, the site had practically zero activity. If it were monetized and designed to bring in income, it would have been a complete bust. However, Farkas then decided to set his team to work with SaaS link building.
So, Farkas decided on guest posting, a strategy we’ll talk about later, and the HARO posting from earlier. This was chosen to get the site on high-ranking authority SaaS websites.
However, before that could be implemented, he chose to focus on the site to establish its authority in a specific field and give other sites a reason to link back to it. In the end, Farkas decided that positioning the site as an educational resource was an effective option. This required further assessment of each piece of content, reworking that content to be link-worthy, and putting the top-quality content front and center.
Results
Farkas’s team started a link campaign by reaching out to guest posting sites and HARO-style providers. Within another half a year, in the earlier months of 2019, their site saw a 2000% growth in site traffic.
While Farkas’s site was largely an experiment and not meant to be a financial endeavor, this proved that SaaS link building was an effective tool for bringing irrelevant sites to the forefront without considerable time investments.
B2B Case Studies On SEO Foundation Strategy
People using SaaS products are literally other businesses. After all, the conventional internet surfer really doesn’t need too many tools to get the most out of their online experience. Naturally, this makes the B2B side of SaaS quite competitive.
One case study I drew a lot of inspiration from revolved specifically around helping businesses stand out from the crowd via SaaS link building. The strategy they implemented was SEO Foundation.
Like all of us, business owners know that SEO keywords were once a key to operating any sort of business on the internet. It is essentially how website owners can “communicate” with Google and other search engines to own the top of relevant search results and get necessary traffic.
However, if you and your competitors all resort to using the same high-volume keywords to build SEO content, it’s very easy to have your pages end up mish-mashed together in search results.
For a company just starting out, just picking the most relevant terms and implementing them with any unique difference will only land you up several pages behind even underperforming competition.
That’s where SEO Foundation strategies come in. And we are going to discuss how a few brands, later in this article, combined it with SaaS link building to gain double the usual results.
SEO Foundation strategies mainly include Keyword differentiation and SEO content emphasis.
Keyword Differentiation
As I previously mentioned, when everyone is using the same keywords, no one gets ahead.
So, differentiation is key. When conducting keyword analysis for SaaS, you need to focus on those terms that are uniquely different rather than those having more search volume – at least until your website has enough authority.
Let’s say you own a hosting company. The number one relevant search term businesses use when looking for a website hosting provider is “website hosting”. To differentiate that SaaS keywords from what every other provider is using, you can simply make it “secure website hosting”.
The reason for adding “secure” was because clients were looking for website hosting that was protected from DDOS attacks; the main cause for 1/3 of the downtime sites’ experience.
Just that one small change greatly differentiates your hosting company from its top competitors while more accurately describing what your customers were looking for.
Obviously, the actual method used will be different for every company depending on what customers are looking for and how it ties into the core keyword.
SEO Content Emphasis
Secondly, the content used to get those keywords out there and attract customers to the site is also key to building a strong foundation.
Content that has dead links and underperforming stats actually lowers a company’s ability to rank highly. This is because search engines like Google rate the quality of your content as a ranking signal.
You should understand that a good SaaS content marketing strategy prioritizes quality and value. So, the second phase, after differentiating keywords, is to work on not only identifying and removing dead links but also ensuring that your best content was providing enough value to readers.
To do this, you need to assess all the content on your site and rank them according to how many clicks and conversions they’ve individually generated. The content pages that rank low should be removed from the site’s index to keep them from being skimmed by Google until you improve the content. As for the top-performing pieces, highlight and update them with new, higher-performing keywords.
Result
After three months of implementing keyword differentiation and content emphasis on different websites, a 35% increase in traffic was recorded and maintained across all the sites in study. Some other websites had a 55% increase.
How To Get Started With SaaS Link Building?
So far, I’ve gone over a lot of details about what SaaS is, why it needs backlinks and a lot of proof showing that various link-building techniques work.
Now, let’s go over ways you can start link building for SaaS and see the same results demonstrated in our case studies.
