If that sounds familiar, there’s a good chance you’re still doing link building based on advice that worked a few years ago.

Google has gotten much better at ignoring manipulative links and rewarding editorial mentions. At the same time, more buyers are finding software through LLMs.

So if your brand isn’t mentioned in the articles and listicles AI tools pull recommendations from, you’re missing potential customers.

This guide is based on what we’ve seen building links for 100+ B2B SaaS companies. What’s still working. What SaaS brands should probably stop spending budget on. And why listicle placements became one of the strongest channels for both SEO and AI visibility in 2026.

Why SaaS link building is different

For the B2B SaaS industry, link building rules are a bit different.

Most of the links you’ll ever earn will point to your blog content. Nobody writes a roundup about project management tools and thinks “I should link to this company’s features page.” 

Editorial links go to content that helps their readers, which is almost always an article. That’s why your content strategy and your link building strategy are inseparable. The logic is: more links to your content → higher rankings → more traffic to pages with a path to conversion → more sign-ups.

You’re also operating in a technically niche space. Fewer websites naturally write about your category. That shrinks the pool of relevant domains you can realistically target. And the ones worth targeting are being pitched by your competitors too.

Then there’s the authority baseline problem. If you’re under DR 30, some of the better link opportunities won’t take you seriously yet. Getting those early links feels like needing experience to get a job, but needing a job to get experience.

None of this is a dealbreaker but it does mean you need to be strategic. Spraying guest post outreach at hundreds of websites and hoping something sticks is low ROI and rarely leads to strong placements.

What makes a SaaS backlink “good” in 2026

Before running any outreach, it’s worth getting clear on what you’re actually looking for. A lot of founders still optimize purely for Domain Rating (DR) or Domain Authority (DA). Those metrics are useful reference points, but they’re not the whole picture.

Here’s how we evaluate every link opportunity at Quoleady.

Topical relevance comes first

A DR 40 blog written for SaaS founders or B2B marketers is often more valuable than a DR 70 lifestyle site.Think about a LinkedIn automation tool. A link from a blog about outbound, lead generation, or LinkedIn growth fits naturally. A mention on a general lifestyle site feels out of place, even with higher DR.

Google evaluates the context around a link along with the domain it comes from. When we build links for clients, we focus on sites covering related topics so the links align with the content.

Organic traffic matters more than you think

A site can have strong DR and almost no readers. Always check the traffic graph in Ahrefs or Semrush before pursuing a placement. You want sites with consistent, gradual growth, not sudden spikes or drops, which often signal a past penalty.

Example of a domain with strong, consistent traffic where a backlink would be valuable

Example of a domain with unstable, declining traffic, not worth building a link on 

Where the link sits on the page

A link embedded inside a relevant paragraph in the body of an article carries real weight. A link stuck in a footer, a sidebar, or an author bio contributes almost nothing. Aim for in-content, contextual placements every time. Also, a link in the beginning of the article is more valuable than a link at the end/middle.

Why over-optimizing anchor text will hurt you

Use natural anchor text. Most strong backlink profiles include a mix of branded anchors, URL anchors, topical anchors, and occasional keyword-rich anchors.

For SaaS companies, branded anchors usually make up a large share of the profile because people naturally link using the company name, product name, or URL.

Keyword-rich anchors can help, but they should be used carefully. If too many links use the same exact-match keyword, the backlink profile starts to look manufactured.

Instead of aiming for fixed percentages, compare your anchor text mix against competitors ranking for the same keywords. If your profile has a much higher share of exact-match anchors than theirs, it’s a warning sign. 

At Quoleady, we prioritize fewer, higher-quality domains over volume. We adjust anchor strategy based on the existing profile – if there’s already a solid base of branded and neutral anchors, we can safely add more keyword-focused anchors.

What to avoid

You should absolutely avoid content farms with no clear niche. These are the sites that appear to be link repositories (every other word is an outbound link, what we call “link cemeteries”). Additionally, avoid any domain that shows or links to adult content, casino, or gambling links in its outbound profile. Getting a link there puts you in that same company.

I’m personally not a big fan of websites that show ads left and right. You’ll find plenty of those on news magazines (including Forbes, by the way). I’ve been quite skeptical about news magazines overall and didn’t really value links from them, but 2026 changed that a bit. After seeing some of these publications show up in LLM results, I realized it’s something to evaluate on a case-by-case basis.  

The SaaS link building strategies that work in 2026

These are the six strategies we use most consistently for our B2B SaaS clients. None of them are shortcuts. All of them compound over time.

1. Content assets that earn links naturally

One link building strategy that still works incredibly well for SaaS is creating original research or genuinely useful educational resources.

Ahrefs is probably one of the best examples of this.

Their research studies regularly attract hundreds or thousands of backlinks because people naturally reference data in articles, presentations, LinkedIn posts, newsletters, and podcasts. Their AI Overviews study alone picked up around 1.2K backlinks.

The same thing happened with Ahrefs Academy. It became a widely referenced educational resource and accumulated more than 8K backlinks over time.

SurferSEO did something similar with Surfer Academy, which now has around 3K backlinks.

What’s interesting is that these links usually don’t come from outreach alone. The initial distribution matters, of course, but once something becomes useful inside an industry, people keep linking to it naturally for years.

I think many SaaS companies underestimate how strong this compounding effect can become. One well-executed research report or educational hub can attract more high-quality backlinks than dozens of guest posts.

2. Guest posting done right

For years, SaaS companies treated guest posting like a volume game. Find websites with decent DR ->
send 500 outreach emails -> publish whatever gets accepted.

The problem is that many of those links never influenced buying decisions in the first place.

Some of the best-performing guest posts we’ve done for SaaS companies were on niche industry blogs where the audience was relevant.

A workflow automation company getting featured on a blog read by operations managers is often far more valuable than getting a DR80 link from a broad marketing site nobody in that niche actually reads.

I also think founders underestimate how much editorial fit matters now.

Editors have become much pickier. AI-generated guest posts completely flooded inboxes over the last two years and many publications became exhausted with generic “10 tips for productivity” type pitches.

What still works is bringing something specific:

• original data from your research
• strong product experience
• unusual observations from working with customers
• your angle and opinion
• screenshots
• examples AI can’t write without firsthand exposure

The outreach itself matters less than people think. What matters much more is angle.

If the topic immediately feels useful for their readers, conversations become much easier.

At Quoleady, we usually spend more time researching publications and angles than writing the actual outreach email. You can feel pretty quickly when an editor sees your pitch as just another SaaS company asking for a backlink versus something they’d want to publish for their audience.

3. ABC Link Exchanges

Direct link swaps like “I’ll link to you if you link to me” are listed by Google as link schemes, especially when done at scale or without relevance. In practice, they still happen, but relying on them too heavily can make your backlink profile look unnatural.

The ABC link exchange idea is very simple. Your site (A) links to site B, site B links to site C, and site C links back to you. There’s no obvious back-and-forth, so it comes across as more natural, and when the sites are relevant and actually send traffic, it is natural.

This strategy works particularly well for SaaS companies that have a blog but don’t want to partner with direct competitors. You find non-competing SaaS companies, agree on the exchange, and everyone gets a relevant, in-content link. As an agency, we get it done faster as we already have assets we own where we can get backlinks returned to our partners when they link to our clients. You can absolutely work on this on your own but if you want to scale your link building – you’ll either need an agency or an in-house team for that.

