Link Building for SaaS – The Ultimate Guide and 18 Strategies That Work22 min read

How can link building for SaaS businesses help you improve online visibility and drive more organic traffic to your website?

Building quality backlinks is one of the most effective ways to improve your website’s authority and search engine rankings. If you strive to stay ahead of the competition in SERPs in the competitive SaaS industry, you need to use link-building to generate more traffic and conversions.

But how to actually start building links? In this article, we will share the ins and outs of link building and 18 proven link-building strategies for SaaS businesses.

There will be tips for you as we go on with the strategies and a tool – Backlink Manager, that can help you monitor the backlinks you’ve built to your SaaS, and manage the relationships with vendors and link-building agencies easier.

Let’s start!

TL; DR

• Link-building is the process of establishing hyperlinks on relevant websites that link back to your page for increased visibility and brand awareness.
• Regarding backlinks’ qualities, you should consider the referring website’s authority, relevance, positioning, anchor text used for the link on the page, and the type of link built (DoFollow or NoFollow).
• A cohesive and effective link-building strategy can help SaaS businesses thrive and get higher SEO rankings.
• Effective link-building increases your website’s DA, credibility, conversion rate, and organic traffic.
• Strategies like guest blogging, building linkable assets, podcast and interview link-building, infographics, and resource page generation can help significantly improve your SEO ranking and flourish your SaaS business.
• Backlink Manager helps you monitor your link-building efforts and prevent link rot (the links you’ve invested in building being removed over time) by sending you notifications when a link goes missing or the page is 404. You can group your partners, vendors and links into campaigns and projects with it easily.
• It also connects you to website authors and developers to network with them so you can ask them to review your products and make guest posts for them.

What is Link Building?

Link building refers to the process of you acquiring links to external links from other websites that direct traffic back to your own website.

Essential Things about Link Building You Should Know

It would be best to keep a few things in mind while implementing your link building campaign.

Dofollow vs Nofollow links

Dofollow links improve your site’s ranking and increase your SERP (search engine results pages), while nofollow links do not affect your SEO ranking.

Nofollow links are hyperlink extensions that can be added to your backlinks when you do not want to endorse or vouch for the website. On some pages, they are built in the comments section to prevent malicious and spam links from increasing.

However, nofollow links can help with promotion, brand visibility, and referral traffic-building purposes.

To determine whether a link is nofollow or dofollow, you can view the blog’s source code that has linked you. All the external and internal links are included here.

You can also email the developer and persuade them to add a dofollow link instead.

Another extension called rel=” sponsored” is used to identify the paid links and sponsorships. The backlinks from these websites are not considered organic traffic and do not significantly affect the search engine rankings.

Anchor Texts

An exact match anchor text is when a hyperlink is added to a text the same as the target keywords it is trying to rank on the search engine. You have to ensure that not all of them are an exact match since they might be marked as “spam links” by Google because of excessive link exchanges. It is referred to as “anchor text abuse.”

So, the best course of action is to include branded anchor text, generic anchor text, and long-tail anchor text. It will establish a more natural and diverse backlink profile.

You can add your customizable anchor text by entering a line of code in the source, as shown here.

Benefits of using Link Building for SaaS

Simply paying for advertising drives your total cost, reduces organic traffic, and lowers your SEO ranking. You need a cohesive SEO strategy to stand out in the increasingly competitive SaaS industry.

Inbound links, also called backlinks, can be critical for SEO optimization because they direct the audience from other web pages to yours. High-quality backlinks can significantly improve your SEO and generate organic traffic for your page. So if you utilize legitimate link-building tactics for your company, you can establish a competitive advantage over other SaaS brands.

Let’s see the potential benefits of following effective link-building strategies for a high-quality SEO ranking.

Positively Influence the Search Engines’ Algorithm and Ranking

Backlink is among the top three factors influencing Google’s search engine ranking algorithm. So if you acquire high-quality backlinks, you can push your website’s content upwards in the search results and rank on search engine results.