1. Guest Posting For Link Building
Guest posting is a process of providing content to websites that cater to business owners while simultaneously linking back to your own site as the solution to a proposed problem in the content.
For starters, I recommend carrying out competitor backlinks analysis. This helps you know which high-ranking websites link back to your competitors. From there, you can approach the high-quality sites missing in your own backlink profile and send a pitch to ask for a guest posting opportunity. If your target sites have search engine strikes or have bad reputations, they’re better off being ignored. This is because they can easily lower your site’s authority ranking.
Once you find sites relevant to your brand, research what topics are relevant to their consumers and reach out to the site admin to approve your topics.
Note that backlinks generated by this method lead to top-performing pages since they are coming from valuable content that is highly relevant to your SaaS product.
2. HARO Link Building
HARO means “Help a Reporter Out”. It’s a free service that helps journalists find sources of information for pieces they’re writing, and it can also help get them gigs in general if a new startup or product needs to get a bit of press attention.
This is beneficial for SaaS companies. If a journalist on HARO is looking for information on a topic related to a business owner’s field of work, the business can reach out, provide that information, and get a backlink to their site.
HARO is also one of the easiest ways to end up in Forbes and other major publications since their journalists are already tied to such platforms and are likely writing for those platforms when they request the information.
For example, a SaaS business such as Signaturely might browse HARO and find that a journalist needs to know how e-signatures work behind the scenes and what makes them legally binding.
The owner can reach out, provide their hands-on knowledge to the journalist, and request a backlink within the finished content. The journalist gets the inside scoop they need, and the company gets exposure on the platform the journalist publishes. It’s a win-win situation.
3. Blog Content Marketing For Link Building
Customers are constantly looking for information. They want to research their purchasing decisions, find solutions to their problems, and generally educate themselves on whatever it is they’re doing. This goes for both the B2B and B2C sectors.
By creating a varied blog that covers the topics a company’s audience is interested in, you can leverage your blogs as backlinks in guest posts, PRs, etc. The key is to utilize SEO to maximum effect while ensuring the topic being blogged about is one that the majority of the target audience is searching for online.
For example, a tow truck company might write blog posts about how to call a tow truck during an emergency. They can then write and publish a guest post about proper car maintenance but link back to the blog post on how to call a tow truck by mentioning that emergencies still happen.
This not only pulls organic traffic into the site but also establishes the site as an authoritative source that knows what it’s talking about, leading to higher conversion rates. The same concept can be applied to any SaaS site with tremendous results.
Additionally, you can outreach other webmasters and propose link exchange opportunities with your blogs to get more high-quality backlinks.
Create Link-Worthy Content
Finally, one of the best ways to generate backlinks is to create content that is truly worthy of being linked to. Yes, average content with a lot of guest posts and other links that are part of a transaction is capable of producing results, but that doesn’t mean shooting for average is the best idea.
Whenever we at Digital Gratified start a project, we immediately look at our client’s content.
- Is it linkable?
- Would people researching for a paper or trying to prove a point link to that content?
- If I brought this to a guest post site or tried to establish a mutually beneficial agreement with a content creator, would they be willing to work with this?
If the answer to any of those questions is “no”, then my team and I know the first step is to re-create that content in a way that makes it worth linking to. Once that is done, the other methods can come into play and be a lot more effective.
3 Unique & Highly Effective SaaS Link-Building Strategies
For SaaS platforms, the best place to get a backlink is another SaaS platform. A backlink from a content farm/content mill website is not as worth it as a link from another SaaS platform. The same is because the content quality on such content farm platforms is very low, and they often charge dollars for publishing content. Also, such domains often get penalized by Google for creating forceful link-building schemes.
But again, when you target SaaS blogs, you have to sync with their super strict guidelines and send them multiple emails to successfully earn a backlink.
The complexity of SaaS domains makes it challenging for businesses to plan a SaaS link building. So here we are going to talk about three link-building strategies, particularly and especially for SaaS businesses. These strategies are pretty easy to implement, cost-effective, and can help you generate more quality links in less time.
A-B-C-D Link Partnerships
Guest posting is definitely a great way to build HIGH-QUALITY backlinks, but let’s be honest, it takes a lot of hard work to get a guest post published on a SaaS platform. Also, the whole effort gets you just one backlink only in return!
