It’s no surprise that SaaS is extremely competitive and to survive and thrive in this niche traditional SEO and content marketing tricks might not be enough. In the early linking building days, getting backlinks was a piece of cake and it didn’t matter whether your content was low-quality or high-quality, you could have a random bunch of words with several links and it would still get ranked in the SERPs. The scenario saw a change, post all the “Content is King” notion – meaning that writing high-quality content is necessary to get ranked and contextual high-quality backlinks.
Writers spent days coming up with helpful content focussing on educating their customers and giving out valuable information in order to get backlinks but turned out that wasn’t enough either. SaaS was missing out on a key strategy – content distribution and the easiest way to do so is through backlinks. If done right, it’s proven to be one of the most effective ways to get ahead in your niche. For SaaS, high-quality backlinks are the pathway to better search engine visibility, more valuable organic traffic, and ready-to-buy referrals. When it comes to SEO for SaaS, you need to boost your backlinking efforts substantially to drive valuable traffic.
Every SaaS wants to get high-quality backlinks but it’s not easy. When link building, just finding such opportunities is not enough, prospecting links, adding them with designated and relevant content that too in a natural way, and negotiating its placement on your website is also important. Here are some link building strategies for SaaS:
Let’s dive in!
Tactical link building is the most basic link-building strategy wherein you add highly relevant links that depict your website’s association with a particular keyword group. Proper contextual use, and adding keywords with low difficulty will serve your purpose and signal to Google what keywords the URL on your website is relevant for.
Before jumping to any conclusions, here’s how you can choose websites for acquiring quality links:
For SaaS, dofollow mentions can work wonders, especially if the backlinks are from authoritative sites, or influencers from the same niche. However, getting these links isn’t easy which is why most SaaS opt for nofollow links and although these links don’t boost your site metrics directly, they are still important from an SEO perspective.
In order to build authority links, make sure that you choose relevant publications and influencers from your niche, sites that have a higher authority than the one you choose for in a tactical link. Because of this, you can’t expect a website like this to link to you in the context of your choosing. The negotiations for link building on these types of publications tend to be more delicate, and you’ll have to prove a demonstrative value. Fortunately, this is possible using the pair-up link-building strategy.
For this strategy, you get to pair up your highly comprehensive content with a specific keyword alongside tactical links built to it. A great specialized content piece curated in this manner will rank higher in the search engine (provided the keyword difficulty is low).
For this strategy to work, all you need to do is perform in-depth keyword research and build contextually relevant tactical links and voila, you have a winning strategy that will work for any information-based keyword.
With effects that go beyond the SEO realm, Digital PR link building will bring your product or service into the limelight by focusing on brand recognition and although this strategy isn’t as keyword-focused as the rest, it still helps you drive significant traffic to your website. But for this to work, you need to grab a spot in some of the major publications in your niche. This can be accomplished by presenting brands and services as a solution and the people behind them as thought leaders in their industry. One important thing to note here is that this strategy works great for large media companies and might not be ideal for your SaaS.
As essential as link building is for any business, its role in driving traffic and revenue for SaaS is hard to ignore, in fact, it’s indispensable for SaaS since the target audience is a small percentage and it’s fairly easy to get their attention by building just a few, good backlinks. Tactical link-building follows the same pattern for most of the part – find the link-building opportunity, find the right person to connect with, personalize your message and build relationships, and voila, you’ve got yourself high-quality backlinks.
Here are some of the most effective link-building strategies you can use right away if you don’t want your content to be buried on the last pages of Google search and are looking for a convenient way to boost referral traffic for your SaaS.
Like I said, “Content is King”, this for backlinks means that if your content is worthy, backlinks will follow naturally and if it’s not then all your link-building efforts will go down the drain. It’s important to have a strong content foundation and high-quality, thought-provoking, well-researched content rather than writing the same old overused topics.
Although writing content about your SaaS is great but try to write about things your SaaS user might be looking for, deep dive into the keyword research and analyze what keywords are users finding you with, and try to address every pain point with your content, not just the high-level stuff but add topics you think your user might already know. Once you curate awesome, knowledge-packed pieces of content, backlinks will follow naturally.
