SAAS Link Building Guide: All You Need to Know

Without a doubt, link-building is an essential component of any successful SEO strategy. However, it can be hard. Freaking hard, if you don’t know what tactics to use.

The good news is, with the link building strategies that I’ll cover in a minute, you’ll be able not only to ramp your backlink profile and surface on the first page of search results but also outrank your competitors.

Ready to jump in? If so, read on for the details.

Why Is Link Building Important for SAAS Companies?

Covering so many companies, from marketing automation to SEO tools to document signing, and whatnot, SaaS is one of the hottest industries these days.

Just to give you some numbers, in 2022, according to a report by Statista, there were over 17,000 SaaS companies in the US alone, with a customer base of 59 billion people. In 2023, the global SaaS market is expected to grow by up to 20%, which shows incredible SaaS growth.

Thus, if your SaaS offers CRM software, you automatically compete with about 298,000,000 pages for that keyword!

This also shows that the competition between SaaS companies will grow harder than ever, and it will be almost impossible for SaaS companies to get on the first page of search results, where, as we all know, all traffic is.

According to the report published by Moz, the first page of Google captures 71% of the total traffic and has gone up to 91.5% in recent years, leaving minuscule chances for companies that appear on the third or even second page to receive any traffic at all.

That’s exactly why link building for SaaS companies is crucial. With a successful link-building strategy at hand, you can kill two birds with one stone – boost your Google ranking and increase your brand awareness, while at the same time widening the gap between you and your peers.

In addition, link building allows you to take a more targeted approach by obtaining backlinks to the product pages that would not attract links on their own, thereby helping you improve bottom-of-funnel rankings and increase marketing qualified leads (MQL).

Understanding Link Building for SAAS Companies

Not all link building strategies are equally good. In fact, some of them can be detrimental to your site’s authority and even lead to penalties if Google spots unusual linking patterns and schemes on your website and decides to run a manual check of it.

However, the strategies we use are white-hat techniques only. This allows us to bring real results to our SaaS clients and continuously grow their website visibility without downfalls.

Now, before I move to the practices, let’s first quickly cover what makes links good.

What Makes a Link “Good”?

In addition to the “dofollow” tag, there are a few more factors that add value to a link. Here are the most important of them:

• Relevance of the link to the topic;
• Authority of the linked page and domain;
• Page traffic;
• The number of ongoing links on the page;
• Anchor text.

Best Practices for Link Building for SAAS Companies

Further down, I’ll share my most favorite link building techniques that can boost your backlink profile with power.

Write Guest Posts

Guest posting is the cornerstone on which link building is built. So, if you’ve not been building links through guest posting yet, it’s time to start now.

Essentially, it comes down to the following:

• Making a list of all credible websites in your niche;
• Reaching out to the owners of the sites with a proposal to post free content on their blogs.

But before you get all excited about getting a link from a website, it's critical to do some research first. Start by checking their domain authority (DA) to see if it's worth your while. There are lots of tools you can use for this (Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush).

And don't forget to brush up on your link lingo! Knowing the difference between do-follow and no-follow links is key. Check out what kind of link the website offers. You can even snoop around their site to see what previous guest posts got.

Sending one email to a website's editors might not be enough. It's a good idea to follow up with them after two to four weeks to increase your chances of success. Your first email could get lost in the sea of pitches they receive.

To give you an idea of how this works, check out this screenshot shared by Christian Coulson in his article on submitting a guest post to a blog:

After obtaining the requirements for content creation, write a business-related article and include a link back to the page of your site that you want to promote. By doing so, you will be able to increase the authority of your domain and attract organic traffic to your site.

For example, you could write an article for HubSpot.

This blog has more than 41 million monthly users and covers everything from software products to big data to team building and more. More importantly, their requirements are fairly easy to fulfill. As long as a piece is not plagiarized, the concept of the idea is original, and the length of the article is between 1000-1800 words, it can be published on the site.

Or, you can post on Smash.vc or Userlist that post SaaS-related content. Like HubSpot, they have high domain authority and are actively looking for sources that can provide them with high-quality blog posts. 