We’ve used similar approach to help one of our clients, RingBlaze. When we started working together, they had a DA of 8 and almost no backlinks. Using a combination of smart A-B-C exchanges, partnerships, and manual outreach, we published 50 guest posts and built 35 backlinks to target pages. 

As a result, we grew their DA from 8 to 30 in five months. Blog traffic went from zero to 50K visits and the content generated over 650 leads. At one point, their founder Dennis reached out asking us to slow down because they couldn’t handle the volume of inbound. That’s the compounding effect of a clean, consistent link building approach done over time.

Another cool example is Peopleforce. We got them from position 7 in Google to position 4 for one of their biggest lead gen keywords with 6 powerful backlinks.

One thing you should remember is to stick to just three sites. Once you go beyond that, things get messy with more coordination, more chances for someone to drop off, and the whole setup can fall apart.

4. Getting featured in listicles

“Best [category] tools“, “Top [X] alternatives to [competitor]”, “The [Y] best software for [use case]” – all these pages rank for some of the most high-intent keywords in any SaaS niche. The people reading them are actively comparing options before making a purchasing decision. Getting your product featured in them earns you a backlink and puts you in front of buyers at exactly the right moment.

This has always been valuable for SEO. But in 2026, listicle placements have taken on a second job that makes them even more important.

We ran a study analyzing over 10,000 citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini. We tested hundreds of high-intent SaaS prompts to understand where LLMs actually pull their information from. Across every model, listicles were the main citation source. Claude relies on them for over 70% of its citations. Even Gemini – the least listicle-dependent model in our study – still pulls 40% of its citations from listicle-style content. When someone asks ChatGPT “what’s the best CRM for a 50-person B2B team?”, the answer it gives mostly depends on which brands show up in the listicles it trusts.

Getting featured in a well-ranking listicle in your category is your most direct path to appearing in AI-generated answers.

The execution challenge is the tricky bit. Finding the right listicles (the ones that rank and have traffic), vetting them for quality, finding contacts of the right people, writing a pitch that gets an editor’s attention, and following up without being pushy is a full process.

That’s exactly what our Listicle Outreach Service is built for. We find 30+ high-impact listicles per month that are relevant to your product category, and pitch editors on your behalf. It’s done-for-you, so you can focus on your product while your brand gets placed in the lists your buyers are reading. To give you an example, just last week we’ve received a positive reply from Monday.com for our cilent when asked to get featured in their roundup.

If you want to track and manage your listicle presence yourself – knowing which listicles mention you, which mention your competitors but not you, and which are worth pursuing next – you can use our tool ListicleManager.com. It replaces the spreadsheet most teams end up using to track placements, and gives you a clear, prioritized view of your listicle gap and opportunity.

For example, most of our recent leads came from AI answers after we’ve spent months outreaching listicles on “Growth Marketing, SEO, AEO, GEO, content marketing and link building agencies”.

Works just as well for SaaS businesses – you get the top ranking listicles for your business keywords (example: proposal management software, LinkedIn automation tools, AI ad generation tools, etc.) and reach out to see what it takes to get your SaaS featured. Most likely you’ll need a listicle on your blog to return the favor.

Check out my LinkedIn post where I cover the entire process from A to Z in-depth.

Lots of listicle placements happen through exchanges with top ranking competitors. Basically, you feature your competitor in your listicle while competitor features you. Clients often ask whether this could be seen as an A-B exchange and hurt rankings overall.

In practice, no.

If you look at almost any “best CRM software”, “best SEO tools”, or “best project management software” article ranking in Google top 10, you’ll notice the same pattern: many of those companies mention each other across comparison pages, alternatives pages, integrations, directories, roundups, and industry resources.

That’s how SaaS ecosystems naturally work.

The problem starts when exchanges become obviously manipulative, irrelevant, or purely created for SEO with no real user value. But being featured alongside other legitimate tools in your category is completely normal and happens across the entire industry.

5. Digital PR and original research

When a piece of research gets picked up by a few industry publications, it usually turns into several placements on sites with authority and traffic.

For SaaS, this is more accessible than it sounds. You’re already sitting on valuable data (usage patterns, benchmarks, customer insights) and when you package it around a question your industry is asking, it becomes something publications are willing to cover.

Funding rounds are one of the easiest PR opportunities for SaaS. When airfocus asked us to cover their series A, we reached out to platforms that regularly cover those announcements and landed placements on Crunchbase and TechCrunch.

With Expandi, we focused on getting Stefan, the founder and CEO at Exandi, featured on Forbes and Entrepreneur. These placements don’t come with dofollow links, but the mention itself still carries weight for AI visibility.

We also publish press releases for clients on sites like Fortune, Reuters, and The Next Web. A mention and link on these platforms often get picked up and republished by other outlets, so one placement turns into many more.

In 2026, as more attention shifts to AI visibility, SaaS founders are trying to figure out how to show up in those answers, and digital PR helps you get there while also building a brand people talk about.

Clients also often ask what drives better ROI: one big feature or multiple smaller placements? In most SaaS cases, listicles and comparison pages come first, since they directly influence both search results and AI answers. Press releases and larger publications usually come next, once you want broader visibility. In some niches, like blockchain, a feature on a major platform can carry more weight, so it depends on where (and how) your audience is actually looking.

6. Journalist sourcing platforms

Back in the days HARO launched a model where journalists post requests for expert sources, and companies or founders respond with relevant insights in exchange for media mentions, citations, and backlinks. That approach still works well today across several newer platforms.

Some of the best current options include:

• Source of sources (previously known as HARO) is created by HARO’s original founder, Peter Shankman. Closest in structure to the original platform.
• Featured.com (formerly Terkel) connects experts with journalists, with both free and paid plans.
• Qwoted is widely used across industries and tends to attract high-quality media opportunities, especially in business, tech, and finance.
• RoundupHero is built for creating expert roundup content at scale, helping brands collect expert insights, generate content faster, and earn backlinks and mentions through collaborative articles.
• Muck Rack is more enterprise-oriented, but strong for targeting specific journalists by beat.
• SourceBottle is similar to HARO, with a good mix of tech and business journalists.

For SaaS founders, this used to be one of the more attractive link building channels, but in practice it’s become harder to justify. The competition is intense, journalists get flooded with responses, and many of them come from low-quality or generic “experts,” which makes it difficult to stand out. It also takes time to monitor requests, write responses, and follow up, with no guarantee of getting published.

That said, it can still work if you’re a real expert with something specific to say. If your response is based on actual experience, includes concrete examples, and doesn’t sound like something AI could generate, you still have a shot at getting picked up. In those cases, it’s worth trying; just don’t expect it to be a consistent or scalable channel.

7. Internal linking (massively underestimated in SaaS SEO)

I’ve seen SaaS companies spend thousands on backlinks while barely thinking about how pages connect inside their own website.

At the same time, some strong ranking improvements come from internal linking alone.

A common situation looks like this:

• the “HIPAA-compliant scheduling software” page doesn’t link to the healthcare integrations page
• an “email warm-up tool comparison” article never links to the deliverability guide
• a “SOC 2 checklist” article gets traffic but never points readers toward the actual compliance workflow product
• product use case pages are disconnected from educational content

So backlinks come in, traffic comes in, but the authority is trapped on isolated pages instead of strengthening the lead gen pages.

The goal for your SaaS website is to build an interconnected ecosystem of pages in a strategi way where pages that get lots of backlinks (think original research page or Academy) support your lead gen pages and push them up in Google.