It is especially important for SaaS companies like yours, as users typically only click on Google’s top four or five results. Potential customers can more easily discover your SaaS company when your ranking is higher in search results.

Increase The Credibility of Your Website

Search engines value high-quality backlinks as a sign of a credible and authoritative website. When trusted websites link to your website’s various pages, search engines like Google will view your site as trustworthy and relevant.

You will have a better possibility of higher search rankings for your target keywords since the search engines will consider you worth promoting. This increased credibility can also lead to more referral traffic, as users who trust the website linking to your site may be more likely to click through to your site.

Increase Domain Authority

Domain authority is a crucial metric for search engine algorithms that measures the strength and credibility of a website. Moz’s Domain authority works as score points in search engine optimization. It considers various factors, such as the quality of your inbound links. So, applying a proper link-building strategy for your domain will improve your SEO ranking in search engines by increasing your domain authority.

You can analyze the domain of any website and see its details for free using Moz or similar authority checkers.

Have Better Sources of Relevant Traffic

Backlinks help you get traffic for your website and gain access to audience who will be interested in your product or service. With improved visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs), you can get traffic from potential customers whom you can convert into qualified leads.

You can see the number of paid and organic traffic through tools like Ahref’s.

Improve Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is critical to SaaS businesses like yours, so you should convince your users to convert from the first moment. What is a better way to impress them than informing them about your SaaS website or product through a credible website or Google’s first page?

And since people are already specifically looking for the content that you have to offer, their chances of converting are significantly higher.

Build Brand Awareness

You can take your brand awareness to new heights after you start to build links by highlighting your brand and what it has to offer. Your website’s position in the search engine rankings for the target keywords will also increase your brand awareness.

How Effective Link-building Helps SaaS Companies Grow?

Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, and other big SaaS brands implement individual link-building campaigns for growth. They have seen significant successes owing to their effective link-building strategies.

Adobe

With an authority score of 91 and 1.3 billion backlinks, Adobe is a serious contender for one of the best SaaS platforms. They have 84% follow links and 16% no follow links among those backlinks.

Microsoft

We all know about Microsoft’s influence in the SaaS industry with its leading services. It has a traffic value exponentially more than Adobe and an Authority Score of 94. An astounding 6.5 billion backlinks are linked to Microsoft, with 92% of them being dofollow links and the rest being nofollow links.

Besides industry leaders, relatively smaller SaaS brands have gained massive traction and website traffic from building links. For example:

Hubspot

HubSpot, the marketing and sales software platform, focuses on producing top-notch content that draws backlinks from reputable websites. The backlinks helped HubSpot noticeably improve its search engine rankings and increase its traffic, leads, and customers.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It has concentrated on connecting with thought leaders and influencers in their sector, leading to high-quality backlinks from reliable websites. This has increased traffic to their website and improved their search engine results.

Efficient Link Building Strategies for SaaS

You can’t deny the influence of your link building efforts on SaaS, as it can positively impact in giving you a stronghold in this ever-evolving industry. Backlinks are critical in terms of SaaS since they can improve your SEO to a great degree.

Let’s go through some proven link-building techniques to follow if you want to climb the ladder in the search engine rankings (with some tips added) :

SaaS Link Building Strategy #1 Publish Linkable Assets

There is no alternative to good content. You have to create content that delivers value to your readers. High-quality websites would intuitively want to link to them because of their ample resources and information. Make sure to use images, infographics, and statistics to attract instant attention.

The next step is incorporating your linkable article or website into these contents. You can build the content relevant to the particular topics before linking it.

Tips: You can use Ahref’s website to determine which topics generate the most traffic. Then collect and compile these resources to form informative content.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #2 Create Clickable Content on Trending Topics

You have to stay updated on trending topics that correspond with your niche.

You can generate a few clicks for your website by leveraging people’s curiosity on hot topics to earn domain points.

Tips: It can be troublesome as it works as instant gratification. People will move on to the next relevant thing, and you must constantly generate updated content to remain relevant.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #3 Unlinked Brand Mentions 

Search for the blogs or articles mentioning your website’s name but not providing a link. It can be a review, a referral, or user-generated content.

