Link Building For SaaS: How To Get Quality Backlinks From High-DA Websites

Defining Link-Worthy Pages

Not every page on your site is qualified for SaaS link building. You should determine and pitch value- and ROI-driven pages for excellent results.

When it comes to deciding which page to direct backlinks to, marketers think directly about the homepage. And by default, they want to direct all backlinks there. For example, if they owned a domain called www.salesforce.com, they would want to redirect all backlinks there. This is a mistake.

Depending on your goals and content strategy, some pages may be better qualified to receive backlinks than the homepage. Take, for example, hunter.io. Their website has about 700k backlinks. Yet, only 4k of those links are redirected to the homepage.

The rest of hunter.io’s backlinks are directed to other pages like blog posts and product pages.

From our experience, product and content pages are the pages to which it makes sense to direct backlinks. Here’s why:  

• Product page: This is the page featuring your tool—it’s not necessarily your homepage. This page has commercial value. It is where visitors can see what your product actually does and why it is the ideal solution to their problem. By linking back to this page, you’re not only raising awareness of your product, but you’re also increasing your conversion potential.
• Blog posts are content you create to meet your prospects where they are in the buyer’s journey. For example, if you have a link building tool, you can
• Create an article titled “What is a backlink and why you need it?” to educate prospects who are in the discovery stage.
• Create a blog post entitled “How to get backlinks to you site” to introduce your tool to your prospect.
• Create a blog post entitled “The 5 Best Link Building Software for SaaS Brands” to persuade the prospect to buy your tool.

Linking back to blog posts helps you raise awareness about your product but also push your articles on SERP so they can bring in tons of leads.  

However, if you are in a niche industry and think that the two types of pages listed above don’t qualify for backlinks, don’t worry. Here are a few things you can do to identify those pages:

• What content have you created on your blog that can be a relevant reference on the target website?
• Understanding what product and content will bring the most value to the target website’s audience.
• Figuring out what product tier brings the most revenue to your business and how it will fit into helping the target audience.

Once you have a clear idea of pages you want to direct backlinks to, you can now move on to finding target SaaS websites that’d be open to giving you a backlink.

Prospecting: Identifying relevant, high-DA or -DR, and qualified SaaS websites to target

Most SaaS companies build links on the basis of, “we want links from DA70+ sites,” which is fine. The thing is, just because a site meets your DA/DR standards doesn’t mean it’s qualified to give you a backlink.

As you screen websites for your SaaS link building strategy, you need to consider other factors other than the DA. Here’s what you need to do.

Target The Right Websites

Stay away from PBNs or gray/blackhat SEO “hacks.”

Avoid sites that are part of any private network of websites that link out to one another in order to increase their rankings (aka link farms). This strategy tends to be spammy as most links and anchor texts are not placed naturally.

Only target niche-relevant sites

You should target sites that focus specifically on your niche. Focus on finding SaaS companies that aren’t undermined by your tool and whose audience will find your content or tool useful. For example, if you have a printing on-demand tool, you can target 3D manufacturers’ websites.

Check for penalties and blacklisting.

It’s pointless to get a backlink from sites that Google keeps on its blacklist. You may get the backlink, but it won’t impact your ranking, DA, or anything as far as Google is concerned.

Only target companies with quality content

Disqualify any site that doesn’t indicate quality content. Sites filled with spun or low-quality content will not help you rank. Ideally, you should look for sites that have a strong content reputation in the niche. For example, if you’re in the email marketing market, MailChimp can be a good choice.

Be Strategic About Which Pages Link To Your Website

Consider taxonomy when placing your links

A taxonomy, in the SEO jargon, is a group of pages with a common attribute which therefore share relevance with one another.

For example, on Hubspot’s blog, SEO, Email Marketing, Sales Process, etc., are all taxonomies.

It’s important to look at the taxonomy, because it determines if your link building efforts will pay off or not. Imagine you have a page that features a “prospecting tool” and you place the page link on a Hubspot article in the “Video Marketing” category.

Now, imagine that same link is placed on an article in the “lead generation.” category. See the difference?

Consider the page’s Authority Score

Authority Score is SEMrush’s compound domain score that grades the overall quality of a webpage.

This is a one-to-100 score that combines the number of backlinks a page has, its monthly visit count, the referring domains, the keywords it targets, and several other SEO metrics to determine the value of a page.

Obviously, the higher the score, the more likely you will gain SEO value when you get a backlink from that page. For example, you will get more traffic from a page with a high Authority Score than a page with a low score.

Identifying Perfect-Fit Strategies

Define the best link building strategies to be used. You should approach this upon analyzing your target pages and your business.

