How to Build Links to your SaaS Site

Intro

In this post, we will cover different ways using which you can build links to your SaaS site.

Why is SaaS link building important for SEO?

SaaS link building helps boost the SEO of your SaaS business in a number of different ways:

1. Increases your credibility: Your visitors are more likely to trust your content or expertise if you’re mentioned on high-authority sites
2. Google examines your backlink profile: To rank higher than competitors you need to start with more links that are better in quality as well as quantity.
3. Get more traffic: You will get more visitors from different sites where you are mentioned
4. Better SEO rankings: Lots of quality backlinks improve domain authority meaning better search engine rankings
5. More sales, more revenue: Good links send you high-intent traffic to your site sending you more leads that help you convert more people

Other than that, there are even more benefits of building white hat links:

• Build publisher relationships: When building links for your site, you will get a lot of partners. Their help can help you get more out of your marketing. The connections that you gather this way last a lifetime
• You can promote your webinar or even a course on their network.
• Continuous referral traffic: Your link will always remain on the partner site. Unlike ads, these links will get you traffic long after you stop link building.

Ways to Build Links

1. Unlinked brand mentions

Finding unlinked mentions of your brand on different websites can be a real opportunity for you. If you do a SERP analysis you will find a lot of competitors following the same strategy.

It isn’t just a strategy for big tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush or Ranktracker’s backlink checker. Unlinked brand mentions require you to reach out to site owners who mentioned your brand but didn’t add a link. You can set up Google news alerts to alert you if they added your link or not. For example, I had several unlinked mentions of my Masterclass tutorial. I got several links once I sent emails to webmasters informing them of the same.

Research the author, send them an email or a tweet, and kindly ask them to add a link back to your website.

2. Linked brand mentions

Linked brand mentions include a tactic where you reach out to sites that have linked your homepage. You ask them to add a link to a more relevant page instead.

For example, you may have an internal page to which you want to build links instead of directing all the link juice at the homepage. This helps you beat competitors and outrank them on the SERPs.

3. Guest posting

Guest posting is an integral part of link-building efforts. It’s one of the most predictable and straightforward ways of building links. It doesn’t matter whether you have a SaaS site or a fashion website. The basics of link building remain the same for both kinds of sites.

How does it work?

Guest posting starts by building relationships. You start by building relationships with high-quality sites. After they accept the proposal a team of writers create the content for you and include a link back to the page where you want to drive traffic and topical authority. This gives you great content and an opportunity to place that content on quality sites and accrue a number of high-quality links.

This helps you amass a huge number of links in a short time and the increased domain authority and consequent traffic pays for the effort you spent in writing and sourcing guest posts.

You can also cultivate a long-term relationship with the site owner who wants content quality and is willing to support your backlink strategy for guest posts.

Link prospecting is however time-consuming and takes back and forth. Most SaaS businesses use the services of professional link builders who have built tons of guest blogging connections over the years.

4. Trend reports

Venngage has a blog post titled * Biggest Graphic Design trends. It has over 450 referring domains linking to it.

They managed all that link power not by building relationships with existing sites.

Creating quality content like trend reports is one of the best ways to attract high-quality links and Venngage has a huge backlink profile that it raked up over the years.

Just like reports, posts with charts and graphs too tend to get a lot of links.

The strategy is simple. Create a piece of content that not many can easily replicate. They researched 2020 trends and created a long-form article with 13000 plus words

• They created high-quality infographics to make that article more shareable
• They created a good quality youtube video which has more than 48000 views

They updated the same URL every year with the current year. And they increased the number of referring domains to their site. This increased their search engine rankings.

5. Podcasting

How can search engines find your site from a podcast? And what does this have to do with building quality backlinks? YOu may be surprised to know that podcasts aren’t just a way to create brand awareness but they’re also a great SaaS link-building tactic too.

It works in a similar way to guest posting. Most podcasts also have a website. So when you speak on a podcast, they publish the same to their website and include links to your site.

The greatest advantage of building links through podcasting is that you don’t need the time, effort, or resources that go into building high-quality written content which is the norm with guest posts. Just prepare beforehand and speak for 30 minutes on a familiar topic.

6. Product embeds

Product embed links are a result of when someone embeds parts of your product on your site.

Let’s say people embedded a Typeform contact form. That links back to Typefroms’ contact form maker page. This boosts rankings.

For this to work, make your product embeddable. The rest people can do and when they embed your product it will have a link that says Powered by. The tactic is called widget link building.

7. Shareable links

You can get a lot of links from sites like Dribble, Zendesk, SurveyMonkey, HubSpot, and others if you create client portfolios or projects.

How to do this?

To do this, ask your users to share projects created with your tool online. This way user generated content is doing most of the link-building for you and increasing domain authority.

They are turning users into link builders but the content they produce means we can benefit from this guest blogging and get links from a variety of sources.

Here’s an example that was posted on Adobe’s website. The button “Prototype Experience” links back to Invision.

Mistakes to avoid when building links

Avoid following these practices when building links.

Generally, speaking— avoid link farms or sites that encourage gambling or pornographic content. Link farms are networks of websites that often link to each other in a bid to circularly increase each other’s domain authority. These sites eventually get flagged by search engines due to their suspicious link-building practices. Getting a link from these sites is the equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot.

Link farms enable you to get several links in a short time frame but your site may land in trouble sooner than later.

Link exchange is not a good tactic

Getting a link in return by giving a link sounds good on paper but it isn’t a strategy that bears fruit in the long run.

Here are the reasons why you should approach this strategy with a certain caution:

1. The audience where you’re getting a link in exchange is different. You may get high traffic but the bounce rate will be higher too. There’s no use in getting links from a site that shares a different audience than what you are targeting.
2. The excessive practice of link exchange can invite penalties from Google but also from sites that you are collaborating on. This will get your site penalized and your SEO will deteriorate as a result of that
3. Link exchange means you need to link to others and the sites you’re linking to may be questionable in nature.

Don’t buy links

Buying links is when you’re spending some money to get mentioned on your site

1. It can easily backfire
2. Since it costs you a lot and buying links from a number of sites will dent your marketing budget
3. They might make the link no follow

Penalties due to bad links

Bad-quality links are very easy to get but they also spell doom.

1. Poor quality of traffic: The traffic has a higher bounce rate and lower dwell time. This happens when visitors to your site don’t match the target persona you want.
2. Reduced visibility: Mismatched traffic may reduce rankings for keywords you want traffic for
3. Search engine deindexation: Poor backlink profile can result in your site getting totally deindexed from search engines.

Let’s look at the content and backlink strategy of Nimble. They have one of the top performing pages in the form of an article ranking for the term Sales Playbook. It only has 650 words and isn’t detailed. HubSpot’s article on the top spot is over 2000 words in length and more detailed. Nimble has the link profile and content team to clearly create a far better article. The lack of depth is hurting them. Additionally, the page hasn’t been updated since being published in 2013.

Conclusion

What do you think of our tips to build links with the help of outreach, guest blogging, finding unlinked mentions and creating shareable resources? Do let us know in the comments below.