Link Building for SaaS Companies [How to Dominate Google]

What makes certain SaaS companies stand out from the others?

How are some SaaS brands able to crack an increasingly competitive industry?

That's what we're going to explore in this piece from an organic traffic point of view, and how brands like HubSpot have grown from 500,000 monthly visitors to over 7,000,000 monthly visitors in just 4 years.

SaaS (software as a service) covers a very wide array of companies - marketing automation, sales CRM, SEO tools, document signing - you name it. The business model is essentially the same across the board, charging customers a recurring monthly or annual fee for use of the product.

It’s an insanely hot industry right now, on course to grow by approximately 20% per year until 2025, with hundreds of large acquisitions per month.

Organic Traffic for SaaS Companies

Many successful SaaS brands follow a very similar pattern of gaining success. They drive organic inbound traffic to their website in order to build a readership base that will convert into a paying customer. There are some incredible examples of brands who have done this in competitive spaces, such as GrooveHQ in the support desk space.

💡 HubSpot focus heavily on organic search traffic - It saves them a huge amount on ad spend, as you can see below.

However, as we'll soon see, there's also a ton of companies that don't do this very well - They don't have a cohesive SEO strategy, and they invest far too much in paid advertising when they could easily attract more organic customers through their website.

Why Link Building & Outreach is Important

Backlinks provide the SEO ‘juice’ for companies in the SaaS space to help outrank their key competitors.

By building high-quality backlinks to targeted pages, you're feeding Google a major trust signal (links are essentially upvotes, after all) that they should give your website or page preferential ranking over a competitor.

Links aren't the only important signal (content and page structure equally so) but they're a major piece of the puzzle, and it's so easy for companies to get a competitive advantage over you if they're link building are you're not.

At LinkBuilder.io, we’ve helped dozens of companies in the SaaS to turbocharge their SEO performance, including FollowUpBoss.com, SkedSocial.com, Drip.com and many more.

Link Building Strategies That Work For SaaS

Once a brand has nailed its content strategy, they need high-quality backlinks and a solid link building strategy to compound their efforts and get the ranking results they deserve. If you're not actively building links and reaching out to bloggers, you're at a disadvantage to your competitors who are.

Here are some actionable ideas on how to build great backlinks...

1) Building Linkable Content Assets

Linkable Content is the backbone of most link building outreach campaigns. You need to have content that's worth showing people, and they must be adequately impressed to want to link to it.

🏆 Examples of Awesome Linkable Assets

1. HubSpot's "45 Visual Content Marketing Statistics You Should Know in 2018" - has over 4,500 sites linking to it. HubSpot are masters at creating visually appealing content that shows unique data and statistics. They're equally as good at getting it circulated.
2. SkedSocial's Guide to Instagram Live - We built over 20 backlinks to this page with a single outreach campaign, from some incredible domains. Instagram Live was a completely new concept at the time, and this detailed 'How to' guide provided an incredible resource for newcomers.
3. Drift's "Chatbots Report 2018" - I love Drift as a brand, and they're increasingly good at creating linkable content assets backed by data. This report has over 350 referring domains. They've taken an extremely popular topic in the marketing World (Chatbots) and turned themselves into one of the leading commentators.
4. Foundr.com's Ultimate Guide to Starting an Ecommerce Business - Strictly speaking not a SaaS company, although their courses are acquired by entrepreneurs and business owners all over the World. This is a page we helped build over 50 backlinks to. It's an incredible guide and a classic example of a killer linkable asset.

💡 How to Come Up With Linkable Topic Ideas

First off, we want to come up with some ideas on topics we think might be popular, then we need to validate the idea.

Let's run with the keyword "Chatbots" - An incredibly popular topics for marketers right now. We can plug the concept into Ahrefs Content Explorer to figure out whether it's a highly linkable idea getting much traction.

Here's what we found with some of the top results:

And we can cross-check this on Google, to confirm that there are a ton of articles on Chatbots that people are truly linking to:

Voila!

Now we know that Chatbots are an incredibly popular topic, worthy of building a linkable asset around. The next step is to build your linkable asset, develop outreach campaigns and watch the backlinks flow.

2) Guest Posting

This is an incredibly popular link building strategy in the SaaS niche used by a plethora of brands to land links on top sites related to business, technology, startups, and marketing.

It's used by most SaaS companies with a strong SEO & content strategy in place. Say what you want about Neil Patel, but he's an incredible marketer and regularly uses guest blogging to amplify his brands.

The premise is very simple - Reach out to other companies or publications that are publishing content, and enquire to see if they'd like to receive a contribution from you.

