We’ve seen a huge number of new SaaS startups over the last decade, making this landscape extremely competitive, no matter what your niche. And when competition is fierce, businesses must take every opportunity to increase visibility and make themselves stand out from the crowd.
SEO can play a huge role in this and a big part of any SEO strategy is link building.
Through an effective link building strategy, SaaS companies can improve their rankings on the SERPs and help drive more traffic to their site. This is so important for increasing brand visibility and encouraging consumers to engage with their services.
So, if you’re ready to start securing backlinks for your SaaS company, you’ve come to the right place. In the guide below, we’re going to share some of the most effective link building strategies you can implement right away.
Build linkable assets and content
First and foremost, if you want people to link back to your website, it’s no good simply having one webpage they can use. Instead, you need to create a series of linkable assets that can be easily quoted and linked to by others writing content relevant to your posts. The best way to do this is to create a blog that can be accessed through your website.
This way, you can start to share genuinely useful content and insights, allowing you to connect with your target audience and start positioning your SaaS business as an expert in your industry.
But don’t just chuck any old thing up on your blog and hope for the best. You need to consider user experience at all times and ensure you produce high-quality content that includes tips, case studies, statistics and information that can be easily quoted and linked to.
Roundups are also a great way to secure links. You’ve probably seen loads of these articles before, they are the type with titles like ’20 top SaaS tools’ or ‘The 10 best CRMs for businesses’.
Whatever you create, the end goal is to become a go-to authority on your subject or niche as this will help you to naturally gain more backlinks.
Guest posting
Guest posting is a strategy that’s definitely overdone by a lot of businesses and marketers but there is still an opportunity for it to pay dividends for your business if it’s done to a high level.
The overall aim is to build relationships with high authority sites, typically those in your niche, and share some free, top-quality content with them that they can include on their own blog or social media pages.
Securing these guest posting opportunities requires a careful strategy and lots of pitching, and it can be very time-consuming. But it is worth it.
Once you’ve arranged to write a guest blog on a topic that they are happy with, you can create the content (or have someone create it for you) and naturally include a link back to your own website or blog.
This link can be attached to keywords (also referred to as anchor text) and can help to increase your website’s domain authority and therefore, your rankings.
Linked and unlinked brand mentions
If you do a search for your brand, it’s likely that you’ll find corners of the internet where you have been mentioned in other content. This is broken down into two categories and is a great opportunity to build links.
Unlinked brand mentions are examples in which your company name has been used but the website owner has not linked to your pages or content. This gives you the opportunity to reach out to them and ask them to link back to your website.
If you’re short on time, you could set up Google News alerts to find out which sites are talking about your brand and then check whether they’ve included a link or not.
Linked brand mentions are those sites that may have already linked back to your homepage when you have other content that is more relevant.
In this case, you should reach out to them and point them towards the more appropriate content and ask them politely if they would prefer to change the link to that instead. This can help you to capitalise on better-quality referral traffic.
Answering media requests
Why not turn your insights into influence by answering media requests? There are several tools and resources out there that can help to connect journalists and reporters with industry experts, for example, HARO (Help a Reporter Out), Featured and Cision.
Using these tools, you can respond to requests from journalists and content creators on topics that match your brand and area of expertise. If selected, your quote will appear in their article, along with your brand name and usually a link back to your website or findings if you’ve provided stats.
Just be prepared that you might not hear back from every request you answer as journalists are busy people on tight deadlines.
Use the skyscraper technique
Brian Dean, an influential SEO expert, created a technique known as the skyscraper technique and it has become a popular way to gain backlinks. Essentially, this involves finding out what your competitors are writing about and then producing your own, better-quality version of this content.
You can then look for websites linking to your competitors and reach out to them with your updated higher-quality content. So, not only are you link building, but you’re potentially taking links away from competitors too.
The tricky part is ensuring that your content is far better and stands head and shoulders above other brands in order to secure these links.
Link To Your Sources
This may sound a bit counter-intuitive but hear us out. When you write a piece of content it helps to quote some stats, facts or opinions to back your thoughts up. To do this you’ll need to have done your research and learned who provided these insights. And by linking to these sources you give your content the trust and authority it needs to be successful and as a bonus you’ve now got a list of people you can reach out to that can help to promote it.
By linking to your sources and letting them know about it you give them an opportunity to share it with their audience and more importantly in terms of link building, they may also include a link to your piece from their own website. Why? Well because everyone likes to be appreciated and if they feel proud to be included in a great piece of content then they will naturally want to share that with their audience.
A little ego-stroking can go a long way in this game.
Offer testimonials
Our final suggestion is a nice easy one. As a SaaS provider, you may use other companies and tools to in your processes. That could be CRMs, project management tools and more.
If that’s the case, why not reach out to these platforms and let them know that you’ll write a testimonial in exchange for a link back to your website? Some may only give nofollow links but it’s certainly still worth considering.
This can be a mutually beneficial way for you to earn links and for them to boost their ratings and get great reviews.