A visitor reading about “how to reduce onboarding dropoff” naturally lands on onboarding templates, customer onboarding checklists, onboarding analytics comparisons, and eventually the product itself. Everything supports everything else.

This also matters much more now with AI search. LLMs are trying to understand relationships between concepts, use cases, industries, integrations, and products. Strong internal linking helps create that context.

One thing I’d strongly recommend is revisiting older high-traffic articles regularly. Sometimes adding several highly relevant internal links to newer commercial or comparison pages can impact rankings faster than publishing another new article.

8. Turning unlinked brand mentions into backlinks

If your product has been on the market for some time, there’s a good chance people are already writing about it without linking to you. Could be a review on someone’s “tools we use” page. Or a mention in a roundup that never became a hyperlink. Or maybe a case study that references your product.

A few years ago, SEOs would often run entire unlinked mention campaigns trying to convert every brand mention into a backlink. And yes, these links can still be valuable. The publication has already acknowledged your brand, so the outreach is usually much easier than cold link building.

But in 2026, the mention itself already carries much more value than it used to.

LLMs rely on entity recognition, brand associations, citations, and contextual mentions across the web. So if a trusted industry article talks about your product positively, that signal may already contribute to how your brand appears in AI-generated answers even without a clickable link.

That doesn’t mean backlinks stopped mattering. They still absolutely help with rankings, authority, and discoverability. But if you already earned a strong contextual mention on a reputable site, it’s often not worth spending weeks chasing every missing hyperlink.

You can still monitor mentions using Semrush Brand Monitoring, BrandMentions, or Google Alerts and occasionally send a short, friendly email asking for a link. Some will happily add it.

But overall, your time is usually better spent earning more high-quality mentions, reviews, listicle placements, expert quotes, and industry coverage rather than obsessing over converting every existing mention into a backlink.

9. SaaS review websites and directories

Review platforms (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius) rank for some of the highest-intent keywords in any SaaS category. “Best [category] software” pages from Capterra often outrank vendor websites in search results, including in international markets. 

LLMs often pull from directories because they offer standardized, comparable data across vendors. A strong, up-to-date G2 profile is a signal that your product is legit, established, and trusted.

Some of the top platforms for B2B SaaS are G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, and GetApp. All of them offer free basic listings. Beyond these, there are dozens of niche software directories, review platforms, and industry-specific marketplaces where having a complete and active profile can strengthen your visibility across both Google and AI systems.

Where most SaaS companies go wrong is treating their directory profiles as a one-time submission. A stale profile with outdated screenshots signals to AI that it’s not active. Keep your profiles current and add verified reviews regularly. Make sure the product description matches how you’re positioning yourself everywhere else.

10. Integrations with other SaaS

Integrations are one of those underrated SaaS growth channels people rarely discuss from an SEO or AI visibility angle.

When you build a native integration with another tool, you often earn visibility inside their ecosystem through integration directories, documentation, partner pages, or product mentions. Sometimes that includes a backlink, sometimes it’s simply a brand mention.

And honestly, in 2026 the mention itself already carries a lot of value.

When buyers repeatedly see your product connected with tools like HubSpot, Slack, Zapier, or Salesforce, your brand starts feeling more established and trustworthy.

AI systems pick up on these associations too. LLMs constantly see brands appearing alongside certain workflows, tools, and categories, which helps reinforce what your product does and where it belongs.

11. Affiliate partnerships (not direct but could work too)

An affiliate programme doesn’t typically come to mind as a link building strategy, but it can work as a secondary benefit. When affiliates promote your product, they often publish content like reviews, comparison posts, and tutorials. These include links back to your site. If those affiliates are established bloggers, newsletter writers, or SaaS reviewers with real audiences, those links carry genuine editorial weight.

The downside is that affiliate links are usually marked as nofollow, so the direct SEO value is often limited.

But affiliate partnerships still work well for AI visibility because they generate something increasingly important in 2026: relevant brand mentions across the web.

Affiliates naturally create reviews, comparisons, tutorials, and “best tools” articles where your product appears alongside competitors and related workflows. Some publishers still include dofollow contextual links, especially inside longer editorial reviews, but even without them, those mentions help reinforce your brand associations across categories and use cases which LLMs tend to pick up. 

What doesn’t work in 2026?

A lot of link building tactics still technically “exist,” but many don’t move the needle anymore, especially for SaaS brands trying to improve both SEO and AI visibility.

• Links on pages nobody visits
  A surprising number of “DR 70+” websites get almost no organic traffic on the pages selling placements. If nobody reads the page, references it, links to it, or cites it, the SEO and LLM value is usually minimal too.
• Mass cold outreach with generic templates
  Most outreach today is painfully obvious. The same recycled “I loved your article” and “Quick question” emails sent to thousands of websites. Response rates are terrible unless the pitch is genuinely relevant and personalized.
• Low-quality directory spam
  Submitting your startup to hundreds of random directories rarely helps. Most have no audience, no rankings, and no visibility in AI systems. A few strong industry platforms matter much more than 200 forgotten directories.
• Sitewide links, footer links, and author bio spam
  These links still exist everywhere, but they rarely carry much weight. Contextual mentions inside actual content tend to matter far more now, especially when the page itself gets traffic, rankings, or citations.

The same thing happened with link building as with content: once everyone started mass-producing it, visibility, relevance, and human attention became much more important.

What changed with SaaS link building in 2026?

A few years ago, most SaaS companies were mainly chasing dofollow backlinks from high-DR websites.

Now people pay much more attention to where their brand shows up online and how often it gets mentioned across their niche.

LLMs pick up mentions from listicles, comparison pages, reviews, Reddit discussions, integrations, and industry articles. A mention in a strong “best CRM software” article can help your Google rankings and also improve your visibility in ChatGPT or Perplexity, even if the link itself is nofollow.

Another thing that changed is the importance of certain page types. Listicles, comparisons, reviews, integrations, and original research influence a huge number of AI-generated recommendations today.

For almost every SaaS client we work with now, listicle outreach became part of the strategy. If your product isn’t showing up on the pages buyers already read while researching software, there’s a good chance LLMs won’t mention it much either.

The goal today is getting your brand consistently mentioned on trusted pages in your niche instead of collecting random backlinks from websites nobody visits.

How do you know if your link building is working

I’ve seen a lot of SaaS companies building links for months without knowing if anything is improving. Here’s what we usually look at:

Are your lead gen pages moving up in Google?
Your comparison pages, landing pages, and high-intent articles should slowly start ranking higher for the business keywords.

Is traffic growing on those pages?
Check impressions and clicks in Google Search Console. Slow steady growth is usually a good sign.

Are the links sending visitors?
Some placements look good in Ahrefs but sit on pages nobody actually reads. The best mentions usually bring at least some referral traffic over time.

Is your brand showing up more often in AI answers?
LLM visibility platforms like Allmond can help track whether your company starts appearing more often in responses from ChatGPT, Claude,Perplexity AI, or Google Gemini.

Most SaaS link building campaigns start showing results in about 2–3 months, while bigger traffic growth usually comes over 3-6 months. If someone promises huge results in 30 days, I’d be careful.

How we build links at Quoleady

We’ve been doing SaaS-only link building for five years. Our client list is exclusively B2B software companies, which means our entire network – the blogs we work with, the editors we have relationships with, the exchange partners we coordinate – is built specifically for the SaaS ecosystem.