However, with A-B-C-D link-building strategy, you can 5X the result. In fact, you won’t even have to write the content. Here’s how to do it:
Step: 1 Outreach Domain The Same Old Fashioned Way
The beginning of this strategy is the same as most guest post strategies: find domains from which you would like to have a link and send them a guest post outreach mail. And wait for their response.
Step: 2 Plan The Content Once You Get Approval On A Title
Once you get the approval from that domain, go ahead with planning the content. Make a good content outline.
Step: 3 Outreach Other Domains From Where You Want A Backlink
This is the part where things get crazy! You don’t have to outreach more domains to ask them if you can publish the guest post on their domain. You have to offer them an opportunity to get featured on the domain that approved your title in the first place. Here is an email template to explain.
Hey {First Name},
I hope you are doing well!
I am {name}, {Your Position}, at {Comnay Name}; I was looking for high-quality SaaS domains that might be interested in getting a backlink from {Domain Name That Approved Your Title} and found yours.
Sounds Interesting? Then keep reading.
I just got approval from {Domain Name That Approved Your Title} on writing an article on {Title Approved}, and I believe that you might be interested in getting your link included in that guest post. So, if you want to contribute, please feel free to add your link with 500 words of content in any of the sections that you think are relevant to you.
In exchange, I would really appreciate it if you could allow me to add my backlink to any of your previously published blogs.
I believe this could be a pretty good and mutually beneficial partnership! What say? 🙂
Thanks,
{Your Name}
You will need to send this to more domains and try to get acceptance from at least five to six relevant domains. Believe me, you would get amazed when you see that most domains would agree to partner with you (just make sure that the approved title and the domain are relevant).
So, if each partner of yours contributes 500 words, the total contribution would be around 2500 – 3000 words.
You must be thinking, won’t you include your link in that guest post?
In Content Body: No
In Bio: Hell Yeah! (If they allow)
You would definitely not want to add multiple links in a guest post. So, keeping only your partner’s link in the guest blog is better.
Also, there is a thing about guest blogging; if you outreach the same domain where your guest post is already published, it would be easier to get approval from them on another title again. The reason is that they would get to know that you write pretty well after the first publication. This means, going ahead, you can still guest post for yourself on that domain with just your link.
Step: 4 Editing Before Submitting
At the end of the day, the article has to be published under your author’s bio. So, make sure you proofread the content before you submit it. The edits would include; changing the tone, the English version (make sure it is in your native English), and sorting grammatical errors if there are any.
Once you are done with proofreading, submit the content.
Here is how an approving platform would benefit: The content would be from multiple writers who are experts in that niche. It means it would be better than it would be if it were written just by you.
Here is how your partners benefit: They would get a link from a good domain and that too by making minimal efforts.
Here is how you benefit: You will simply get a lot of backlinks with just some emailing work and editing!
Graphic Links Redirection
Have you ever tried infographics for link building? Does it work? For sure, it does. But worked much? Probably not.
Building backlinks through infographics is a great strategy, but if the domain doesn’t add infographics? (which many domains actually don’t)
So here, this is a better and more effective strategy; Graphic Links Redirection. Here’s How To Do It:
Step: 1 Check Top Blogs On Targeted Keyword
Just like all other strategies, this also begins with good research. You just have to enter the keyword you are targeting and note down the top blogs in the SERP.
Step: 2 Create One Image / Video For All
If you target a keyword and list down all blogs from SERP on that keyword, you will find that most will probably be on the same topic. It means you can plan to create a single image/video for all related to that topic.
Step: 3 Outreach Them & Ask If They Can Add That Graphic
If someone reaches out to you and asks you to add an image or video with a link, then would you link it?
Mostly, domains are reluctant to add links to a blog page or service page in their blogs. Especially if they see them as their competitor; however, when it comes to adding good graphics with just a simple source link, they don’t mind. So, here is an example mail;
Hey {First Name},
I am {Your Name}, I just checked your blog; {blog link}, and found it really interesting. {Add something about the blog, what you liked about it and what was the most attractive point, etc. to make email more personalized}
By the way, there is one thing I believe it lacks, i.e., an image at {location with description}. Don’t you also think so?
