While offering an amazing SaaS, you want to share its benefits and experience with more clients. One of the ways to achieve that is by increasing your ranking and visibility in search engines, which is possible with SaaS link building.
Back in 2016, the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google revealed that RankBrain, content, and links significantly impact the ranking of your online platform. In the meantime, we can switch our focus to accessible components to improve them.
That is why, here we’ll dive into the details of:
- Link building for SaaS companies.
- The importance of links and what influences their quality.
- Common mistakes that you should avoid.
- Useful strategies that work for software as a service companies.
So, let’s don’t waste time and get started!
What is SaaS Link Building?
Link building is the practice of acquiring useful hyperlinks from external sources to the needed pages. It helps bring traffic of online visitors from one place to another.
Meanwhile, link building for SaaS is pretty much the same. Companies place links on other online platforms to bring traffic to their own websites. The process of obtaining such backlinks involves different strategies and approaches. All of them aim to increase the online visibility of SaaS businesses on SERPs (search engine result pages). That can greatly influence overall SaaS popularity.
Why is Link Building Important for SaaS Companies?
A company’s online visibility can greatly influence visitors’ traffic and overall growth. That makes link-building quite important for the further development of SaaS. It manifests in several major points:
- Search engine visibility – backlinks help search engines determine the relevance of a SaaS website. That increases its exposure to potential customers who seek solutions.
- Trust & authority – gaining the trust of search engines and internet users is paramount for SaaS companies. Such creditability ensures the reliability of the content and services that they can get.
- Lead generation – backlinks from online platforms that occupy relevant topics help to enter a specific niche and target a corresponding audience. As a result, that generates high-quality traffic and increases engagement.
- Long-term sustainability – link building contributes to organic growth and sustainability by creating a strong foundation for online visibility. Over time, a SaaS company’s backlink profile becomes larger and more resilient to market fluctuations.
- Brand awareness – the more popular the SaaS brand, the larger its audience. Link building helps to develop company recognition across multiple web pages due to mentions, descriptions, and hyperlinks that navigate internet users to your SaaS website.
- Competitive advantage – in a competitive market, it is important to attract the attention of potential customers. With quality backlinks, you increase traffic and strengthen your company’s presence, which helps you outrank competitors.
How To Choose a Quality Link for SaaS?
Now that you know the reasons why link building for SaaS is important, you can start focusing on their quality. However, choosing them may not be that simple. Therefore, we have prepared several SaaS link building tips on what you should take into consideration.
Relevance
The quality links must be relevant. This is the initial step in their selection. Your SaaS is part of a specific marketing niche or industry field. Thus, you need to attract the relevant audience. That is possible with links that contain useful content on the relevant topic.
From the perspective of search engines, such links reinforce their presence and authority. It results in attracting the target audience and increasing the overall value of a domain. With such a natural and diverse backlink profile, you achieve sustainable SEO success.
Page traffic
Each page has its own metrics for the volume of visitors. High traffic has better potential for referrals to the SaaS website, which increases brand awareness. Additionally, it shows that the link has greater visibility online. That is due to top-quality relevant content, which engages visitors.
With high-traffic links, it is easier to boost SaaS exposure. However, it is important to keep relevance as a priority. It can be easy to find web pages with huge visiting metrics, while the content cover is irrelevant to the SaaS domain.
Anchor text
Internet visitors can easily navigate between web pages due to the anchor text. It also shows search engines that the content is linked. That is why the anchor text should be descriptive and relevant. Only then it does enhance user experience as it allows finding the needed information within the same topic.
As for link building, anchors use keywords to optimize search engine page results. However, inserting too many of them may decrease the content’s genuine value. SaaS experts prefer to use natural links and appropriate keywords to correctly represent linked content.
Domain authority
Another point to consider is the domain authority. It defines the general credibility and influence of SaaS websites in the rankings of search engines. Pages with high DA (domain authority) have more chances to take higher ranks in search results, meaning their links provide more SEO benefits.