Every link we place is checked against a consistent set of criteria before we proceed like topical relevance to the client’s niche, organic traffic, domain rating, spam score, dofollow status, outbound-to-inbound link ratio, and whether the client already has a link from that domain. We don’t work with content mills or PBNs. Every placement is an editorial, in-content link from a solid website with an actual audience.

PassKit, a mobile wallet solutions provider, is one of the clearest examples of what this looks like over time. They’ve worked with us for four years and rely entirely on our content and link building strategy for their organic growth. Over 14 months of focused work, we generated 876 leads from 26 articles by pairing high-intent content with a consistent backlink building programme that built authority around the topics their buyers were actually searching for. 

I always recommend treating link building as a long-term investment, which is how we structure every engagement.

Our three core link building services work in tandem. Guest posting puts you in front of editorial audiences in your niche. ABC link exchanges build your backlink profile with relevant SaaS domains from our established network. And our Listicle Outreach Service gets you featured in the comparison content your buyers are reading, and the content AI models are pulling from.

Putting it all together

SaaS link building in 2026 is much simpler than most SEO advice makes it sound.

The goal is to get your product mentioned on trusted websites your buyers already read and trust, then keep doing it consistently over time.

That can happen through guest posts, listicles, PR, integrations, affiliate content, expert quotes, or product reviews. All of it adds up. A strong mention on a good SaaS website can help your rankings for years and also increase the chances of your brand showing up in AI answers.

What changed is that people stopped obsessing so much over raw backlink numbers and whether a link is technically a dofollow. Visibility, relevance, and strong mentions on pages people actually visit now matter much more.

If you want to understand where your backlink profile stands today, what’s holding your rankings back, and how your brand appears in AI search, you can book a free strategy call with Quoleady. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is SaaS link building in 2026?

SaaS link building in 2026 is basically getting your product mentioned and linked on trusted websites through reviews, comparisons, listicles, PR, integrations, and other industry content.

Those mentions help your software rank higher in Google and make it more likely to appear in AI answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and similar platforms.

Why is link building important for SaaS companies?

Organic search is still one of the best growth channels for SaaS, but content alone is usually not enough. Backlinks and brand mentions help Google understand which companies are trusted and worth ranking higher. Without them, even good content can struggle to compete for valuable keywords.

There’s also a compounding effect: once your site starts earning strong mentions and links, new pages usually rank faster. And in 2026, those same mentions also help with visibility in LLMs

Is link building still relevant to SEO in 2026?

Yes. Backlinks still matter a lot in 2026, both for Google rankings and overall online visibility. What changed is that low-quality links are much easier to ignore, and sometimes they can even hurt. A few strong, relevant mentions on trusted websites usually do far more than hundreds of weak links nobody actually reads or visits.

What should you avoid in link building?

Avoid cheap mass link packages, spammy outreach blasts, and links stuffed into footers or author bios nobody reads. Chasing DR without thinking about relevance is another common mistake. The same goes for building links aggressively when there’s barely any good content on the site. Most shortcuts are pretty easy to spot now, both for Google and for people.

How long does it take to see results?

Most SaaS link building campaigns start showing results in about 2-3 months, while bigger traffic growth usually comes over 3-6 months. It depends on your starting point, competition, and how consistently you’re building mentions and links. If someone promises huge results in 30 days, I’d honestly be careful.

The post 11 SaaS Link Building Strategies: What Works & What Doesn’t in 2026 appeared first on Quoleady.

I’ve been there – and I’ve got good news. You don’t need a massive content operation to build great links. What you do need is a smart strategy that works with the resources you have.

That’s exactly what this guide is about: ABC link exchanges. I’ll show you how we’ve used this approach to help product companies land backlinks from big-name SaaS sites like Monday.com, HubSpot, Toggl, SurferSEO, Writesonic, and SocialPilot. And I’ll break down the whole process, step by step, so you can try it too.

What are ABC link exchanges (and why should you care?)

Let’s keep it simple.

In an ABC link exchange:

• You link to Site B.
  
• Site B links to Site C.
  
• Site C links back to you, Site A.
  

It’s a clean, smart way to build links when you own a good website to get other SaaS brands links from. Google doesn’t like direct A-B exchanges but ABC works quite well. 

And yes – you can stretch it even further with ABCD or even ABCDE exchanges (more on that later).

This works especially well for product startups. Mainly because product companies often don’t have a big blog or tons of traffic so the usual “guest post swap” model doesn’t get you far. So let’s dive in:

The ABC link exchange step-by-step process

Here’s exactly how we’ve done this for SaaS clients:

1. Start with competitor research

Fire up Ahrefs.

• Go to Referring Domains.
  
• Plug in your competitor’s website (in our case, we used Hotjar).
  
• Filter by traffic (e.g., 5K+) and Domain Rating (DR) (I usually go for DR 50–90).
  
• Why cap DR at 90? Because you’re unlikely to get a response from giants like Google or Microsoft for an exchange.

Related: SaaS Link Building: What Really Works in 2025?

2. Export and clean your list

Export the filtered domains. Then (and this is important), remove any sites that already link to you. A simple Excel filter or Google Sheets formula does the trick.

3. Check for relevance

Let’s say you’re targeting the English-speaking market. Filter out domains in other regions like .fr, .es, .de.  Focus on .com and other relevant domains that match your audience.

4. Find emails

Upload your list of domains to Apollo or Instantly.

• Apollo is great, but I find Instantly a bit more convenient for outreach campaigns.
  
• Let it work its magic and pull email addresses for you.

5. Write a simple, friendly outreach email

You might want to consider using another domain (or domains) for the outreach as well as the cold outreach and deliverability best practices which means: 

• setting up your DKIM, DMARC records 
• Use 2-3 inbox per domains for outreach
• Don’t send more than 50 emails/inbox/day
• Verify all emails before sending
• Add variants of texts so you don’t send same email to everyone

Read about: 12 SaaS Link Building Strategies That Work in 2025

ABC link exchange outreach sequence template I’ve used: 

Subject: Let’s swap links!

Hi {{firstName}},

Olga here, founder at Quoleady.

I’d like to see if there’s an opportunity for a link collaboration:
I could include my link to your blog post in exchange for one from a top-notch site I manage.

Does this work for you?

Best,
Olga

Follow-up 1 (in 2 days):

Hi {{firstName}},

Just wanted to follow up on my message from a few days ago about the link placement.

Let me know if this is something you’d consider. I can send more details if helpful.

Best,
Olga

Follow-up 2 (in 3 days):

Hi {{firstName}},

Reaching out again to see if you’ve had a chance to consider link placement opportunities. We’re flexible: open to both link exchanges or paid insertions, whatever works best for you.

Would love to hear your thoughts when you get a moment.

Thanks,
Olga

Follow-up 3 (in 3 days):

Hi {{firstName}}!

Not sure if now’s a good time on your end, but if you’re still open to potential collaborations, I’d love to discuss link options further.
Happy to make it as easy as possible. Just let me know.

Cheers,
Olga

6. Negotiate and close the deal

Once you start getting replies, it’s all about communication. Some deals happen fast, others take a few back-and-forths. Be patient and flexible.

You might be interested in: Effective SaaS Link Building Tips: Proven Strategies to Boost Your SEO in 2025

What if you don’t have a site to offer for a link back?

No problem. You’ve got options:

✅ ABC, ABCD, even ABCDE exchanges – build a longer chain where you find partners willing to swap across multiple sites. For example, A links to B, B links to C, C links to D, and D links back to A.

