SaaS companies exist in one of the most competitive niches possible. There are more and more companies creating solutions and automations than ever before. As this space grows, it becomes harder for every SaaS company, even the big ones, to get their products in front of the customers they are searching for. SEO and link building for SaaS has become increasingly important for any SaaS company that wants to succeed. Are you unsure how to build links or where to start? Well, not to worry. To help you get started on your link-building journey we’ve put together this quick guide to help your SaaS company start the work to get noticed. To get started we will discuss what link building for Saas is, some link-building strategies, and why a mix of Dofollow and Nofollow links is so important.
What is SaaS Link Building?
If link building for SaaS is so important, what exactly is it? In its simplest form, link building for SaaS is the practice of acquiring links that lead to a SaaS company’s website to help increase its search engine ranking, visibility, and ultimately, its traffic. These links are often referred to as backlinks. The link is featured on a third-party site and leads back to a specific page on your site.
Backlinking is a key component of any SEO strategy and can be especially useful when navigating a competitive niche as many SaaS companies do. The benefits of link building for SaaS work together to create more impact. To begin, if your company site is mentioned and linked to highly credible sites, this helps build your company’s credibility as well. The audience has learned to trust the third-party site, and now that site has given you a stamp of approval as well. This credibility is extended to search engine algorithms as well. The more trustworthy sites that feature your link, the more search engines like Google will highlight your site as an authority in a specific industry. This leads to better search rankings, which also increases your organic traffic. Though, the benefits don’t end with how well you rank on Google. Being featured on a high-quality site helps build your brand. If the site is an industry thought leader, then receiving a backlink from them helps drive more attention to you. More importantly, this also helps build your relationships in the industry and can lead to more contacts and an easier time getting links in the future.
Link Building Strategies For SaaS Sites
1. Guest Posts
Guest posts are among the most utilized link building strategies available today. This is something your company can handle internally, or they can have experts such as BASE handle it for them. A guest post is when your company provides a piece of content for another site to post. For example, you may want your company featured on a specific publication, reaching out for a guest post where you create the content and all the other website needs to do is post the content can be a great way to get started. This requires little effort on the part of the site you’re partnering with and allows you to get your company’s name out there. At BASE, we can handle this entire process through our own partnerships in nearly every industry, and our team of talented writers.
2. Create a Blog
While a blog may not be unique to SaaS companies, that doesn’t mean they aren’t effective tools for link building. Creating a blog has a few great benefits. First and foremost, it helps set your company apart as a thought leader in your industry. When you create unique and informative content, the people you reach are more likely to continue to come back to you to learn more, or to find solutions to their problems through your site. These blog posts can also be used to create organic backlinks to your site. If your content meets the needs of your audience and niche, it can gain traction and be linked organically as it gains attention. Additionally, readers can post the content themselves wherever they see fit.
The best way to start seeing these sorts of benefits is by creating long-form, high-quality content, posting it to social media, and making sure the metadata is relevant including meta descriptions, H1 tags, and other heading tags.
3. Get on Podcasts
Podcasts can feature similar benefits to both creating a blog and guest posting. If you create your own podcast, you can help your company become a thought leader. Additionally, these podcasts provide great opportunities for other websites in your industry to link to.
You can also be a guest on other podcasts. If there are popular podcasts in your industry being a guest star on them can help you find an audience that is already eager to learn about new solutions and companies entering the space. Once they hear about you on the podcast they can easily follow the links in the descriptions directly to your site
4. Utilize Product-Embedded Links
A product-embedded link is a great way to get backlinks, while also showcasing just how useful your product is. Unfortunately, this may not be available for every SaaS company, but for those that can, it should be taken full advantage of. So, what is a product-embedded link? Have you ever been on a site, filled out a form for a demo, and at the bottom is a small text field with a link back to the company that created the form? That’s a product-embedded link. You’re letting someone use/embed your product, and within the product, you have included a link back to your page. These are best used with form builders, though may be able to fit into other products as well. These backlinks give you all the benefits of helping more people find you on Google, but you also receive the added benefit of having your audience use your product firsthand. They can be filling out the form, or interacting with your product and be truly impressed by its function. Instead of searching for who made it, they simply look at the bottom and see the link back to your page.
5. Use Your SaaS Partners
In the world of SaaS it is common for many companies to partner up for one reason or another. One of the most popular is to offer complementary services for their clients. SaaS companies often specialize their products, so partnering with a company that can offer something you don’t is a great way to increase value for your customers, but also create backlinks that can help you grow organically. If you already have some partners, reach out and offer to include links on your site as an integration partner and ask that they do the same. If you are just starting out and lack these partnerships, begin reaching out to other SaaS companies that may have started around the same time as you and offer a service that complements your primary service. You can help each other grow, create more value, and create more backlinks for your site.
6. “Best of” Roundups
Articles listing the top products in a specific niche are not new, and they aren’t going away anytime soon. These articles can be a great tool for SaaS companies to help create meaningful links from sites that create their own reviews about products companies actually use.
To start, all you need to do is research which publications create these kinds of roundup lists. After you find a few you are interested in, you can reach out to the author and make an argument as to why your product should be included in the roundup. You can also allow them to test your product so they can make an educated decision. If everything goes well, your product will be featured in a best-of list. However, even if it doesn’t necessarily go the way you are hoping, the experience is still valuable. The author can provide useful feedback as to why your product just barely misses the cut and what might change their opinion in the future. You can take this feedback to your team to help create a better product experience.
Create a Good Mix of Dofollow and Nofollow Links
As you begin creating your backlink strategy you will encounter two types of links. They are Dofollow and Nofollow links.
A Dofollow link is a link featured on another site that a search engine is able to crawl and pass any authority back to your site. A Nofollow link is a link with a Nofollow tag. This means search engines will generally not crawl these links and will pass little to no authority to the linked site. You may be asking, if a Nofollow link passes no authority, then what’s the point? This is a fair question. Dofollow links are easy to understand. They help build Google authority to your site and improve its rankings. While Nofollow links don’t do this directly, they still provide value to your site overall.
First, users can still discover the link and follow it to learn about your company. Another great benefit of having a mix of Dofollow and Nofollow links is how natural your page looks. Every site will have a mix, but if it skews heavily one way or the other it’s possible for algorithms to think something untoward is happening with your site. While Dofollow links are generally the most helpful, ignoring Nofollow links can harm your strategy in the long run.
Does Your SaaS Company Need Links?
At the end of the day, link building for SaaS companies is incredibly important to any strategy. They help Google, and users find your site in more places. This leads to more traffic, and ultimately more leads. If you need help building links try out BASE’s “What it Takes to Rank,” report to figure out how many links you’ll need to rank, or contact us for more information.