It's pretty cool that many websites these days are open to accepting guest posts. They'll often have a dedicated section with guidelines and contact info for their editors, so it's easy to submit your work.

For example, Serpstat Blog (DR: 78) has a page with a crystal clear plan of action for those interested in submitting a guest post:

And here is a similar section on another website with DR: 84:

Discover Conferences for Guest Posting

Another great way to boost guest posting presence is with the help of conferences. For SaaS, this can be Dreamforce, SaaStr, or Adobe Summit events or any other suggested by Google as top for the year.

The idea is to map out market leaders and scrape the data from the conference sponsors pages using web data extraction tools such as Hevo Data, Parsehub, Import.io, and more.

By crawling URLs, these tools can extract web data in seconds, allowing you to further copy it into a Google Excel sheet for analysis.

Once you make a list of the companies that you’d like to connect to, go to LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator Tool or any other processing tool of your choice and search for these companies.

The great thing about LinkedIn Sales Navigator Tool is that, in addition to a quick search by company names, it allows you to search by company roles, thus, making it easier to connect to the right people without wasting time.

Next up, conduct a thorough research on the company before you outreach. In doing so, you’ll not only learn what type of content they typically post and who their targeted audience is, but you will also be able to write a more personalized message.

Of course, this method, while not dreadfully complicated, requires a lot of time, effort, and commitment, not to mention the tools needed to analyze data. And many SaaS companies prefer to use the services of professional SEO agencies (like ours) that already have all the needed connections and know their ropes.

Leverage Review Sites

Online review platforms are another surefire way to promote your SaaS website. Just so that you get an idea, according to Moz, online reviews make up to 10% of the criteria for how Google ranks sites, which is a big number, to say the least. Therefore, you can’t afford not to use this opportunity for link building and increasing organic traffic growth.

At the same time, you can’t use just any platform you come across. There are thousands of online review platforms, all with their pros and cons, but only few of them can offer you real value. So, here are the questions to ask yourself before choosing one:

• How many reviews on average do they post every month?
• What do they do to stop fake reviews?
• How many (if any) businesses are registered on the review platform?

The power of reviews is truly incredible, and it would certainly be wrong to miss this opportunity.

Besides, many review sites, such as G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, TopTenReviews, and many others, are ready to provide product reviews in exchange for just screenshots or demos, allowing SaaS companies to choose partners on the most suitable terms for them.

As surveys show, 90% of people first read the review about a product and only then go to the producer’s site to check it out. So, be sure to pick a few of the highest-ranking niche review sites and try to get a personalized product review with backlinks on one of them.

Reap the Benefits of Unlinked Brand Mentions

Here's a great tactic for boosting your SaaS link building: claiming unlinked brand mentions. Unlinked brand mentions are basically when someone mentions your company on their website but forgets to include a hyperlink back to your site. It happens more often than you might think!

To claim these mentions and get the link back to your site, you can reach out to the author via email and ask them to add the link.

Now, you might be wondering how to find these unlinked mentions in the first place. One way to do it is by manually searching for them.

We can show you how to do it using our own brand as an example – just replace our brand info with your own!

Enter such a word combination in the Google search box:

intext:{Admix Global} -{admixglobal.com} -twitter.com -facebook.com -pinterest.com -youtube.com -linkedin.com -instagram.com -quora.com

Next up, it's time to roll up your sleeves and dive into the results yourself.

Alternatively, you can use one of the dozens of brand mentions tools available online.

Get Links From Communitiesd

Another popular way to increase organic traffic is to post content with links on community sites like Reddit and Quora. These websites have millions of active monthly users, which makes them ideal for spreading the word about your business and attracting referral traffic.

With external websites, which communities are, there’s no need to create high-quality links – just use nofollow links. These links don’t increase the site’s domain authority, but they can give you the needed traffic and may very soon lead to real dofollow links.

The main rule: links should be embedded as natively as possible.

Besides, there are community websites that allow the use of dofollow links (YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, etc.). Take the time to research what these sites are and incorporate them into your link-building strategy.  