✅ Paid placements – sometimes you can offer payment, but keep in mind many link managers can’t accept money for blog links, so it’s hit or miss.

✅ Partner with an agency – agencies like Quoleady (yep, that’s us!) specialize in these kinds of link-building strategies. We’ve been doing this for SaaS companies for over five years, and our network is what makes it work. We’ve helped clients land links from:

• hubspot.com
• monday.com
• surferseo.com
• writesonic.com
• socialpilot.co
• userpilot.com

 …and more sites that are tough to get on your own.

Dig deeper: The Power of Internal Linking for a Quick Ranking Boost of Your SaaS Blog

Real results from ABC link building

Here’s a glimpse at what this approach can do:

✅ 6 links → ranking jump from 4th to 7th for BambooHR competitors

✅ 3 links → #2 for electronic pitch calling system

✅ 3 links → from 8th to 5th for a key lead gen keyword

The bottom line

If you’re a product company looking to build links without a huge content budget, ABC link exchanges are worth exploring.

You can DIY it using the steps above – or, if you’d rather skip the manual work, we’re happy to help.

At Quoleady, we focus on helping SaaS brands build high-quality, sustainable links that get real results. If you’re curious how we could help your brand, let’s talk! 

The post ABC Link Exchanges: A Guide to Building Links for Product Companies (with Real Examples) appeared first on Quoleady.

For SaaS startups, niche edits can be a faster and more effective alternative to traditional guest posts. But not all niche edit opportunities are worth it. Low-quality sites or spammy tactics can do more harm than good. The key is to find high quality sites that offer real value, and secure links that actually move the needle.

In this guide, we’ll break down the best strategies for securing SaaS niche edit backlinks effectively, from finding the right websites to crafting outreach emails that get results.

Related: SaaS Link Building: What Really Works in 2025?

6 tips you should follow to build SaaS niche edits

1. Identify relevant SaaS websites for niche edits

Not every website is a good fit for niche edits. The goal is to find high-quality, relevant SaaS blogs that already rank well and attract strong organic traffic. Adding your link to the right site increases your chances of getting referral traffic and SEO benefits.

Here’s how to find SaaS websites open to niche edits:

1.1. Use Google search operators

Google is one of the easiest ways to uncover sites that accept content updates. Try these search queries:

• “SaaS blog” inurl:blog
• “Best [your SaaS niche] tools” intitle:list
• “Software reviews” inurl:reviews
• “Updated” OR “Last updated” [your topic] site:.com

These searches help you find existing articles that mention SaaS products, making them ideal for niche edits.

1.2. Analyze competitor backlinks

If your competitors have secured niche edits, you can do the same. Use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to check where their backlinks come from.

• Enter a competitor’s domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
• Go to the Backlinks report and filter by “Dofollow” links.
• Look for SaaS-related blogs linking to them as these are potential targets for your outreach.

1.3. Check domain authority

Not all backlinks help your SEO. Before reaching out, make sure the site:

• Has a domain authority (DA) of 30+ (use Moz or Ahrefs).
• Receives organic traffic (check with Ahrefs or Semrush).
• Has relevant content and not a general blog covering random topics.
• Avoids spammy outbound links because too many unrelated links can signal a low-quality site.

Focusing on high-authority, SaaS-focused blogs increases your chances of securing a valuable niche edit that benefits your search rankings.

Read also: Top SaaS Link Building Strategies to Boost Your Traffic and Authority

2. Audit the website’s existing content

Once you find a relevant SaaS business’ website, the next step is to identify the right page for your niche edit. Link insertion to just any article won’t work. You need to find a strategic placement that benefits both you and the site owner.

2.1. Look for outdated or underperforming content

Pages with outdated information, broken links, or declining traffic are prime targets for niche edits. You can find these using:

• Ahrefs’ Site Explorer → Enter the domain → Go to the Top Pages report → Look for pages with good backlinks but low recent traffic.
• Wayback Machine → Check if an article has been updated recently or still uses old data.

If a site owner sees that their page needs an update, they’re more likely to accept your niche edit.

2.2. Find articles that already cover related topics

Your link should fit naturally into the content. Some ideal types of pages include:

• Listicles (“Top SaaS Tools for X”)
• How-to Guides (where your product can solve a problem)
• Comparison Articles (where your SaaS product can be mentioned as an alternative)

For example, if you run a project management SaaS, look for articles like “Best Productivity Tools for Remote Teams” and pitch your product as an additional resource.

2.3. Ensure relevance and context

The anchor text and surrounding content matter. A poorly placed link won’t help your SEO and might even get removed later. When requesting a niche edit:

• Suggest a specific anchor text that fits naturally.
• Ensure the surrounding text supports your link, e.g. if the article is about CRMs, don’t add a link to an unrelated SaaS.
• Offer a small content tweak (e.g., a stat update or expert quote) to make the edit feel valuable.

A well-placed niche edit strengthens the page instead of just adding a link, making it more likely the site owner will approve your request.

Related: Effective SaaS Link Building Tips: Proven Strategies to Boost Your SEO in 2025

3. Outreach the right way

Once you’ve identified a relevant SaaS website and the right article for a niche edit, the next step is to reach out to the site owner or editor. Sending generic emails won’t get you far—your outreach needs to be personalized, concise, and focused on value.

3.1. Craft a personalized email

Avoid mass emails or template-based outreach. Instead, write a short and direct email that shows you’ve actually read their content. Here’s a basic structure:

This keeps things short, friendly, and to the point. Site owners are more likely to respond if you respect their time.

3.2. Highlight mutual benefits

Website owners won’t add your link just because you ask. You need to give them a reason to say yes. Here’s what you can offer:

• Updated information: If the article is outdated, mention how your edit improves accuracy.
• Extra value: Offer a stat, quote, or insight that enhances the post.
• SEO improvements: Point out broken links or ways to strengthen their content.

If they see that adding your link improves their article, they’ll be more open to making the edit.

3.3. Follow up without spamming

If you don’t hear back, send a polite follow-up in 5–7 days. Keep it simple:

If there’s still no response after two follow-ups, move on to the next person. Don’t spam.

Need your SaaS Digital PR strategy sorted? Book a 1-1 SaaS Content Marketing Strategy Call with Quoleady founder today.

4. Offer value instead of just a link

Site owners receive dozens of link requests, so a simple “Can you add my link?” won’t work. Instead, make it easy for them to say yes by offering value.

4.1. Suggest small but meaningful improvements

Instead of just inserting a link, suggest a small content tweak that makes the article better. For example:

• Adding an updated stat that improves credibility.
• Fixing a broken or outdated link with a better resource.
• Expanding a thin section with extra insights.

This way, your request feels like a content upgrade, not just a backlink grab.

4.2. Make the edit effortless

Most editors won’t take the time to rewrite a paragraph for you, so do the work for them. Instead of just requesting a link, provide a ready-made snippet they can copy-paste into the article.

Example:

This makes it effortless for them to say yes.

4.3. Avoid spammy placements

A niche edit should fit naturally into the content. Avoid:

• Forcing links into irrelevant sections
• Over-optimized anchor text (e.g., “best CRM software for startups free trial”)
• Sites that sell links openly (Google may devalue these)

A well-placed niche edit adds value to the article, improves SEO, and builds trust with site owners—making future link opportunities easier to secure.

5. Prioritize quality over quantity

Not all niche edits are worth pursuing. Some backlinks can actually harm your SEO if they come from low-quality sites, link farms, or irrelevant content. Instead of chasing as many links as possible, focus on securing high-authority, more relevant sites, and natural placements that drive real results.

