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Link Building
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9/21/2023
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18
 min read

SaaS Link Building Strategies: A Complete Guide + 7 Strategies

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SaaS Link Building Strategies: A Complete Guide + 7 StrategiesLink Building
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SaaS Link Building Strategies

Building a solid online presence is crucial for SaaS companies. When it comes to boosting your SaaS website's visibility, link building is a strategy that can't be ignored. Acquiring high-quality backlinks can improve your search engine rankings, increase organic traffic, and increase your conversion rates.

In this guide, we'll dive into various link building techniques and strategies tailored specifically for SaaS companies. From understanding the basics of building links to the ins and outs of tactical backlinks, authority links, and other strategies, we'll provide all the info you need to understand the basics of starting a link building campaign.

Basics of Link Building for SaaS

What Is a Backlink?

At its core, a backlink is a simple concept: a hyperlink from one website pointing to another. But its implications are vast. Think of backlinks as endorsements or references in the world of the internet. If a reputable website links to your site, they essentially say, "We trust this source and believe it offers value."

This 'vote of confidence' is noticed by search engines. They interpret these links as signals, helping determine the credibility and relevance of the linked-to website. So, suppose your SaaS website garners several of these votes, especially from esteemed sources. In that case, search engines are more likely to regard your site as trustworthy and relevant to users, potentially boosting your rankings.

Understanding Referring Domains in Link Building

While individual backlinks play a pivotal role in SEO, understanding the concept of referring domains adds another layer to the equation. A referring domain is simply the unique domain that contains the backlinks to your website. So if website ABC links to you five times, you still have just one referring domain—ABC.

Here's why it's significant: Obtaining backlinks from diverse, unique domains usually has a more pronounced impact than accumulating multiple links from a single domain. Think of it this way: A hundred people praising your work is often more credible than one person praising you a hundred times. This diversity signals to search engines that various sources find your content valuable.

The most impactful strategy is securing links from relevant, high-authority unique referring domains. Not only does this approach amplify your domain rating and authority, but it also underscores the breadth of your content's value across the internet landscape.

To put it simply, while increasing the sheer number of backlinks is beneficial, diversifying and growing the number of unique referring domains should be a cornerstone of your link-building strategy. Prioritize quality and relevance, always seeking out partnerships or collaborations that make sense for your SaaS product's niche.

The Importance of Quality Over Quantity

The digital landscape is vast, and the internet is filled with millions of websites. Not all of them, however, are trustworthy or of high quality. As a result, search engines have become smarter, focusing on the quality of the backlinks rather than sheer numbers.

Imagine you're seeking a job recommendation. Would you prefer ten recommendations from acquaintances and strangers or one strong recommendation from the top expert in your field? The latter, of course! Similarly, having fewer backlinks from authoritative, trusted websites is more advantageous than a multitude from questionable sources. Low-quality or spammy sites can harm your reputation and SEO rankings.

The Concept of Domain Rating and Relevance

Domain Rating (DR) is a term you'll often come across in the realm of SEO and link building. Developed by Ahrefs, DR is a score (ranging from 0 to 100) that provides a predictive measure of a website's ability to rank on search engine result pages. Websites with higher DR scores are seen as more authoritative and influential.

When aiming to acquire backlinks, targeting high DR sites can amplify the impact of every single link. But DR isn't the only consideration. Relevance is equally critical. For instance, if you run a health and wellness website, a backlink from a renowned medical journal would be more beneficial than one from an unrelated domain like automotive repair.

In essence, it's not just about getting any backlink; it's about securing backlinks that make sense in the context of your content and industry. By aligning with sites that are authoritative (high DR) and relevant to your niche, you bolster the efficacy of your link-building efforts.

Setting the Foundation for Effective Link Building

Like constructing a durable building requires a solid foundation, establishing a successful link-building strategy is rooted in fundamental groundwork. Without these foundational elements, your link-building efforts could be in vain, no matter how advanced or sophisticated your tactics might be. Here’s a deeper dive into these foundational cornerstones:

Creating High-Quality, Link-Worthy Content

The internet is inundated with content, but not all of it is worthy of attention, let alone a backlink. This is where the renowned saying, "Content is King," gains its significance. But what makes content "king"?