For example, Reddit doesn't allow new websites to just drop links and expect them to be visible. Your post might be removed by Reddit's spam filter or moderators.

If your post or comment gets 5-7 upvotes, your link will automatically become dofollow. But don't go creating multiple accounts just to upvote your post (that's a no-no and could get you banned).

Instead, try to create interesting content that people will naturally want to upvote.

Explore Broken Links

You can also take advantage of a so-called broken link building strategy. The concept of this strategy is downright simple, but the outcome can be phenomenal.

Essentially, what you need to do is go to the website that you want to get a link from - say, forbes.com, for example. Then scan the site using Chrome’s extension Broken Link Checker or Ahrefs Best by links report.

Upon detecting broken links, the tool will highlight them in red.

What you can do next is to create your own piece of content with a backlink and contact webmasters, offering them to update the broken page with your article. If they like the article and find it valuable to visitors, they will gladly publish it on their site.

The cool thing about the broken link building strategy is that it’s mutually beneficial. Not always marketers are aware of the 404 pages on their websites, but when they swap out the broken links for nice and freshly updated content, they can improve both their user experience and Google rankings, while you can get a quality backlink.

Guest Podcasting

You might be surprised to know that podcasting is just as effective a link building strategy as the above mentioned tactics. Yes, that’s right. Podcasts, like any source on the Internet, include “show notes” where they give descriptions for episodes and post them on their websites along with backlinks.

This way, they allow you not only to increase your brand awareness, but also get links back to the websites you need.

Respond to Journalists Requests on Twitter

Twitter is a unique platform to maximize your link building efforts. It’s actively used by journalists, editors, and writers who search for sources and commentary all the time, giving you a great way to contribute to various media articles.

To get started, optimize your Twitter account by making sure that it has all the details about you along with your photo to generate social proof. Then make “Twitter lists” of people in a similar niche as yours, start following them, and keep a close eye on the “JournoRequest” hashtag.

Whenever you see a relevant media query, respond to it quickly. The sooner you respond, the better, as there are more chances that you’ll be noticed. At the same time, make sure your responses are accurate. For example, if a journalist has made it clear that they want comments, give them comments instead of making small talk and introducing yourself first.

You could also DM journalists to pitch your idea. This method often turns out to be the best way to start media relations.

Take Advantage of Expired Domains

An expired domain, which basically refers to any website that hasn’t been renewed and is no longer in use, can be used as a link building strategy in several ways:

• Redirect it to your website;
• Rebuilt it.

These domains still retain their backlinks and can be repurposed to help build links for another website.

One way to use an expired domain is to redirect it to your website. This means that the expired domain will now point to your website, passing on the link juice and authority it has accumulated over time. Effectively, this can help boost your website’s search engine rankings and increase its visibility.

Another way is to rebuild it completely, which is best done if the expired domain has a strong history and valuable content. In this case, the expired domain will serve as a satellite site to link back to your main website, helping you create a network of high-quality links and improving your website’s rankings.

We often buy expired domains and rebuild websites on purchased domains. However, we don’t just buy any domain that is no longer in use. Instead, we offer our clients to choose what websites they’d like to link to through domain name auction listings. Once a certain domain gets the required number of preorders, we buy it.

As a result, our clients can significantly boost their rankings while paying no more than $150 for a link.

However, it’s important to note that using expired domains for link building can be a risky strategy. If the expired domain has been penalized by Google or has a history of spammy link building practices, it could hurt your website’s rankings instead of helping them.

We don’t take a punt. Each of the domains we put on action is being vetted first using tools such as Google index, web.archive.org, Moz, VirusTotal, Ahrefs, and Majestic, just to name a few.

Create Link Bait Content

Link bait, as you’ve probably guessed from the name, is the term used to describe the content that is so awesome and fascinating that content publishers want to link to it themselves. Most often, this content includes the following formats:

• Visuals;
• Interactive infographics;
• Guides and long articles;
• Data-driven studies;
• Controversial content;
• Statistics;
• Questionnaires.