5.1. Choose sites with real traffic

A site’s high Domain Authority (DA) isn’t the only factor to consider. Some high-DA sites have no real traffic or exist solely to sell backlinks. To avoid these, check:

• Organic traffic: Use Ahrefs or Semrush to see if the site ranks for keywords and attracts real visitors.
• Engagement: Look for reader comments, social shares, or other signs that people actually visit the site.
• Outbound links: If a site has too many outbound links or links to unrelated industries, it might be low quality.

Prioritizing websites with active traffic and engaged readers ensures that your niche edits contribute to long-term SEO growth.

5.2. Avoid spammy link networks

Some sites openly sell niche edits, but Google is getting better at identifying paid links and devaluing them. Watch out for:

• “Write for Us” pages: They sell links instead of offering genuine guest posting.
• Unrelated content cluster: If a SaaS blog also links to gambling sites, it’s a red flag.
• Unnatural anchor text: If most outbound links are stuffed with exact-match keywords, Google might penalize the site.

A handful of high-quality niche edits will always outperform dozens of low-quality links in terms of SEO impact.

5.3. Diversify your link profile

Relying solely on niche edits isn’t a good strategy. Google favors natural, diverse link-building efforts, so combine niche edits with:

• SaaS Guest posts: Writing in-depth articles for SaaS blogs.
• Digital PR: Earning mentions in SaaS roundups or industry news.
• HARO (Help a Reporter Out): Contributing quotes to journalists for high-authority backlinks on websites like Forbes and Entrepreneur.

A well-rounded approach keeps your backlink profile strong and reduces the risk of Google penalties.

6. Monitor and maintain your backlinks

Securing a niche edit isn’t the final step—you need to track your backlinks and ensure they remain active over time. Links can get removed, changed, or devalued, so keeping an eye on them helps maintain your SEO performance.

6.1. Track your links regularly

Use tools like:

• Ahrefs’ Backlink Tracker: It shows when links are lost or changed.
• Google Search Console: It helps monitor overall link health.
• Semrush’s Backlink Audit: It identifies toxic links that might hurt your rankings.

Set up automated alerts so you’re notified if an important backlink is removed.

6.2. What to do if a link gets removed

Backlinks can disappear for various reasons like content updates, site migrations, or editorial changes. If this happens:

• Reach out politely: Ask the site owner if they can restore the link or suggest another relevant page.
• Find a replacement: If the site won’t add it back, look for similar content on other SaaS websites and pitch a new niche edit.
• Strengthen internal links: If the lost backlink pointed to an important page, improve internal linking to reduce ranking impact.

6.3. Build long-term relationships

Instead of one-time link exchanges, aim to build ongoing partnerships with SaaS blogs. If a site owner sees you as a valuable contributor, they’ll be more likely to:

• Offer more niche edit opportunities in the future.
• Accept guest posts or content collaborations.
• Recommend your SaaS to their audience.

Link building isn’t just about getting backlinks—it’s about building connections that drive continuous growth for your SaaS business.

Measuring success of niche edit link building

After you’ve secured your niche edit backlinks, tracking their impact is key. This helps you understand what’s working and where you might need to adjust your strategy. Here’s how to measure the success of your SaaS niche edit efforts:

Track referral traffic: Use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic coming from your newly acquired backlinks. Look for visitor numbers, session duration, and conversions from linked pages. This data shows you if the links are bringing in relevant, engaged traffic.

Monitor keyword rankings: Look for improvements in rankings for your target keywords and new keywords you’re ranking for that you weren’t before. Rising rankings often indicate that search engines are valuing your new backlinks.

Check domain authority growth: Use tools and metrics like Moz to track your domain authority over time. While it’s not a direct ranking factor, an increase in DA can signal that your overall link profile is improving.

Analyze conversion rates: Set up goals in Google Analytics to track how visitors from your niche edit backlinks convert. This could include free trial sign-ups, demo requests, or newsletter subscriptions.

Review backlink quality over time: Regularly audit your backlink profile using tools like Ahrefs or Majestic. Look for the number of referring domains, the authority of sites linking to you, and the relevance of the linking pages to your SaaS offering.

Adjust your approach based on data: Use the insights you gather to refine your niche edit strategy. Check if certain types of sites or content are driving more traffic, focus on getting more similar links. Also, check if some links aren’t performing well, investigate why and avoid similar opportunities in the future

Remember, link building is an ongoing process. Continuously measure, learn, and adjust to get the best results for your SaaS company.

When to partner with an agency for niche edit service

While managing your own link building efforts can be rewarding, there are times when partnering with a specialized agency makes more sense. Here are some scenarios where outsourcing to a SaaS link-building agency could be beneficial:

Lack of time or expertise: If your team is already stretched thin with other priorities, an agency can handle these tasks efficiently. SaaS link-building agencies have specialized knowledge and experience in securing high-quality backlinks within the software industry.

Need for scalability: If you’re looking to rapidly increase your backlink profile or target a large number of high-authority sites, an agency can scale and deliver your efforts more effectively. They have the resources and infrastructure to manage large-scale campaigns.

Focus on core business activities: By outsourcing link building, you can focus on product development and sales. This allows you to optimize your internal resources for core business activities.

Access to advanced tools and networks: Agencies often have access to advanced SEO tools and established networks within the industry. This can help you secure links from high-authority sites more efficiently than trying to build these relationships in-house

Let Quoleady handle your niche edit link placement

Building high-quality niche edit backlinks takes time, effort, and the right connections. Instead of managing outreach, negotiations, and link tracking on your own, let Quoleady do the heavy lifting for you.

We specialize in SaaS link-building strategies that drive real SEO results. Our team helps SaaS startups secure authoritative, relevant backlinks through niche edits, guest posts, and digital PR, without the hassle.

Here’s how we can help your SaaS business:

• Custom link building strategies: We craft personalized link insertion strategies tailored to your specific SaaS niche and target audience ensuring maximum relevance.
• Manual outreach: We use manual outreach methods to secure high-quality, dofollow backlinks that drive results. No content mills or PBNs here, just genuine connections and valuable content.
• Transparent reporting: You’ll receive clear, transparent reporting on our progress, including the specific sites we’ve targeted and the links we’ve secured.
• Proven results: We’ve helped numerous SaaS companies with our strategic approach like Expandi and FullSession achieve significant growth in organic traffic, leads, and revenue.

Ready to learn more? Visit our dedicated SaaS Link Building service page to explore how we can help you achieve your growth goals. Let’s build a stronger online presence for your SaaS company together!

FAQ

What are niche edit links?

Niche edits are links that are placed in an existing piece of content on another website. They are also known as link insertions. Niche edits differ from guest posting, where one writes a new article and gets published with a link back to one’s website. Niche edits are a type of link building method that involves requesting a link from an existing piece of content.

What are the benefits of niche edits?

Niche edits offer high-quality backlinks by inserting links into existing, indexed content, leading to faster SEO gains than guest posts. They save time and resources while improving rankings, domain authority, and website credibility.

What is the difference between niche edit and guest post?

A niche edit is when you add a backlink to an existing article on another websites. It involve updating existing content, making them quicker and more natural for SEO. On the other hand, guest posts require creating fresh content from scratch, but they allow you to control the messaging and context of the link.

How important is anchor text for niche edit backlinks?

