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There is no doubt that SaaS is a promising and highly competitive niche. All it takes is a couple of facts to prove it. The annual growth rate for this market is 18%, and in 2021, 73% of companies will move completely or mostly to SaaS solutions.
Most customers come to a website from search. And the user rarely goes further than the first page of search results. Therefore, finding a site in the top 10 for the target queries is the basis of a steady stream of customers. Here SEO optimization comes to the rescue – not only internal but also external. Its main method is link building.
Search algorithms tend to increase the ranking of the most interesting and popular sites. If the site refers to a lot of people, especially authoritative sources – therefore, it has quality content and is interesting to users, and it is worth increasing in search results.
Each year, the requirements of search engines are becoming more and more complex. Whereas in the past it was enough to buy links en masse from any resources, search engines now monitor their naturalness and the quality of donor sites.
Not surprisingly, business owners are most eager to balance the power of their business with the potential of SEO for maximum reach. And that’s where the hitch often arises because classic optimization techniques don’t work nearly as well with SaaS.
It’s not enough to just deal with keywords. The best strategy currently available is getting valuable backlinks that improve the visibility of your site and drive both regular and referral traffic to it. The Internet is full of different link-building methods that are supposedly universal for everyone. But we know for a fact that SaaS isn’t for everyone, so we’ll pick only those that are definitely applicable to it.
And now, let’s take a look at actual methods of link building for SaaS.
There’s not much point in talking about this technique: it’s undeniably effective when used correctly. Proper use means the regular posting of useful and valuable articles on authoritative platforms whose topics are similar to yours. Guest blogging provides endless opportunities to deliver important and useful information to the reader. In doing so, it is not difficult to naturally mention in the text the benefits of your product or its new features that will solve the problem even more effectively.
With guest posts, you can promote your own brand and get good traffic. It is a topic that has been discussed a thousand times, so we will not go into many details. If you are interested, you can find all the necessary information in this guide.
Some sites post special articles where they show the best tools for a specific task. You must have seen such article: “10 Best Marketing Tool” for example. Getting your product on such a list will be awesome. These are natural links that are valuable to both you and the owner of the website because they make his list fuller.
Do not be mistaken, getting your product on such a list, will not be easy. To get results, you will need to contact the owner or a writer and convince them that your product is really one of the best. Big websites, that post such articles, are very careful when it comes to creating a “Top 10 Things” list.
Most owners of such sites, like to share their lists on all social networks after the list is published, and it can start a wave of sharers and likes among other users. Of course, there are many such sites all over the world, you just need to find the one that suits you.
It’s good if you can find a writer that has a specialized website and, perhaps, even writes for other platforms. This way, if he likes your product, he might include it in his future post more than once.
Additionally, there are specialized review sites, that constantly post lists of the best, in their opinion, tools, and programs. If you manage to get on a good side of the owner or a writer, you can get a lot of value out of them. However, it is important to find a trustworthy website, G2.com and TechRadar are great examples.
Many users refuse to buy a product because they doubt its usefulness. Offer them a trial period or demo mode to gain their trust. This was shown to be a great link-building method by Ahrefs. They created a special page on their website and filled it with their free SEO tools. Since such pages are getting often shared and put on all kinds of lists, the page managed to get 1300 backlinks and 288 referring domains, as you can see from a screenshot.
Of course, for this to work the free version of your product still has to be good. Yes, you can limit what users can do, but it still has to show the potential of the full version.
Now, this is not an easy method, but it is been shown to have enormous potential if done correctly. The point is, you can do a survey or some kind of research, then you just publish the results. If the topic was chosen correctly, people will start to share your survey, and leave a backlink to it. You must have seen such surveys, every industry has them.
The beauty of this type of content is that it is informative and increases your brand awareness at the same time. Additionally, it can get into TOP-10 search results on Google, but this mostly depends on the quality of your survey.
StackOverflow proved the power of this link-building method. Their 2018 Developer Survey managed to get 17,000 backlinks from around 3,500 referring domains.
The last method is perfect for people with no link-building experience, or when it is just easier to outsource your link building. Delegate the task to an experienced freelancer, monitor his work, and see how increasing link building affects your ranking. You can find expert freelancers on sites like Upwork and Fiverr or simply go to a link building agency.
All of the above is not an exhaustive list for building SaaS backlinks. New sites and content ideas are getting constantly tested. Today, when building up the link mass should be more cautious. This should be done slowly, gradually increasing the number of links, carefully selecting sites for placement. If the algorithm finds the links obtained unnaturally, the site may fall under the search engine filter. Getting under the filter is fraught with loss of search results and loss of site positions.