  • Value Proposition: Your content should offer tangible value to its readers. This could be in the form of actionable tips, thought-provoking insights, or data-driven observations.
  • Problem-solving: Address common pain points or questions in your industry. If readers find solutions or answers on your site, they're more likely to share it, and other websites are more apt to link to it as a valuable resource.
  • Originality and Authenticity: With so much content out there, originality stands out. Authentic content garners more backlinks, whether it's a unique perspective, original research, or a fresh take on a trending topic.

Remember, when you consistently produce high-caliber content, you invite backlinks and build brand authority and trust.

Pro-tip: Create free, user-friendly micro-tools related to your main offering on your website. These can not only attract a large number of quality backlinks but also help you rank for vital keywords. This strategy can drive top-of-funnel conversions, growing your email list and providing opportunities for remarketing.

Importance of User-Friendly Website Design

Having great content is one thing; you must also make it easy for users to find the information they're looking for.

  • Navigability: Websites should be easy to navigate, ensuring users can find what they're looking for without hassle. A clear, intuitive navigation structure can mean the difference between a user staying or bouncing off.
  • Responsiveness: With the proliferation of mobile devices, your site needs to look and function well across all screen sizes. A responsive design ensures users have a positive experience, whether on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
  • Aesthetic Appeal: A modern, clean design looks professional and instills trust. Visually appealing sites are more likely to receive backlinks, as other website owners feel confident directing their audience to a well-designed site.

Keyword Research and Targeting

In the vast sea of online content, keywords act as the lighthouse, guiding users to your shores. They represent what your potential audience is actively searching for.

  • Understanding User Intent: Beyond the actual search terms, it's vital to understand what users truly seek. Are they looking for information, a product, or a solution? Tailoring content to match this intent boosts relevancy.
  • Finding Niche Opportunities: High-volume keywords are attractive but often highly competitive. Delving into long-tail keywords or specific queries can uncover underserved niches, allowing your content to shine and become a prime target for backlinks.
  • Consistent Content-Keyword Alignment: It's not just about sprinkling keywords into your content. It's about ensuring the content genuinely addresses the topic, query, or issue associated with the keyword. This genuine alignment fosters trust and makes your content a credible backlink source.

Benefits of Link Building

Link building is more than just a strategy for gaining higher search rankings. For SaaS companies, it can play a pivotal role in enhancing online visibility, building brand authority, and driving targeted traffic. Let's delve deeper into the manifold benefits:

  • Enhanced Search Engine Rankings: This is the most evident benefit. As Google and other search engines prioritize backlinks as ranking signals, a robust link profile can catapult your website to the top positions, making your SaaS solutions more discoverable.
  • Driving Referral Traffic: High-quality backlinks from reputable sources ensure that a steady stream of relevant users already interested in SaaS solutions land on your website.
  • Establishing Industry Authority: Being referenced by authoritative websites and blogs in your industry adds weight to your brand. Over time, this results in being perceived as a thought leader in the SaaS domain.
  • Building Brand Awareness: Every time you secure a backlink, you get your brand in front of a new audience. This increases awareness and can lead to higher brand recall.
  • Relationship Building: The link building process often involves networking with industry peers, bloggers, and journalists. These relationships can be invaluable, opening doors to collaborations, partnerships, and other business opportunities.

To reap these benefits, you must remember that link building is not a one-way street, it's a link exchange: a negotiation of placing your link on another's website. That carries a lot of uncertainty, both in terms of your backlink success rate and the effectiveness of search result rankings. How can you be sure your SaaS link building efforts bring value? The answer lies in two core strategies: tactical and authority.