The remarkable benefit of link bait content is that it doesn’t even need to be promoted. If the content you create is really good and evokes the right feeling and emotion, it actually sells itself and people link to it without being asked.

Let’s look at some of the some examples of successful link bait content below.

3 Successful Examples of Link Bait Used by SaaS

Perhaps, the easiest way to explain how link bait works and why it must be part of a link-building strategy is to take a look at examples.

Below, I’ve selected three of the most successful ones that demonstrate the effectiveness of link bait. I’ll go over each of them and explain what exactly made them so popular so that you can use these insights for your business SEO goals.

1. Color Palette Generator by Canva

I’d like to start with a Color Palette Generator piece created by Canva. It is an exemplary piece of link bait interactive content that, at the time of writing this article, has already earned over 4.18K backlinks from 1.9K domains. You can check this by conducting a quick Ahrefs backlink analysis of the exact URL:

What makes this piece so successful? First things first, it’s the interactive part, of course. Visual content with interactive features is hot right now, and people love it. However, what’s even more important than that is that it offers useful content for everyone.

Now, instead of buying Photoshop and breaking a photo into colors there, as you’d have to do a few years ago, everyone – from newbies to web designers – can use the tool online and grab a color palette for free.

Of course, it’s not surprising that this simple solution went viral almost instantly and remains just as popular now. People use it for a variety of purposes, and it proves to be an extremely useful tool.

2. Stats and Facts by Fundera

Another great example of using link bait in SaaS is the article “What Percentage of Small Businesses Fail?” written by Fundera’s content team. This informative piece has acquired over 4.85K backlinks from 2.34K referring domains, which isn’t a small feat.

Surprisingly, many people are skeptical about using stats and facts as link bait. However, contrary to what some people think, educational pieces with interesting statistics like the example above can be just as (if not more) attractive to earn links as interactive content.

If you have ever written an article for your blog yourself, then you know firsthand that statistics are an important element of high-quality content. Bloggers are always looking up numbers and stats on sites like Statista, etc. Why not give them a good piece of content as a reference and improve your search ranking as Fundera did?

3. Guide by CoSchedule

Guides and how-to articles are other sources widely used to attract links. The trick is, the content must be really valuable and thoroughly researched. A case in point is the guide from CoSchedule. Thanks to its rounded approach to all of the aspects of writing, this URL alone has managed to earn 436 backlinks from over 127 referring domains worldwide.

Now, how about your industry? Does it have many guides? If it does, are they all well-written? Whatever the case, creating an in-depth guide can help you attract links like mad and outrank your peers.

Why Doesn't Everybody Use Link Bait?

You might wonder why – if it’s so mind-blogging – link bait isn’t used by everyone. The answer is quite simple. Like any other method used in link building, link bait requires commitment for long-term success.

To make it successful, not only is it essential to have well-crafted content – whatever it be – but you also need to have a good promotional plan at hand, a well-defined audience, and a keyword strategy.

In terms of the latter, keyword research is half the battle, because if the link-bait page doesn’t rank for the right keywords, even a very enticing piece is unlikely to attract links. This is one of the main reasons SaaS companies employ SEO agencies like ours to get professional help.

HARO Link Building

Another effective and underutilized SEO tactic that can offer tons of benefits for your SEO strategy is HARO link building. What is it? Let’s take a closer look.

HARO, short for “Help A Reporter Out”, is an online service created by Peter Shankman in 2008. The original goal of the service was to bring writers from all over the world together in one place and help them collect quotes and engage with reputable sources from any relevant topic.

Over the years, the service has turned into a proper large-scale database. Now HARO can handle thousands of journalists’ requests and is rightfully considered a hub for various media outlets, including some big players like The New York Times, Forbes, ABC, etc., which makes it an effective link building tool. 

Is HARO Right For You?

If you’ve not heard of HARO by now, most likely, it’s because your link builders have decided it’s not for you. But does HARO have limitations? The short answer is “no”.