Anchor text is crucial for niche edit backlinks because it helps Google understand the context of your link and what the linked page is about. When requesting a niche edit, make sure the anchor text is natural, relevant, and varied, avoiding overly optimized keywords. This improves the SEO value of the link and makes it blend seamlessly into the existing content.

How to get editorial backlinks?

Editorial backlinks come from organic mentions in high-quality content. To earn them, create link-worthy content like data-driven studies or unique insights, and leverage digital PR by getting featured in SaaS roundups or industry news. Using HARO to respond to journalist queries can also help secure media backlinks. Building relationships with SaaS bloggers and pitching value-driven niche edits can lead to natural mentions. These backlinks are highly valuable for SEO because they come from trusted sources.

The post SaaS Niche Edit Backlinks: Top Strategies You Should Follow appeared first on Quoleady.

This guide covers the top SaaS link building agencies in 2026, highlighting who delivers real results. Whether you’re a startup looking to build authority or an established SaaS brand aiming for sustainable growth, these agencies specialize in securing relevant, high-authority links that move the needle.

Top 15 SaaS link building agencies right now

Here are eight SaaS link building agencies known for delivering high-quality backlinks that improve rankings, build links, and drive organic traffic.

1. Quoleady

Quoleady is a B2B SaaS SEO and AI visibility agency that helps software companies grow through organic search, strategic link building, digital PR, and expert-driven content marketing. The company works with both startups and enterprise software brands. Quoleady helps clients improve visibility in Google and AI search, create research-backed content, build category authority, secure relevant backlinks through manual outreach and partnership-driven campaigns, and drive qualified pipeline and revenue growth.

Quoleady builds links through guest posting, HARO outreach, and strategic partnerships with reputable industry sites and influential publications. They prioritize natural, editorial links from real authoritative websites, ensuring long-term SEO value.

Their services are tailored to SaaS companies, making them a solid choice for startups and tech brands to take their digital marketing strategy in the right direction. Their marketing team can also help established companies looking to strengthen their backlink profile with high quality content and brand mentions.

Book a free strategy consulting session with the site owner, Olga.

Key services

• SaaS link building
• SaaS content strategy
• SaaS content writing
• SaaS consulting
• SaaS guest post
• SaaS SEO audit
• SaaS SEO content guidance
• SaaS analytics
• SaaS content audit
• SaaS digital PR
• Forbes and Entrepreneur

Notable clients

Here are some of the popular clients Quoleayd has helped with their link building campaigns to improve online visibility with SERP rankings:

• Expandi
• Pandadoc
• Monday.com
• airfocus

Read also: SaaS Link Building: What Really Works in 2026?

Case study with results

Quoleady has helped several SaaS companies grow their traffic, leads, and revenue through high-quality link building and content marketing services. Here are a few success stories:

• Expandi – Helped scale Expandi from 0 to $8M ARR in just a couple of years with a strong content and link building strategy.
• RingBlaze – Drove 50K website visits and 650 leads with just 20 articles, showing the power of targeted content and high-quality backlinks.
• FullSession – Generated 500 leads in four months with 16 well-optimized articles, demonstrating how SEO and link building can directly impact conversions.
• ResponseScribe – Took them from 0 to 4.5K+ monthly visits in just six months, proving Quoleady’s expertise in building organic growth from scratch.

These results highlight how Quoleady’s tailored SaaS link building and content strategies drive real, measurable business growth.

Client testimonials

Pricing

Quoleady offers flexible link building pricing based on website authority, relevance, and campaign goals. Plans start at $300 per link, with higher-authority placements available from $350–$400 per link.

Rather than focusing on link volume alone, Quoleady prioritizes niche-relevant placements that support long-term SEO growth, authority building, and AI search visibility. All plans include link strategy, prospect targeting, manual outreach, and placement on vetted websites.

The minimum monthly budget is $1,500, allowing SaaS companies to scale their link building efforts based on their growth objectives and target markets.

2. SAASY LINKS

SAASY LINKS is a premier link-building agency focused on SaaS brands and white-label partnerships with SEO agencies. The team earns editorial backlinks, branded placements, and Reddit mentions that improve rankings and visibility across Google and AI search platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Their process combines competitor analysis, targeted prospecting, and relationship-driven outreach to secure permanent links from high-authority publishers.

The agency works directly with SaaS companies and also operates as a white-label link-building partner for some of the world’s best SEO agencies. This dual focus has helped refine a delivery model that prioritizes relevance and authority over volume, making the service suitable for long-term organic growth in competitive SaaS niches.

Key services

• Editorial Link Building
• Branded Link Building
• Branded Mentions on Reddit
• White-Label Services

Notable сlients

SAASY LINKS has delivered results for a range of SaaS companies and works with multiple SEO agencies on a white-label basis. Their client roster includes:

• Modash – Social media analytics platform
• Flipsnack – Online Flipbook maker
• Uniqode – QR Code management platform
• Inventive AI – AI RFP platform

Results

SAASY LINKS has helped SaaS companies achieve substantial organic growth through strategic link building campaigns:

• MODASH – Grew organic traffic from 20.4K to 185K visitors (806% increase) with 132 high-quality backlinks over 32 months
• Gencharge – Scaled from 0.7K to 19.5K monthly visitors (2,785,614% increase) through 215 strategic link placements over 37 months
• Social Status – Increased organic traffic from 0.6K to 5K (733% growth) with 91 targeted backlinks in 34 months
• Mostly AI – Drove traffic from 0.5K to 2.2K visitors (340% increase) with 49 carefully selected links over 11 months

These results show how strategic, quality-focused link building can drive sustained organic traffic growth for SaaS businesses.

Pricing

SAASY LINKS offers transparent, service-based pricing:

• Editorial Link Building – Starting from $250 per link (packages from $1,250 to $5,250/month)
• Branded Link Building – Optimized for AI visibility (starting at $2,500/month)
• Branded Mentions on Reddit – Starting at $350/month (includes replacement guarantee)
• White-Label Link Building – Custom agency packages with volume-based pricing

Their pricing structure is designed to be accessible for growing SaaS companies while offering flexibility for agencies managing multiple client accounts. Each link is vetted for relevance and authority rather than simply hitting quantity targets.

3. Editorial.Link

Editorial.Link is a SaaS link building agency that helps companies earn high-impact backlinks through editorial placements and listicle mentions.

Links appear inside existing content on real business websites that already rank and generate traffic. The agency focuses white-hat strategies designed for sustainable SEO growth and enhanced visibility in both traditional and AI-powered search results.

Key services

• Editorial backlinks inside ranking content
• White-label link building for agencies
• Listicle mentions optimized for visibility in AI search results

Notable clients

Editorial.Link works with SaaS startups, SEO platforms, and digital brands looking to scale organic traffic through high-impact backlinks. Notable clients include:

• NordVPN
• PandaDOC
• DiscoverCars
• DepositPhotos 

Results

Editorial.Link has helped clients show up for tougher keywords, grow steady organic traffic, and stay visible where it counts – in both Google and AI-driven search:

• PandaDoc – Boosted organic visibility by 212% with targeted backlinks from high-authority business sites. 
• Intellectsoft – Achieved a 197% increase in organic traffic through strategic editorial link placements.

Pricing

Editorial.Link offers simple, pay-per-link pricing starting at $1,750 for 5 links or $6,000 for 20, with custom plans available for larger campaigns.

4. Epic Slope Partners

Epic  Slope Partners is a boutique SEO agency that helps B2B SaaS and AI native companies build authority through white-hat, relevance-first link building. While they offer full-funnel SEO services, link acquisition is an integral part of how they help brands improve visibility.