Tactical Link Building for SaaS: Methods and Tips

Tactical Link Building Strategies for SaaS Companies

Tactical link building focuses on acquiring keyword-focused links from multiple sources to influence rankings for specific keywords directly. This is often done via guest blogging or working directly with bloggers and contributors at niche publications to link back to your keyword-optimized landing pages or a blog post from highly relevant external pages.

The beauty of tactical building is the control it offers over the content linked. You know the referring domains, where the link will appear on those pages, and what content it will link to. This is particularly useful in SEO, where explicit signaling to Google is crucial. The drawback is the success rate for building links can be low depending on the methods you employ and the authority of the sites linking to your content.

Tactical Link Building for SaaS: How To Get Started

One effective approach to tactical linking is to leverage existing relationships and simply ask for more links to your content. Send a clear proposal to happy clients, partners, and affiliates, then start negotiating. These connections already have a favorable opinion of your brand, so getting backlinks from them should be simple.

Guest posting is another great link building tactic. You can establish yourself as an authority in your field and gain valuable backlinks by writing excellent articles for relevant websites in your industry. Both parties benefit from this strategy: the website hosting your guest post receives valuable content, and you get exposure to their audience and the chance to demonstrate your expertise.

The real challenges with tactical link building are ensuring your content aligns with the editorial standards of the website linking to you and identifying willing host sites that are reputable. You want platforms with a strong online presence, high domain authority, and a target audience that aligns with yours. This ensures that your guest posts will reach the right audience and have a greater impact on your efforts.

The key to tactical link building is to focus on quality content and legitimate referring domains. There are no shortcuts to success here, and if you monitor your metrics, you'll see definite positive results over time.

Dangers of Low-Quality Tactical Backlinks

Not all tactical links are created equal. Links from low authority or low-quality sites can be frowned upon by Google and other search engines, resulting in a neutral or negative weight on the link. Similarly, links from unrelated websites are considered low quality and should be avoided.

In your campaign, avoid the pitfalls of poorly optimized tactical links, such as the excessive use of exact match anchor text, placement on private blog networks (PBNs), and improper contextual use of links in articles. Make an effort to make sure that your tactical links have a strategic purpose and efficiently inform Google about the applicability of the URL of your website for particular keywords.

Tactical Link Building Campaign Tips

Tactical SaaS link building is complicated and constantly evolving, but it has enormous potential to help your company. You can improve your website's visibility, authority, and organic search rankings by taking a sound approach to links. Consider these suggestions as you evaluate your backlinking efforts.

  • Create Compelling, Useful Content: Don't expect sites to link out without offering them something useful. Create content resources like how-to guides, a thought leadership blog post, or data studies tailored to the audience of each site you want to get links from. Provide true value with a subtle, relevant call to action.
  • Optimize Anchor Text: For tactical links, use keyword-focused but grammatically correct anchor text. Avoid using exact-match anchors excessively, such as text that matches your target keyword. Create a blend of relevant generic, partial match, and branded anchors.
  • Identify Relevant, High-Quality Sites: The importance of a backlink is strongly influenced by the website that offers it. Target sites must have metrics like high domain rating (DR) scores and organic traffic in addition to being pertinent to your industry and niche.
  • Monitor Metrics, Adjust Link Building Tactics: Link building is an ongoing process that requires consistent effort and adaptability. Stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in the industry, and continuously evaluate and refine your tactics to ensure optimal results
  • Reverse Engineer Competitor's Links: Take the time to analyze where your competitors are obtaining their most impactful links. This not only allows you to understand and potentially replicate their link-building success by reaching out to the same sources but also gives insights into the strategies they employ. They might be leveraging techniques like embedded badges, micro-tools, or other innovative methods to scale their backlinking efforts. By understanding their tactics, you can adapt and possibly outperform them in your own link building campaigns.

Authority Link Building for SaaS: Methods and Tips

Authority Link Building Strategies for SaaS Companies

In contrast to tactical, which emphasizes building many links from mid- to high-quality sources, authority link building emphasizes acquiring links only from websites with the highest possible authority. These websites typically have a significant impact on your industry, a strong online presence, and larger audiences that span the globe. You can raise your website's authority and search engine rankings by obtaining backlinks from these websites.