🔎 Find Your Targets

We call this phase 'Prospecting' and there are a number of methods you can use for efficiency and scale when prospecting for the website's that you'd like to write for.

We can run detailed search operators to find opportunities, we can reverse-engineer competitor link profiles, and we can even reverse-engineer individual authors to figure out exactly which sites they're successfully landing guest posts on. We use all of these techniques and more to identify sites that'll be open to the idea.

The idea is to build out a list of website targets, just like this:

🚀 Launch Your Outreach, Wait For Opportunities

When you've launched out your campaigns (we use an outreach CRM called Pitchbox for this), the idea is that everybody wants us to write for them, just like this guy:

Now, all we need to do is establish a content creation process for writing your guest posts, scale that process out and submit them at scale. It's easier said than done, but a good system works wonders.

3) Resource Pages

There are literally thousands of resource pages on the internet. These are essentially pages that aim to give readers as many resources on a particular topic as possible.

Here's a classic example: 70 Best Ecommerce Marketing Resources

They're perfect for targeting either SaaS products directly, or perhaps an informational piece of content.

💡 Tip - It's easy to reverse-engineer competitor resource page links

We use tools like Ahrefs to find out what resource pages are linking to our competitors, and try and win the same links.

In the example below, we looked specifically for resource pages linking to the ActiveCampaign homepage (a marketing tool) from pages that specifically feature the word tool within them.

We found 61 great link opportunities from this very quick search, that we can instantly export and for outreach.

It's a super scalable approach that can yield a ton of links and referral traffic, primarily because the people you're reaching out to have already shown a strong willingness to link out to relevant resources & brands that they like.

If you're a SaaS company reaching out to a marketing blog, it's a perfect opportunity to put your product on the map. If you can build trust with a serious blogger, you can build trust with their reader base as well.

🚫 Broken Link Building - The Next Level

The internet is full of broken pages. Many resource pages are linking out to resources that no longer exist, and when the user clicks through on them, they're taken to a dead page. This is a perfect opportunity to reach out and notify a website that they're linking to a dead page, but not to worry, you have something even better for them that they can replace the broken link with?

4) Roundups

Have you ever seen a page like "50 Marketing Professional's Share Their Favourite Software"? That's a classic roundup page.

Roundups are a seriously awesome source of links, especially to help build out homepage links. People love reading roundups, and people love writing roundups.

💬 Journalist & Media Requests

If you were a journalist tasked with writing a mega-roundup like the one we mentioned above, would you manually search out 50 marketing experts? Probably not. Or at least if there was a time-saving option, you'd certainly consider it?

That's where media request services come in - Like Helpareporter.com.

In 2019, this is probably the most common source of getting positioned on roundups and articles where expert opinions are required. Writers, bloggers & journalists commonly use services like those listed below to get super-fast and detailed responses from a number of credible sources, without having to do more than setting up a request.

Here are some of the services you can use:

• Helpareporter - Industry leader, but also the most competitive in terms of people on there.
• SourceBottle - These guys also have an awesome Twitter page you can follow for requests
• JournoRequests (now ResponseSource) - Again these guys have a cool Twitter integration - Just search for #JournoRequests and you'll see what I mean. Awesome for anyone who's spending time on Twitter.
• Qwoted - New organization, I love the layout of their requests and they all seem really high-end.
• YEC - This is a particularly awesome opportunity, although it's only accessible to entrepreneurs with $1M+ annual revenue, and it's a private members-only club. However, once you're inside there are some incredible free media & PR opportunities.
• Private FB Groups - This one's a little bit vague, and not very actionable, but we're in a number of B2B groups where authors from some super high-trafficked websites lurk. They're constantly looking for input and collaboration from others, which leads to backlinks.

📰 Even reporters from the New York Times use these services - see below

👥 It's All About Connections

All of the strategies we've described are simply different ways of approaching people. The thing that ultimately leads to backlinks is establishing a connection with someone.

The key is to use a number of different approaches and to do it at scale, with consistency and quality. For more inspiration, check out our roundup of link building experts to see an even larger range of strategies.

Results & Potential

There's no point in engaging in SEO if it's not going to drive real business.

But successful marketers understand the value of driving traffic which is ready to buy and traffic which is in a process of self-education.

Check out some examples of our work in the SaaS space below, where we've helped elevate organic traffic through link building, and help our clients overcome their over-reliance on paid ads.

Case #1 - Website in the SaaS Marketing niche

We started work with them in December 2018, growing traffic from around 3k visitors/month to 15k visitors/month.

Case #2 - Website in the CRM niche

We started working with them in April 2018, growing from around 13k visitors a month up to the 35k mark.

You can check out more of our link building case studies here.