The long answer is, while I’d certainly agree that it’s more adapted for niches like finance, business, and high tech that have the highest number of queries, I’d also say that it can - and should - be used by any other type of brand as well.

Why? Here are just a few reasons:

• The prevalent majority of queries published on the HARO platform have a DR of 50 or higher;
• About 69% out of 1,500 studied queries receive 1,000 organic visitors monthly;
• More than 50% of all articles published on the platform include dofollow links.

Without sounding like a no-brainer, here is an example of how HARO can be useful for getting backlinks from world-famous websites like Forbes.

Given these stats, it’s obvious that not using HARO in your SEO is an oversight. The good news is, it’s not too late to give it a try!

Leverage the Power of HARO Link Building

HARO is a free platform where websites can acquire backlinks from the most visited websites. However, its free version is rather limited, so you’ll most likely want to upgrade it to get access to a bundle of other useful features that are only available in a premium plan.

Once you sign up, here are the steps to take:

• Choose a category you’re most qualified in (e.g. business and finance, high tech, travel, healthcare, lifestyle, education, etc.);
• From now on, you’ll receive emails from journalists three times a day - at about 5:35 a.m., 12:35 p.m, and 5:35 p.m.;
• Reply to the queries that you know really well.

Sometimes you may be tempted to answer questions that are not in the category you have chosen. However, I believe it’s a steep road to take. If you aren’t an expert in the field, your commentary won’t qualify as expert and may even hinder your chances of success.

Right, but how exactly is HARO used for link building then you may wonder?

Here’re a few tactics to keep in mind:

• Don’t rush;
• Choose wisely;
• React quickly;
• Concentrate on what’s important.

Don’t Rush

The remarkable advantage of HARO is that it allows SaaS businesses to gain backlinks from websites like WebMD, Forbes, etc. that have a DA of 94 and higher with relative ease.

The flip side of the coin is, it doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, expect to wait at least a couple of weeks before an article citing your source gets published. This is because journalists often publish their queries long before they actually write the article.

Choose Wisely

As I’ve mentioned earlier, there’s no point in trying to respond to as many queries as you can.

In doing so, you run the risk of demonstrating insufficient competence in a certain area and being marked as a “time waster” by journalists, which can ultimately lead to the loss of your credibility.

Only respond to the queries that are relevant to your topic. Even if you don’t get dofollow links right away, with a good strategy at hand, you’re sure to obtain links valuable to your content.

React Quickly

While you definitely shouldn’t answer all queries that come your way, you should answer quickly. Imagine how many responses journalists get to each of the queries they publish. This number can easily reach thousands!

How many responses out of this number do you think they can physically read? That’s right. Not a lot. And if your response isn’t at the top or/and you don’t answer the same day, chances are high that they won’t even open it.

So, whether you’re running your SEO campaign on your own or relying on an agency, it’s important to make sure your alerts and filters are set up so you can be the first to cover the topic.

Concentrate on What’s Important

It goes without saying that it takes a lot of dedication to succeed. Truth be told, HARO has become incredibly oversaturated, and even those who’ve been using it for a long time and were able to secure solid links can now run into challenges sometimes.

However, I never said link building was easy. Getting links with HARO is a great way to increase the authority of a SaaS business, but it can easily take from a few weeks up to a couple of months. It can even take longer if you don’t make a dedicated effort to craft good pitches worth being included in journalists’ posts.

Building Relationships With Industry Leaders

Along with all the other tactics I mentioned above, I’d also love to focus on a relationship-based link-building tactic. At Editorial Link, we use this method a lot because:

• It belongs to SEO white-hat techniques;
• It can help boost the client’s domain rating significantly.

So, what is so special about this method and how does it differ from traditional outreach? The difference between the two is huge.

First and foremost, the relationship-based approach doesn’t involve “cold” outreach where you have to send an email blast in order to establish a “first touch contact”. You already have a network of friendly partners to work with in business niches that are relevant to yours.

Let me explain how it works with an example. In our agency, we do it like this. Find a reliable source, e.g similarweb.com and then publish a guest post with links to our partners with whom we have agreed in advance that they will return links to our clients.