Often overlooked by SaaS companies, corporate profiles, although take some time to reflect the desired results, are a great way to get organic backlinks because you aren’t just listing your business here, you’re also adding links to your website. You can kick start this process by listing your business on sites like:
Guest posting is the most commonly implemented backlink strategy and rightly so. There’s obviously nothing easier than writing a great content piece for a relevant third-party site and including a link to your own website or any previous onsite blog content. But before you head off to write a blog, here’s what you need to do:
Research your niche and understand which industry websites are looking for a guest post writer, use these keywords to boost your Google search:
Before pitching your article or post:
A noteworthy point here is that none of this will matter if your content isn’t relevant to their audience and if it isn’t high quality. Also, refrain from just bragging about your SaaS and promotional content, instead, focus on genuine helpful information. You need users to believe that you haven’t just written the post they are reading for the sake of SEO but you’ve something to offer them. That’s when the referral traffic will start pouring in.
When writing a guest post or just a generic blog post for your website, it’s pretty obvious that you will end up mentioning a couple of SaaS companies, brands, and whatnot. Once you’ve published your article on your website or on any third-party platform (or even in the writing stage), it’s time to grab some backlinks, reach out to the platforms you’ve mentioned in your article with a simple email and ask them if they will be willing to link with it.
Writing a bunch of guest posts every month is good but collaborating with fellow SaaS geeks and asking them to mention your product or service for a mention back is the best way to create a backlink for a backlink situation. For this, you need to start by finding a writing partner and ask them to mention your SaaS in their articles and do the same for them.
There’s an amazing tool CoMention that will help you find partners you can collaborate with for the same, it not only allows you to track mentions and keywords but also generates a list of backlink opportunities, all you need to do is add an article you are working on and click on “Find Keywords”.
Who said spying is bad? It’s great when it can cut down your research time by 50%.
You might think that you are the only fish in the pond when in fact there might be Google-coronated kings in your SaaS niche. But the point is how are you going to compete with them? Simple, by spying on them.
Your competitor’s backlink profile is a treasure trove of knowledge and information at your fingertips that can help you unlock the secrets to backlinks. As a SaaS, it’s important that you know who your competitors are, something that you should research even before building your product.
Once you’ve got that, all you need to do is check their profile using an SEO tool (Ahrefs or SEMrush). You can start off by checking the common backlinks your competitors have and since the website has linked with their SaaS, convincing them to link with yours as well will be easy.
You can also replicate their best backlinks by using the skyscraper technique, all you need to do is filter the best links, check the type of content the backlinks are embedded in, generate higher-quality content, and then negotiate with the site owner to replace your competitors’ link with yours.
A great content marketing and organic backlink generation strategy is interactive, value-jammed infographics. Visuals have always been linked with better learning in fact studies show that visuals increase learning and retention of information by 78% which is just another reason why site owners are more likely to link their content with infographics.
Infographics are especially valuable for SaaS companies as asking users to read manuals amounting to a novel will make you lose your potential customers. This can be easily replaced with an interactive infographic using resources like infographic bee, Infographaholic, cool infographics, infographic journal, etc.
There are 2 ways to get value out of infographics, one being – searching for a proper content distribution platform – curating a list of influencers and bloggers within your industry and requesting them to link with it, and the second one is using Google reverse image search to check if someone is already using your infographic without linking for which you can, later on, send an email to remind them to do so.
Creating roundups as well as participating in them is another amazing way to get backlinks, here’s how you can do it:
Think about it, you created a roundup post featuring 5 or 10 industry influencers, and if all of them share your article or repost it that’s how many high-quality relevant backlinks you’ll get without spending a dime.
Testimonial link-building strategy is a win-win for both parties, especially for SaaS startups that are always on the lookout to add more testimonials or success stories on their website. When you submit testimonials for products or services you’ve used, more often than not, you will get a free backlink from that company.
SEO for SaaS is no more complicated than for any other, the general rules are pretty much the same. The bottom line is alongside high-quality content you need a great content distribution strategy to get that referral traffic. After all, SaaS inbound marketing is pretty different from traditional inbound marketing. The aforementioned strategies and tips will help you build powerful backlinks fair and square.
Feel like I have missed a backlink strategy? Do share your proven ways to grow backlinks in the comments below.
Shivam Kumar