One of the key differences between tactical and authority building is the latter is more difficult to control. It will never be as easy to obtain links from worldwide leaders as from smaller or niche publications. Making useful resources like white papers, case studies, or industry reports, promoting them, and hoping high-profile publications link back to your website are the main ways to get these links. For some SaaS companies, it seems hit-or-miss, but if done correctly, it can be incredibly effective.

Authority Link Building for SaaS: How To Get Started

No authority-based link campaign is complete without a sound content strategy. SaaS companies should thoroughly understand the problems their target audience faces to produce infographics, videos, and perhaps even one or two helpful blog posts that offer solutions. A good place to start is with easily readable, visually appealing, and excellent thought leadership content. You should also keep a full calendar of regular SEO content releases with a good long-term content strategy.

To earn those authoritative backlinks, you also need to promote this content. Building relationships with influencers and thought leaders in your industry can significantly boost your authority-building efforts. By engaging with these individuals through social media, attending industry events, or collaborating on projects, you can establish connections that may lead to valuable backlinks. Furthermore, influencers are more likely to share your content with their followers, expanding your reach and increasing the likelihood of acquiring authority backlinks.

Another strategy for authority links is guest blogging. You can demonstrate your expertise and reach a wider audience by submitting high-quality content to reputable websites in your industry. Ensure to include relevant and contextual links to your website when writing a guest post to increase your authority and traffic.

Influence and Authority Backlinks

Authority links require a well-rounded approach. A followed mention from a relevant publication can significantly boost your business. However, securing such links from major publications like Forbes or Entrepreneur is often unrealistic due to their 'nofollow' policy. These links are important for search engine optimization, but they don't directly enhance the metrics of a page. When building authority links, then focus on elevating the authority of your URL by linking with relevant publications with higher site authority than those used for tactical links.

While creating valuable content and building relationships are essential, monitoring and analyzing your backlink profile is equally important. Regularly auditing your backlinks allows you to identify low-quality or spammy links that may harm your website's reputation. You can maintain a clean and authoritative backlink profile by disavowing or removing these links.

Authority Link Building Campaign Tips

Because authority building is about quality over quantity, you may need to shift your thinking about approaching your strategy. Use the tips below to adjust your approach and increase your chances of outreach success.

  • Find Relevant Industry Publications: Research the major online publications covering SaaS and your specific product niche. Prioritize pitching to sites with the highest Domain Authority scores. Publications may include TechCrunch, Mashable, SaaS Weekly, and FinSMEs.
  • Create Valuable, Shareable Content: Work closely with the editorial teams at major publications to craft content that fits their style and guidelines. Offer data studies, expert insights, or exclusive tips from which their audience will benefit. Make content highly social media friendly.
  • Personalize Your Link Building Outreach: Don't just mindlessly reach out with a copy-paste email. Research the site owner and editors to find ways your content specifically aligns with their site/brand/audience. In your outreach, suggest specific ways they could link to your content that adds value to their readers through beneficial information.
  • Have Patience: Authority backlinking can be slow, with many ghosting contacts and outright "no" responses. However, the payoffs are worth it for your SaaS business, which is why a careful, patient, and persistent strategy is key.

Other Notable Link Building Strategies

More Link Building Strategies for SaaS Companies

While we've covered the main and most effective strategies for SaaS companies, it's important to understand other approaches. Below are a few link building strategies that may or may not become part of your long-term outreach and backlinking efforts.

Broken Link Building

Broken link building involves finding broken links on websites within your niche and offering to replace them with relevant links to your content. This helps the website owner fix broken links and provides an opportunity for you to acquire a valuable backlink.

While broken link building was once a popular strategy, it is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Not only does this method fail to produce natural backlinks, but it often fails to enhance your site's authority. Google may even penalize it if the original pages change or are restored. For most SaaS companies, there are better uses of SEO time than hunting for expired pages that provide minimal, if any, actual value.