You can take the help of third-party software and tools that will list the websites that have used your website’s name but haven’t used links. BrandMentions is one of the popular tools that do that. It can include mentions from a long time.

Besides, you can also filter out which websites have mentioned you but didn’t link your website using the “Highlight unlinked domains” feature.

Tips: By reaching out to smaller blogs with a loyal following, you can increase the chances of your website being shown at the top of Google search results and build a trustworthy relationship with the author.

That way, the next time they write something that may is relevant to you, they will remember to link your website.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #4 Linked Brand Mentions

Linking to the home page usually doesn’t effectively encourage people to try out your product. Instead, linking them to the article or service they might be looking for will significantly improve your chances of acquiring new customers.

Moreover, it will be regarded as a high-quality backlink and increase your website’s domain authority in search engines.

Tips for link builders: “The more specific, the better” is the mantra in the case of link building. Find out what topics people are looking for the most on search engines. Then compare them with the number of traffics they are generating.

If the ratio is significant enough, you can build relevant links to that topic and increase your traffic count.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #5 Guest Posts

Blogging on reputable websites specific to your niche and including your website’s link will promote your brand to a potential new customer base. You can contact them to become a guest writer and create enlightening and high-quality materials to enrich their blog.

How to know which websites to create blogs for?

Guest blogging is one of the best link-building tactics you can pursue. However, you need to research to find low to mid-tier websites that correspond to topics relevant to your niche. You can use link building tools to filter out what you need easily.

While you can see which keywords generate the most traffic for a website, you can also find their activity status and the number of writers working for them. It will give you an idea of whether or not they will be interested in accepting guest posts and bloggers for their website.

Tips: You must ensure that when you create content for other people, the backlinks they allow you to add are “follow” links. If the entire purpose of your doing it is to increase your SEO ranking, nofollow links might be of no use to you since they do not affect your profile rating at all.

However, it is helpful for brand promotion and visibility. You can also link them in your portfolio as websites that have used you as a reference.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #6 CEO Interviews

One of the best ways for Saas link-building is to promote saas companies through Link-building outreach campaigns. Media request services can be a good strategy to do that.

Many websites and agencies interview CEOs, bring in SaaS experts, and talk to them on social media live streams. This boosts their website traffic since only the audience that truly wants to engage with the SaaS businesses gets to know of them.

Tips: Using a prospect list, companies can ask the founders or others of a SaaS startup to give interviews with their CEO.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #7 Fix The Broken Link Building

A blog post or article might have used your website as a reference, but the links they have used for you do not work. So, customers cannot come to your profile to consume your content even if they want to.

How to find broken links for websites?

You can find many service providers that find broken links for your website. You can find those specific link schemes or articles, email the writer or developer, and get them fixed.

To detect broken links on websites relevant to your niche, utilize tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz.

Tips: When looking for broken links in websites about your niche, it doesn’t necessarily have to be for your website. Using the tools, you can filter the websites using keywords relevant to your service. Then you can email the authors individually and inform them about this problem.

Finally, you can provide them with a replacement link with similar content on their website instead.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #8 Podcast Link Building

Podcasting has become an extremely trendy part of the SaaS industry in recent times. You can start a podcast to reach a wider audience and build valuable relationships with other content creators in your industry. It can be a great opportunity of generating more inbound links to your websites.

You can also participate in others’ podcasts, share your stories with their audiences, and earn backlinks to your websites.

Podcasts can help you gain colossal brand visibility, valuable relationships, and lead-generation opportunities.

Tips: Always remember who the target demographic for your audience is. Since you are a SaaS business, you can give interviews on podcasting channels like Voucherify. They have interviewed SaaS CEOs before and have an audience of listeners interested in this topic.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #9 Influencer Endorsement

One of the oldest but most effective SEO strategies is asking influencers particular to your niche to promote your content.

It will come at the price of hiring or sending them free stuff for review. However, you can access a loyal fanbase once you get an influencer to endorse your product.