This way, we get an indirect exchange of links, which is reliable and safe. Also, this method is much more cost-effective as you only pay for the links and not for hours, unlike what most other agencies would charge you.

However, the most important advantage of this method is that it allows you to constantly increase your DR and become a link magnet, naturally driving traffic to your source.

The catch?

Building this kind of network requires a lot of time, effort, and dedication, which can be an insurmountable challenge for many SaaS brands.

That’s where you might be better off entrusting this job to our agency, which specializes in a relationship-based link building approach and can help build high-quality backlinks for you.

Top 3 Unethical Link Building Techniques to Steer Clear of

When it comes to improving your SEO, it's vital to steer clear of certain tactics that can actually hurt your performance. So let's take a closer look at some tactics you'll want to avoid if you want to see positive results!

Avoid Link Schemes

It's critical to stay away from paid backlinks. These are links you can buy from spammy sites like private blog networks, paid guest posts, and paid directories. Even though it might seem like an easy shortcut to boost your site's traffic, it's actually against Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Here's what you can read in the Google Webmaster Guidelines about it:

If Google catches you using these tactics, they could give you a penalty which will take months and hundreds of dollars to recover from. It's better to focus on building high-quality, organic links instead!

Beware of Excessive Link Exchanges

It might seem like a good idea to trade links with other websites, but Google actually considers this an abusive tactic. While it's totally natural to link to each other sometimes, you don't want to overdo it. If most of your links are reciprocal, it's time to switch things up and start using "white hat" tactics instead.

Remember, excessive link exchanges can look pretty suspicious to Google and could even result in a penalty, so it's best to play it safe!

Anchor Text Mistakes to Avoid

Anchor text is actually a Google ranking factor, which means some SEOs might try to manipulate it to improve their search engine results. But here's the thing: using keyword-rich or overly-optimized anchor text can actually get your site penalized. It's risky business, especially if you're using exact match anchor text in your backlinks.

Here's what you can find in the Google Webmaster Guidelines regarding this:

Editorial.Link Case Studies

I guess you’re probably wondering how the relationship-based link-building strategy works in practice, right? If so, let’s have a look at some of the examples of how our team has implemented it for SaaS and what results we’ve managed to achieve.

Of course, I’m not going to reveal all of the secrets and techniques that we use, since this is the work we do and this is what makes us different. However, I will definitely give you some numbers so you can grasp the scale of growth of some SaaS brands.

Case

One of our most successful cases is Boxmode. The competition in the SaaS niche is huge, so they chose a package of 30 links per month. And we built 245 links in 12 months of our cooperation. 

The sites we managed to get links from are flippingbook.com (DR 91), g2.com (DR 90), cloudways.com (DR 90), monday.com (DR 88), premio.io (DR 83), Appsumo.com (DR 81), databox.com (DR 81), podium.com (DR 81). 

Thus, these were the results:

• 230% Monthly traffic increase;
• 144% Domain Rating increase;
• 307% Keywords Ranking increase.

Here are the metrics at the beginning of our cooperation and after several months of it.

Conclusion

To recap, link building is an important part of business growth that can help you improve your website’s ranking and drive traffic to your content. However, it’s not easy.

First of all, there’s the competition. Secondly, the algorithms always change, making it important to stay in tune with the latest trends. And finally, it requires a significant amount of research, outreach, and relationship building, which may easily take years.

With that in mind, quite often, hiring an SEO agency proves to be much more cost-effective in the long run.

At Editorial.Link, we have gained years of experience creating link-building strategies for businesses across a variety of industries, allowing us to quickly identify business needs and determine the most effective (white-hat) SEO tactics.

What’s more, we already have a wide network of websites and influencers. This means you can get trusted links from reputable sources with a DR of 80 and higher without spending months sending out hundreds of emails to your business prospects.

So, if you want to save time and resources, while at the same time building a strong online presence and increasing traffic to your content, Editorial.Link can be your one-stop destination.
To see our link building case studies in more detail, you can visit our website.