Content Syndication

Content syndication involves republishing content on relevant platforms, such as industry-specific websites or online publications. By reaching a wider audience through syndicated content, you increase the chances of acquiring backlinks from these platforms.

Syndication does provide both authority and links, but it's generally a better tool for building brand awareness. Similar to leveraging digital PR, this method may work for many companies, but it shouldn't be considered a must-deploy strategy for all SaaS businesses.

Social Media Engagement

Engaging with your audience on social media platforms can also lead to valuable backlinks. Building relationships with influencers or industry thought leaders on platforms like Twitter or LinkedIn could result in them linking to your content or mentioning your brand, boosting your online visibility. The viability of this strategy entirely depends upon your SaaS business, including your target audience and the resources at your disposal.

Pair-Up Link Building

An extremely effective link building strategy for SaaS companies is to pair up with complementary businesses. Seek out non-competitive businesses in your industry that offer products or services that complement your own, establish partnerships, cross-promote each other's products or services, and acquire backlinks from their websites. This approach expands your online reach and allows you to tap into a new audience segment that may be interested in your offerings.

If you're a SaaS company, for example, that provides project management software, partnering with a complementary business such as a time-tracking software provider or a task management tool can create a win-win situation for both parties. By cross-promoting each other's products or services, you can expose your offerings to new potential customers who are already interested in tools that enhance their productivity and efficiency.

Branded Embed Link Building

Another valuable strategy, especially relevant for SaaS companies with client-facing tools or features, is the "Branded Embed Link Building" method. At its heart, this strategy is about integrating branded links within the functionalities or badges you offer to clients. Familiar examples include chatbots, surveys, widgets, or any other embeddable feature your solution might provide.

Consider how often you've seen "Powered by [Company Name]" or similar phrases on various tools across the web. Such embedded links can significantly boost the authority of your overall domain when done correctly.

However, it's crucial to tread carefully here. This strategy should primarily be utilized for branded links, and not for heavily anchor-text optimized ones. Overdoing it or trying to sneak in overly promotional or keyword-rich anchor texts can not only sour your relationships with clients but could also land you in hot water with search engines, leading to potential penalties.

When done right, the branded embed link building approach can offer two-fold benefits: it solidifies your brand's presence on client websites and provides consistent, authoritative links back to your domain, especially the homepage. It's a testament to the symbiotic relationship you share with your clients and the trust they have in your solution.

Incorporating this method into your link-building repertoire can be a game-changer, but it's essential to always prioritize trust, brand integrity, and the value you offer to clients above all.

Start Your SaaS Link Building Today

In today's online world, having a strong presence isn't just nice to have—it's essential. Link building plays a key role in boosting your SaaS website's visibility, trust, and organic traffic. By diving into the basics and using both tactical and advanced strategies, you can position your brand as a top player in your industry.

Looking for some expert help? Our link building experts at SimpleTiger are here for you. Hire link building consultants from our team and tap into our specialized link building services. Implement these strategies and see the difference they make for your SaaS business.

Ready to get started? Schedule a discovery call, and let's work together to achieve top rankings for your target keywords.

FAQs

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Takeaways

  • Link building for SaaS involves acquiring backlinks from other sites to improve search rankings, gain organic traffic, and boost conversions. Earning tactical and authority links are two proven strategies.
  • Tactical links directly influence rankings for target keywords by placing links on relevant sites. Authority links from major publications build credibility.
  • Creating quality content and guest posting on industry blogs effectively builds links. Avoid low-quality links from spammy sites.
  • Authority links boost credibility but require valuable content and outreach to influencers. Digital PR also builds authoritative links through media relationships.
  • Other strategies like broken link building, content syndication, social media, and partnerships with complementary businesses can also generate links but must be used correctly.
SimpleTiger
SimpleTiger
Sean Smith
Sean Smith
COO

Sean is Chief Operating Officer at SimpleTiger, responsible for operations, process creation, team utilization and growth, as well as sometimes direct client consultation.

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