Referral links can generate a lot of clicks. So you can ask influencers to link your products to their channel and social media. Additionally, the influencers can mention that by clicking that specific code, the users can get a discount on the subscription fee.

Tips: For influencer endorsement, the most difficult part is finding an influencer that fits your niche. Once you successfully do that, the traffic will most likely flow automatically.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #10 Creating Infographics

Another great link-building method can be to create infographics on various trending topics.

You can acquire backlinks by creating custom-generated high-quality content that will make people want to link them. This type of content usually requires you to research the topics heavily before making an infographic.

Tips: When it comes to rankings, an information-packed cohesive infographic is highly valuable to both clients and competitors. It is advised to update the links after a particular interval of time so that it keeps being relevant.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #11 Roundups and Resource Pages Creation

Information is one of the most valuable resources you can offer. But people usually prefer the convenient medium to obtain it.

Manually searching out which service provider has what rating or review is very tough. People prefer a single blog linking what experts say about the particular software. Roundups and resource pages serve this exact purpose and can bring more potential customers to your website.

Tips: Many blogs with titles like “Top 10 marketing agencies you should know about” or “Top SaaS providers that will make your job easier” can generate significant clicks if they are from a reputable source.

You can either pitch your service to blogs like this or write one yourself and include yours as one of them.

These blog posts can generate high referral traffic. Moreover, it opens the door to potential customers and networking leads.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #12 Networking with Authoritative Websites

Building trustworthy relationships with authors of authoritative websites can help you acquire high-quality links. You can ask them to review your products by offering them a free subscription for a significant amount of time and other incentives.

Tips: Ensure that the referring domains are worth your time by checking whether they are high-credibility websites.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #13 Send Personalized Outreach

Sending an email or phone call that appears inconsistent with branding or messaging can’t do any good for you. It is essential to make outreach personalized, even if it can be a difficult task to do when you need to outreach a lot of people.

Tips: Some CRM software companies will handle your pitches and automatically handle your calls to dozens of sources. Evaluate how many contacts you have and determine how the personalized outreach plan should work.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #14 Image Credit and Linking

Like unlinked brand mentions, pages often use your image without linking them. You can acquire links from these places by emailing them about the issue and asking them for credit with an inbound link to your website.

Tips: You can utilize Google’s reverse image search or Google Lens to find websites using images from your website or content. You can reach out to them and ask them to use your hyperlinks in their blogs.

SaaS Link Building Strategy #15 Content about Ranking Websites

A good way of building links is to write blogs or make guest posts about ranking websites. It will include links to a lot of websites, including your competitors. It can also work as a resource roundup, making people want to check out similar service providers.

Collaborating with your competitors can create an advantage in this case. You can ask them to post the content with all the links in their relevant section. It can work as a mutual beneficiary action where both you and your competitors get more organic traffics.

Tips: It is better to be impartial and include the pros and cons of all websites, including yours, to ensure reliability. You need to make a persuasive case to all of your competitors about why they should post the content you made.

SaaS link-building strategy #16 Create Free Tools

Creating free tools can be an essential link-building strategy in most SaaS businesses. Free tools are convenient and help users do their job without committing financially. As a result, these free tools attract lots of traffic backlinks.

A free SaaS can be anything related to the industry or its core product. You can also try to use one to attract more customers with small free tools.

Tips: You can get the links directly through a web page without being known as Ahrefs. If you create small but useful things, such as an ROI calculator, you can share that on your Facebook page.

SaaS link-building strategy #17 Encourage Others to Review Your Product

People are naturally interested and ready to try your product if someone trustworthy approves it.

You can make a trustworthy blogger affiliate partner and get them to review a particular niche and highlight the benefits of your product. The positive feedback from the reviewers can help you get more referral traffic and brand exposure.

Tips: You might offer the affiliate three months of access and a higher affiliate payoff.