I have attached an image of something that would make sense. You can use that image also. However, I might be using it in my upcoming blogs, so I will request you add a Source link to {Your image link, eg. https://youdomainname.com/wp-content/image.jpg}.
I have subscribed to your blog and am looking forward to more such engaging content!
Thanks,
{Your Name}
Step: 4 Get Up Your Blog & Redirect The Image Link To It
Here is the crazy part now! Once you think you got the image added to as many blogs as possible, you have to start working on your domain blog with relevant content to the image/video. For example, if you were targeting “SaaS link building strategies” and shared graphics related to SaaS link building, then you should go with a blog around a title like “Top X Link Building Strategies In 2023” or something like this.
Before making your blog live, create a copy of the image you shared with those domains.
Let’s say the copy image link is https://xyz.com/wp-content/image-copy.jpg. Add this image to your blog post. Then remove the file https://xyz.com/wp-content/image.jpg from your database and redirect this URL to your newly published blog.
URL: https://xyz.com/wp-content/image.jpg –> Redirected To: https://xyz.com/blog/saas-link-building-strategy.
So, now you have links to your blog from many relevant competing blogs ranking on the keyword you are targeting.
Having links on anchor text “Source” will not give you as much benefit as links on some relevant anchor. But still, this would be a lot helpful in ranking your blog.
Blogger Outreach For Link Building From SaaS Domains
If you were to offer someone a million dollars in exchange for a simple handshake, they would likely accept the offer. This principle applies to various marketing practices, where businesses entice others by offering something desirable at an attractive price or deal. The same can be done for SaaS link building. Here’s how to do it:
Step: 1 Do A Bit Of Blogger Outreach
Content farm domains charge a price for adding guest posts or link insertions. All you need to do is outreach them to understand their price and guidelines and create a list of 20 – 30 domains that charge a reasonable price for link insertion, like $10 – $25. But ensure their domain has pretty good stats like DA, D.R., & Traffic.
Step: 2 Outreach SaaS Platforms Where You Want Your Link Placed
Once you are done creating your list of high authority content farm domains, make a copy of that file and ensure that copy doesn’t have the prices mentioned. Then write an outreach pitch for SaaS domains asking if they want to collaborate with you, and you can provide them a link from any website from this list in exchange for a link from their website. Here is an example email for it.
Hey {First Name},
I hope you are doing well!
I am {name}, {Your Position}, at {Comnay Name}; I was looking for high-quality SaaS domains that might be interested in collaborating with me for link building.
I saw that you had built pretty good backlinks from really high-authority websites. And so, I thought you would be interested in getting more backlinks from such domains.
Here is a list of domains I can provide you a backlink from, do have a look and let me know your views.
{LIST}.
In exchange for this, I would request a backlink from one of your existing blogs. Would that be possible for you?
Our partnership can go far and benefit us in many ways. Do let me know if you are interested in this.
Thanks,
{Your Name}
Step: 3 Upon Their Reply, Add Their Link, & Get Your Link Insertion Planned
Once you get a reply from them from the SaaS domain with link insertion details on one of the domains from the list, just get their link added and pay the blogger. And once you add their link, update them about it and send your link insertion detail.
Although this strategy would cost you a few dollars. But if you make an estimate of your expense, you will realize that you just spent $20 on average for every link acquisition. And with an investment of around $2,000 dollars and a bit of effort, you built 100 SaaS backlinks!
Link Building For SaaS With Digital Gratified
If you’re unsure which steps to take to get your links built up and your site thriving, my team at Digital Gratified is here to help. We help SaaS companies just like yours identify the problems they’re having generating traffic and which solutions are available to resolve those problems.
Then, we implement the changes and strategies necessary to get the site growing in no time. You also don’t have to worry about paying outrageous amounts to get super-quality SaaS backlinks. Our link building services and SaaS SEO services are quite reasonable compared to other agencies. Besides that, you get to work with the best ones 😉
