How to Build Links for your SaaS Business

The average SaaS blog has 6,055 backlinks from 267 referring domains, find out how to build links for your SaaS business.

How to Build Links for your SaaS Business

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Link building is the process of acquiring quality backlinks to your site, and why should building links to your SaaS business be important to you?

In short; to compete online with the singular goal of generating traffic and increasing site rankings in organic search results.

 

Link-building campaigns are mostly conducted by sending cold outreach campaigns, But there are smarter ways to generate quality links like running webinars and syndicating your content.

Why is Link Building Important for SaaS Businesses?

SEO is extremely important for Software as a Service company. Regardless of your niche, the SEO landscape is competitive and it tends to change frequently.

 

SaaS startups are among the leading and most profitable subscription-based models for generating revenue. A great example of SaaS software that you are familiar with is email marketing software, marketing automation software, and more.

 

SaaS software has proven valuable across just about every industry. However, depending on the niche it can be really tough to outrank the competition even if the product and blog content are great. A stronger backlink profile is often the deciding factor that helps you carve out a slice of online traffic to generate needed sales.

 

Does Link Building Still Work in 2023?

 

Yes, the countless algorithm updates changed the impact of rankings but it’s still important. What Google banned was excessive reciprocal link-building, paid links, bookmarking sites, and other link-building techniques that were rampant before.

Using these practices resulted in content that doesn’t have any value showing up on search engine results in place of quality content that would have served a better purpose.

These algorithm updates don’t make high-quality links from authoritative sources less powerful. They just reinforce the importance of quality link building. 

What’s the best way to build links?

The more links you have from relevant, authoritative websites, the higher your chances of ranking on search engine results in pages. We’re going to go over some of the most relevant tactics to build links for your SaaS business.

1. Find backlinks your competitor has

To do this effectively, you need a backlink monitoring tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs.

Create a campaign and go to backlink to find sites that have links.

You can run several competitor searches at a time. You can filter results by URl, rel-tag, whether they all are dofollow or nofollow only or with exact anchor texts.

 

  • Domain Rating
  • Website Traffic
  • Traffic value
  • Organic keywords
  • Referring domains
  • Backlinks
  • additional Ahrefs filters

 

Once you click the run automation you pull all relevant results into your campaign.

 

2. Backlinks from review sites

Online reviews can make up to 10% of the rating criteria on how Google ranks websites. This cannot be ignored. Also, the traffic you get from review sites gives you better leads, and hence translates to better conversions, according to Systeme.io.

Choosing the correct review platform for your business is important since there are plenty of review platforms. Some of them are niche-specific while others are generalists.

Reviews and testimonials of products on popular sites help you generate traffic, but you should consider other things before choosing something that fits your needs.

Things like:

  • Number of reviews going live on the platform every month
  • Number of businesses registered on the platform
  • How does the platform combat fake reviews

 

90% of people agree to the fact that only after reading online reviews do they visit the sites mentioned. Getting links from G2, TrustPilot, and others can improve the traffic to your site. These sites are some of the biggest sites present in the market.

 

Another way to boost rankings is by getting links from popular websites that have regular traffic and a huge audience but getting links from popular websites is difficult as high-authority sites don’t always link to low-authority sites.

3. Backlinks from bloggers in exchange for paid accounts

Building up your audience takes time and effort but with the right help, you can shorten this time period and increase your profits. For example, if it’s a graphic design SaaS tool, they can run giveaways of their procreate pixel art brushes to bloggers to get reviews.

Bloggers can be an asset for building links. Partnering up with the right people can give you a loyal audience base and help you get the rankings you deserve. When you give away a paid account for free to bloggers this can result in an inflow of links.

By getting your product in front of the right blogger you can exponentially increase, your number of backlinks, site traffic, and of course sales.

4. Backlinks from list posts

We mentioned in the first point that researching your competitors is important. By reverse engineering your competitor’s links you’re definitely going to find links from list posts and these are an easy and prime target for you to replicate.

If a rival ranks before you find the links that are going to your competitor but not to you. Then get their contact details and convince them to link back to you.

  • You can look for competitor backlinks on SEO tools like Ahrefs
  • You can set the filtering criteria as one link per domain
  • Set the filter for do-follow links to avoid no-follow links

This is the list of all links linking back to your competitor.

5. Backlinks from communities

Community sites help you get noticed. Community sites give you an avenue to build relationships with your audience. This gives you organic links and also helps you refine your product according to audience needs.

The primary focus here is on creating links. They provide no follow links but this balances your ratio of no follow and do follow links.

No follow links often send you valuable inbound traffic. On community sites, start participating in discussions and leave contextual and serious comments to start attracting attention.

The Livechatinc blog gets thousands of organic visitors and they can provide more guides and create content in line with competitors. This would help them attract more traffic from search engines.

LiveChatInc has a typing speed test. Zendesk produces data-driven infographics and FreshDesk has a customer service resume guide that help them drive new traffic to their site.

Here’s Zendesk with their well-researched pieces.

6. Guest Posting

Lastly, if you want to Build Links for your SaaS Business, guest posting is going to be a part of your strategy.

Guest blogging is one of the few link building strategies that have survived until today and are going strong. It’s an effective way to gain quality links. Guest posting is the process of writing and publishing content on another website as a guest.

There are multiple ways of finding guest posting opportunities. To make your guest posts more valuable you can add data tables, charts, and graphs. The most straightforward way is to reach out to websites that share a similar audience as yours and ask them if they are interested in accepting a guest post. The response will be divided. But the truth is that many websites without “write-for-us” pages accept guest contributions.

The second most commonly used approach is to reach out to sites that already have a page inviting guest bloggers. It seems more logical since you already know sites that accept guest posts and won’t waste time preparing a pitch for these sites. However, there are some problems with writing for sites with a write for us page. Most of these sites have a contact form where you can submit the entire post in one go and communicate with the editor to get things going. Speaking from experience, contact forms aren’t the quickest mode of communication.

Finding websites with a write for us page is easy. You can search by the anchor text on Google. Simply type in your niche + “write for us”, to get hundreds of results that you can start using.

 

Wrapping it up

Businesses need to understand the value of link building as well as the benefits it brings to the table. Link building is a good aspect of SEO because it tells you how Google ranks web pages. The world of SaaS is one of cut-throat competition and hence you need to bring your top game to the table. You must regularly build partnerships, cultivate relationships with other bloggers and SaaS businesses and acquire all the links you can.