4 Link Building Strategies For SaaS Companies

While many marketers and business owners understand the importance of links, very few can execute an effective link building strategy. 

One reason is that link building today has become more of authority-driven activity instead of just being perceived as a way to manipulate rankings on search.

Back in 2010, you can easily spam websites with exact match anchor text links and instantly dominate the search results for your desired keywords.

Today's search landscape has become a challenge for individuals and businesses online. You need to look at backlink opportunities with relevance and authority in mind. 

With the two link signals above, a website can thrive in its respective industry if it can acquire links from places that can bring value to the business’s bottom line.

One type of business that's in dire need of authoritative and relevant links is software companies (SaaS). 

Many SaaS startups can bring in new demos and trials to their business if they know how to take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) — and if they can acquire relevant authoritative backlinks. 

So if you're marketing a SaaS website, here are four strategies to build backlinks to your most important pages. 

1. Publish Informational Template Pages 

Most Saas websites have salesy template pages. 

Either the template helps the user to get more information about how the info product works, or the template itself is the product.

It is bringing value from the standpoint of users, but from potential linkers who would link from their informational articles, those template pages won't seem fit to add to their content. 

One way to combat this is to think of ways on how to publish informational template pages.

The template page doesn't have to be about your product. But it should help your target customers to get through their days either by eliminating repetitive tasks from their workload or by giving them the exact workflow or format they need. 

One good example is Microsoft templates.

If you're a job seeker or starting out in your career, you definitely need some help with your basic Excel and organization tasks. 

So having a template to help you come up with a resume that stands out from the rest of the interviewees is considered to be highly useful for job seekers. 

Think about your industry and your potential customers.

What are the repetitive tasks they do daily that you can turn into some kind of template? 

Are there any challenges your customers face to finish a project or task that, if you gave them a simple framework, workflow, or chart, can help them achieve progress? 

Once you publish your informational template page, you can add internal links to your other more visible pages. 

The reason is that you want these pages to get more link equity from your informational template page. As your template page gets links and ranks, your other internal pages benefit from it. 

You may also add a FAQ (Frequently-Asked-Questions) section to your template page to increase its perceived value from the perspective of potential linkers (publishers, journalists, industry content creators, etc.…). 

Strategizing and executing this link building campaign takes a lot of work, so it's one thing to consider hiring a company that offers link building services to SaaS companies.

2. Leverage Resource Page Opportunities 

Resource pages, also termed as "links" pages, are web pages that list down references to different websites or sources on a particular topic.

Let's say a resource page with the title "Job Hunting Resources", consists of external links to articles, books, informational pages, and tools about job hunting.

Resource page link building is an effective strategy for SaaS websites, as there are a lot of resource pages available on the web.

All you have to do is to find them, create a page that would fit these "links" pages, and get backlinks. 

Easier as it sounds, most SaaS companies don't take advantage of it, given that they don't know where to start. 

Here is a three simple process to do resource page link building: 

Know the right type of linkable audience for your website. 

A linkable audience is a group of people who intently link out to informational content online. You don't have to beg for links. They simply would link to your page if they found it to be useful for their readers.

There are hundreds of linkable audiences you can tap with your content. They include senior citizens, people with disabilities, students, job seekers, people in the abusive community, etc... 

A quick google search can help you identify what linkable audience is for you:

Create content to serve their needs.

Every linkable audience has a need. If you provide information that fits their needs, links won't be a problem.

Know what they consume. Check out the content format, style, tone, voice, or other learning content that's being consumed by your target linkable audience.

So before you dive in and create content, you now have an idea of what content you'll be able to produce for your audience.

Once you publish the most comprehensive version of the topic, it's time to promote it to your potential linkers. 

Promote your content to resource page curators.

When you find a specific resource page, you have to find who handles the page - they are called “resource page curators”. Either they are part of the webmaster team, the IT department of an educational institution, or the owner itself of the blog or website. 

Get his or her contact information so you can reach out and share your content. 

Grab the email addresses of contact persons for each resource page opportunity. This, by itself, takes a lot of work, so you might want to hire a virtual assistant or ask help from your junior team members to get all the available email addresses of your contact persons.

Then, reach out to these people and share your content. The way to increase your conversion rate (how many links you'll get from an outreach campaign) is to personalize your email with the name of the contact person and the website where the resource pages are hosted.

By doing this, you come off as someone who helps their readers to learn new information from your content, not as a complete stranger just wanting to pull off with a link. 

3. Use Link Reclamation Strategy 

If your SaaS product is good, you'll expect industry publishers, bloggers, and journalists to cite your tool in one of their articles. 

And as you grow your business, happy, satisfied customers who have their own web properties (blogs) will naturally write reviews about your product and how it helped them one way or another. 

A good link building strategy for established software companies is link reclamation.

It's easy to implement and often has a high conversion rate, given that you're coming from an authoritative standpoint. You are reaching out on behalf of your brand looking to get credits from their mentions.

Link reclamation is basically gaining links from previous mentions of your product, content, or any respective people or entities in your business. 

If they mention you in one of their articles, they should be giving you credit in the form of a backlink pointing to one of the pages of your website. 

Here is a simple process that you can follow to implement this link building strategy that works in 2021 and beyond. 

Discover mentions of your brand or content. First, you have to know who mentions you. 

You can do this either through a manual search on Google using advanced search operators or by using a tool that automates the entire process of mention discovery.

Grab the email addresses of publishers who mentioned you. 

Look for the right email address of the publisher who mentioned you. You can use email-finding tools like Hunter or go simply to the contact page or about page of the website (where you usually see the email address of your contact person).

Reach out to them and ask them to credit you with links. 

Craft an email by saying that you saw one of their articles mentioning your SaaS product or content. Then request to credit the mention with a backlink pointing to a dedicated page on your website.

4. Offer Tool Access In Exchange For Product Reviews 

The good thing with SaaS companies is that they have an inherent value proposition — the tool itself.

And with that, it's easy to approach publishers, and any other potential linkers, as you have a specific something in mind to offer — your product. 

Take advantage of this by finding bloggers in your industry and from other markets.

You can start off by reverse engineering your competitors' websites.

Check their backlink profile and see who wrote reviews about their SaaS products. 

Then from that, you make a list of all the blogs that have a history of writing product reviews.

You grab their contact information and reach out to them. As I've said, it's much easier to get links from these publishers as you can offer your product straight to them.

Think of how to make your tech product look more appealing. You can give 6 months premium access or usage of the tool or offer them an affiliate partnership program to help these bloggers gain an additional source of income.

Whichever strategy works depending on your market, usage data, and business dynamics. 

Summary 

If you're a SaaS founder or SEO, you know building links to a SaaS website is difficult. But it's doable if you know the exact link building strategies that fit this type of business.

Never invest in short-term link building strategies that won't give you big returns. Start by pursuing relevant authoritative backlinks that will drive more demos and trials to your software company.