Based on the link building opportunities you find and the target pages, your link building approach can fall within these three buckets.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is the best approach for early-stage SaaS start-ups and companies that are still yet to find their product-market fit (PMF). Since they lack the brand awareness and authority to facilitate content and product promotion, guest posting offers them the best way to organically grow their backlink profile and drive traffic to their websites.

Adam Enfroy used this strategy to grow his affiliate business. His blog adamenfroy.com was created in 2019. In just two years, he grew the blog to over 500,000 monthly visitors and generated over $800,000 in 2020 alone.

Content Promotion

Content promotion consists in using content or linkable assets on your website and reaching out to websites that could be interested in linking to them in their published posts. Examples of linkable assets include:

• Trends and statistics
• Case studies
• Lead magnets
• Opinion posts
• Original research
• Long-form articles
• Infographics

This tactic only works if you have quality content and create content assets that genuinely stand out. Content promotion supposes that the content/page must be good enough to perform on its own. Meaning that the key to success is to make sure that the content pages are rich in quality and that people will be happy to link to them.

This is the strategy Brian Dean used to grow Backlinko. The company has recently been acquired by SEMrush.

Product Promotion

People are constantly looking for the best software deals in the SaaS business. So they always search for comparisons guides, lists posts, lists of industry “Best Of”, so our job is to get you featured in those posts.

This is a great tactic to get links to feature pages, demo pages, and all sorts of commercial value pages which couldn’t otherwise be linked to. This can help you get backlinks that fuel user signups and pipelines.

Implementing The Outreach: Define the target accounts and reach out to them

By this time, all that’s left is to reach out to the different companies you’ve identified as the best fit. You should try to pinpoint the person with the decision-making power, essentially the head of the content or SEO department, so that you can reach out to them.

So, to find the accounts you’ll target, here is the process you can follow to make sure you target the right people and get your message to them.

Search for the accounts

Go to the company’s “about page” and find the person who owns the blog or the content department. There is no specific role you should look out for here. But ideally, you’re looking for the head of content or SEO.

Also, not every company lists its workers on the “about us” page. In this case, you can scroll down to the bottom of their page and click on the company’s LinkedIn profile link. Here is an example from Roketto.

There, it’ll be easy to search and find people from different departments and can clearly see their roles.

Next, you can click on their employees and search for SEO or Content.

Now, just in case the job titles seem confusing. You can target several people. Basically, email the person you think is the most likely to be your target and “cc” the others.

Find their email address

After finding their name, you can use a prospecting tool like Hunter Email Finder to find their email address. The tool only requires their name and website URL. For privacy concerns, we’ll be using people from Hunter to show you (otherwise, we could continue with Roketto).

After you fill in the information, you can get their email address and move on to the next step.

Verify the address

You need to ensure the email addresses you collected are valid and that your emails will not bounce. So, you should take time to verify the validity of all the emails before you kick off the outreach campaign. Here, we recommend Hunter Email Verifier.

Just enter the email address and hit verify. The tool checks every email address and lets you know whether or not the email address is valid.

Hit the “Verify” button, and voilà!

Send the email

First, take the time to research each of your prospects and craft super-personalized emails. The goal is to come off as professionals and show that you’re bringing value to their table. Here are a few things you should guarantee during your outreach process.

• The outreach emails are personalized enough, so prospects know you didn’t just target them out of the blue.
• The target pages must have a clear value in the eyes of the prospect and their target audience.
• Being honest and transparent about the intention behind the outreach.
• Keeping the scope of the conversation about acquiring a link, building relationships later.
• Preparing friendly follow-ups emails and remaining professional even in instances of a negative answer.

Publication: Get your links live and conduct and ensure you get a natural brand mention/anchor text and do-follow links

At this point, you’ve sent an email outreach to different companies and have a clear idea of what the outcomes are. Some people agreed and others declined your offer.

For those who accepted, make sure that the links are live and that it is a natural mention of your brand with a valid and clear anchor text, and most importantly, that it is a dofollow backlink. Also, ensure that the articles are permanent and that links don’t get edited or tampered with upon publication.

Think Link Building Is Too Complex? Let Us Help You

Backlinks are essential for SaaS companies. The more and better backlinks you have to your website, the higher your website will rank, and the more traffic you will get. The more traffic you get, the more subscriptions and user signups you’ll get. Think of it like the backlink chain of causality.

At PrestigeLinks, we define ourselves as a white label link building company. We help our clients get high-impact backlinks that fuel their business growth. We work with an A-players team that can craft unique stories about your company and reach out to even the best sites on the web, and get your article accepted for publication.

So far, we’ve landed links for our clients from Forbes, Harvard University, Entrepreneur, and many other well-known sites. Also, we’ve worked with some of the best SaaS companies, including Vidyard, Airwallex, FatJoe, Binance, and more. Contact us to discuss how we can help.