SaaS link building strategy #18 Create Useful Case Studies

A case study can interestingly demonstrate your product’s or service’s expertise. They are also suitable for inbound linking as magnets. If you can use the case study properly, it can be an excellent tool that people will also continue to refer to how you solved a problem in hand. It will be both word-of-mouth marketing and inbound linking for you.

Tips: To appeal to people, you must build a story with your data. Just citing numbers doesn’t give them value.

How to Create Incredible Content that Earns Links Over Time

You need a lot of high quality links and content for a successful link building campaign. You should try to create content that resonates with your audience.

Besides creating an informative and visually pleasing article, ensure it is a modifiable linkable asset. This means the same link can be modified to keep it updated and relevant. For example: “Top 10 most-used Marketing tools of all time” or the “Most used SaaS providers in 2023,” and you can modify the title slightly and upgrade each year.

KPIs to Measure Your Link Building Campaign Success

Here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) you should measure to determine the success of your backlinks.

Domain authority score

It can assess your performance compared to your competitors regarding Search Engine visibility. A higher domain authority score means a website is more likely to appear in SERPs than its competitors.

Return on investment

You can get an idea of the return on investment by comparing the number of organic traffic to the traffic value.

The higher the return on investment, the more successful the strategy. Semrush, SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, Sitechecker, and Serpstat are among the leading tools to determine your website’s traffic value.

The Total Number of Backlinks

You should also consider the total number of backlinks for making a diverse portfolio of backlinks from different types of websites and doing a competitive analysis.

3 Common Black Hat Link-Building Tactics to Avoid

A few “effective” techniques can instantly increase your backlink quantity. However, we do not recommend them since Google can penalize you for manipulated site rankings. These black hat tactics can cause you to lose your position within SERPs.

Here are some of them:

Building Irrelevant Links

Link building in SaaS is a difficult process, so building irrelevant links seem like a tempting option. But you must make the necessary connections and choose how to link your website carefully.

Make sure to avoid making shortcuts by using links on irrelevant websites. You should concentrate on developing quality links for the best DA websites for any business sector. Search engine optimization is more sophisticated in determining backlink relevance.

Anchor text abuse

Anchor texts can increase the ranking in Google. This is how many manipulate anchor text for ranking on Google. The resulting links and optimizing such links, are also against Google’s rules. Depending on how you see this, you’ll probably be penalized. Besides, anchor texts are also risky in backlinks.

Private Blog Networks

PBNs are a group of websites created by purchasing expired domains with high PageRank. All websites in this network have the same owner.

When tracking down these websites, Google and other search engines look for spammy, low-quality backlinks that add no value to the SERPs. It helps them identify if the owner is trying to manipulate the algorithm and punish them in rankings accordingly.

Backlink Manager to Monitor All Your Backlink Requirements

Backlink Manager is a CRM built especially for link building that helps you manage clients and link-building outreach partnerships, monitor links, and get notifications when one goes active or broken.

Backlink Manager categorizes all your backlinks by status, anchor text, and priority. It can update you about the inbound links’ status, whether or not a link is broken or non-functional, and the priority of the referring domains.

One of the best link-building strategies for link-building is guest posting for websites. Backlink Manager creates link-building opportunities for you by connecting you with websites that are taking potential guest bloggers for their websites.

The missing backlinks and brand mentions are shown on the dashboard, so you can email them about building more links, at your convenience.

Backlink Manager uses a simple interface to inform you about your upcoming partnerships and link status. Instead of relying on multiple websites, you can use Backlink Manager to have all your requirements in one place.

Final Words

Link building makes all the difference in improving SaaS businesses’ online visibility and driving more traffic to their website. From industry leaders like Adobe and Oracle to relatively smaller websites like Hubspot, implement effective link-building strategies to increase website traffic significantly

Whether you choose to either build links or acquire links, the SaaS link-building strategies mentioned above can effectively optimize search engines and help your business flourish. We hope you can increase organic traffic to your website and achieve your digital marketing goals with these link building strategies.

Looking to manage your inbound link building campaigns more effectively? Try Backlink Manager by availing of the free plan or booking a demo to see how it can help you.