Additionally, high DA shows that websites are trustworthy to search engines and that they contain relevant content. With the focus of SaaS companies on links from web platforms with high domain authority it is possible to attract targeted traffic and develop brand authority over time.
4 Typical Mistakes in SaaS Link Building
In the process of selecting quality links, you’ll also encounter offers that seem quite promising. However, their origin, content, and relevance may not align with your SaaS link building strategy and even harm it. Thus, there are several mistakes that you should avoid.
Using the black hat tactic
Building quality links requires time and effort. With black-hat tactics, it is possible to reduce the required resources. However, they violate search engine rules, which may result in penalties, including deindexing or banning from search results.
- Buying links – purchasing backlinks in large amounts from websites to boost your SaaS link profile. Quite often, they have low relevance and quality. Such activity may raise suspicion from search engines.
- Link farms and private blog networks – they just connect websites between each other and clients’ pages. PBNs (private blog networks) consist of multiple websites that artificially increase the number of backlinks directing users to a specific website, and they are often owned by one entity,
- Automated link building software – modern tools like bots and software can generate numerous low-quality backlinks without spending much time. That is due to the spamming of comments, forums, and guestbooks with links. Such an approach has no value to internet users.
- Hidden links and text – some black hat practitioners place links and text in a way you cannot see them. It can be behind pictures or when the font color matches the background. That manipulates search engines while users cannot see the links.
Anchor text over-optimization
The use of exact keyword matches in anchor text may lead to over-optimization. Search engines start getting suspicious of such content and pose penalties. That is because links don’t look natural, which may signal attempts to manipulate page rankings. The solution is to diversify the use of keywords, branded terms, and language to sound genuine.
Authority over relevancy
The high authority of a website shows that it occupies high ranks in search engine result pages. However, its domain and content may not be relevant to your SaaS. It may result in valuable links that have small SEO benefits for your needs. That is why you should prefer content that aligns with your niche.
Building links only on a commercial page
Commercial pages are essential in advertising your SaaS and conversion. However, focusing solely on them neglects all the benefits of blog posts and resource pages. They can interest users and bring them to different parts of your website.
Strategies That Work for SaaS Link Building
To succeed with SaaS link building, there are several effective strategies. Each of them has its own benefits and ways of implementation. Thus, you should consider using all of them or the most suitable ones for your needs.
Linkable assets
High-value content has increased the chances of being cited and linked to by others. Such assets are infographics, case studies, surveys, whitepapers, comprehensive guides, and even interactive tools that are relevant to users of an industry.
The implementation consists of defining the topics on which SaaS can provide exciting and original insights. Then, goes creation of corresponding content that tackles questions and provides solutions to the target audience.
Niche edits
Niche edits, or curated link placement, consist of inserting your SaaS website backlinks into existing third-party online pages.
- First, you identify authoritative domains within your niche that already have related content.
- Second, you reach out to website owners with offers to add contextual backlinks.
- As a result, niche edits increase high-quality traffic to your SaaS and enhance your website’s online visibility.
The implementation of this strategy requires time for research. It is crucial to find the most relevant and high-authority domains. After that, it is about successful negotiations.
HARO link building
Another strategy is using HARO, or Help a Reporter Out. This is an online platform that connects bloggers, journalists, and experts with professional sources for their content. SaaS companies can benefit from it by obtaining media mentions and backlinks from authoritative pages.
To utilize HARO, you need to join the platform. Then, you’ll receive journalist queries on different topics, or you can even submit your own. After that, you craft responses to provide valuable insights while mentioning your SaaS. As a result, you get valuable backlinks from relevant, high-quality content.
Final Thoughts
As we can see, there are effective strategies for SaaS link building. With this guide, you already know about effective approaches and practices that you should avoid. Focus on obtaining quality backlinks from relevant content and reputable sources. Then, you’ll increase your SaaS online visibility and awareness.