The team focuses on earning contextual links from SaaS and tech-relevant websites, rather than chasing volume. Outreach is manual, targeted, and aligned with the client’s content and keyword strategy, so links reinforce topical authority instead of creating noise.

Key services

• White hat link building for B2B SaaS companies
• Contextual backlinks from SaaS and tech relevant websites
• Manual outreach aligned with SEO and content strategy
• Authority focused placements that support competitive keywords
• Link building integrated with technical and on page SEO

Notable сlients

Epic Slope works with B2B SaaS and AI companies focused on sustainable SEO growth. Notable clients include:

• Goldcast
• Docsumo
• Xflow
• Levo
• Clueso

Results

Epic Slope’s link building work supports long term improvements in organic visibility and authority. Because links are built alongside technical SEO and content foundations, results tend to compound over time instead of showing short lived spikes.

Pricing

Custom pricing based on campaign scope, backlink quality, and overall SEO goals.

5. Growthner

Growthner is a SaaS-focused SEO and link building agency that helps B2B SaaS and AI companies earn high-authority backlinks that improve rankings, generate qualified pipeline, and build brand visibility across both Google and AI-powered search platforms.

Every link is earned from websites with real domain authority (DA 50+, ideally 80+), genuine topical relevance, and actual traffic. Growthner prioritizes domains that LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini frequently reference, so each placement strengthens rankings and AI brand authority simultaneously. Outreach is fully manual and personalized – no cookie-cutter emails with every pitch tailored to the editor, their audience, and the content context.

Key services

• High-authority backlink building from DA 50+ SaaS-relevant publishers​
• LLM-optimized link placements targeting domains cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini
• Human-led, personalized outreach aligned with keyword and funnel strategy​
• Reddit brand placement in threads that rank on Google and inform AI training data​
• Full-service SaaS SEO including technical audits, content, and GEO optimization​

Notable сlients

Growthner works exclusively with SaaS and AI companies, with no generic playbooks or learning curve. Notable clients include:

• Enthu.ai – Conversation intelligence platform
• DocHippo – B2B SaaS document design software
• CallHippo – Automate customer engagement with AI

Results

Growthner’s link building campaigns are built around pipeline impact, not vanity metrics, with results tracked against PQLs, SQLs, and MRR growth:​

• DocHippo – Grew organic traffic from 1.7K to 17K monthly visitors with 180+ high-quality backlinks over 9 months​
• Cloud GPU Provider – Scaled from 700 to 9K monthly organic visitors with 140+ targeted backlinks in 8 months​

Pricing

Growthner offers tiered SaaS SEO custom packages that include link building. Custom link-only and enterprise packages are available for growth-stage and larger SaaS companies based on campaign scope and authority targets. You can contact them for more information

6. SaaSLink Max

SaaSLink Max is a SaaS link building agency that ties every campaign directly to business outcomes like MRR and signups. The agency exclusively serves SaaS companies, with link-building processes tailored to the SaaS growth model. Their proprietary AI prospecting automation allows the team to reach 2-3x more prospects than standard manual outreach, while still maintaining a fully white-hat, relationship-driven approach.

SaaSLink Max is particularly recognized for its digital PR capabilities, earning hard-to-get placements on sites with 90+ domain ratings and over 1M monthly visitors. A 30-day risk-free trial and prospect approval process give clients direct input into where their links land.

Key services

• Listicle Link Building
• AI Citation-Focused Link Building
• GEO-Focused Link Building
• Digital PR Link Building
• White-Label Link Building

Notable clients

SaaSLink Max works exclusively with SaaS companies across a range of verticals. Notable clients include:

• SE Ranking – SEO platform
• Heepsy – Influencer marketing platform
• ZeroBounce – Email validation platform
• Wave Connect – Digital business card platform
• Linkee.ai – Backlink automation software

Results

SaaSLink Max has driven measurable organic and AI visibility growth across its client base:

• Wave Connect – Grew from near-zero to 1,000+ ranking keywords and 658+ AI citations, reaching #1 for “digital business card.”
• Workyard – Scaled from 1,000 to 9,000 monthly visitors, grew domain rating from 16 to 68, generating $66K/month in organic traffic value.
• ZeroBounce – Gained 700+ AI citations and 1,000+ new top 3 rankings, with organic traffic jumping by 50,300 visits.
• Heepsy – Delivered 140% organic traffic growth and 141% referring domain expansion over 14 months.
• Linkee.ai – Built domain rating from 0 to 62 in 23 months, ranking #1 for “backlink software” on Google and major LLMs.

Pricing

SaaSLink Max offers three monthly plans, all cancel-anytime with no contract:

• Starter – $2,290/month (7 backlinks from DR 30+ SaaS sites, competitor gap analysis, anchor text strategy, rank tracking)
• Growth – $4,790/month (15 SaaS backlinks + 1 AI citation link, link velocity planning, toxic backlink audit, strategy call)
• Enterprise – $7,390/month (25 SaaS backlinks + 2 AI citation links, custom strategy + ICP mapping, full toxic backlink audit, on-site SEO consulting, quarterly review call)

7. Outreach Desk

Outreach Desk is a B2B link building agency trusted by 500+ brands, from SaaS platforms and marketing agencies to e-commerce brands and enterprise SEO teams, to earn backlinks that carry genuine editorial weight. 

The agency specializes in niche edits, contextual link placements, and brand mentions, securing links inside already-ranked, active content on industry-relevant publishers with DR 40 to 95. 

Every campaign runs on 100% manual outreach, no PBNs, no link farms, no shortcuts. Outreach Desk matches each placement to the client’s topical authority targets, ensuring links reinforce rankings rather than create noise. Businesses that take link quality seriously tend to find their way here.

Key services

• Niche Edits & Link Insertions
• Contextual Link Building
• Brand Mentions
• SaaS & E-commerce Link Building
• White-Label Link Building for Agencies
• Guest Posting & Blogger Outreach
• Digital PR
• Enterprise Link Building

Notable clients

Here are some of the brands Outreach Desk has helped build authoritative backlink profiles, improve SERP rankings, and drive consistent organic growth through strategic link building:

• FactoHR
• CloudTalk
• Flatirons

Results

A Series B SaaS company in the HR software industry struggled to rank three newly launched feature pages despite a healthy DR 52 domain. Outreach Desk placed 87 contextual link insertions across HR tech publications in 5 months, moving all three pages to Page 1, ahead of BambooHR and Rippling.

Pricing

Outreach Desk offers flexible pricing to fit campaigns of every size: per-link pricing for targeted placements, monthly packages for ongoing authority-building, and custom enterprise arrangements for high-volume needs. Contact the team for a tailored quote.

8. Rock The Rankings

Rock the Rankings is a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in link building and content marketing. They emphasize high-quality, niche-relevant backlinks that improve search rankings and drive organic traffic. Their approach is fully managed, handling everything from prospecting to outreach and securing links from authoritative sites.

Key services

• Guest posting & editorial links
• HARO (Help a Reporter Out) outreach
• SaaS content marketing
• Competitor link gap analysis

Notable clients

Rock the Rankings has worked with leading SaaS brands across different industries. Some of their notable clients include:

• Bizzabo
• Toast POS

Results

They have helped SaaS companies increase organic traffic and acquire high-quality backlinks that improve search rankings. Some of the key metrics that their case studies showcase:

• Bizzabo – $150,000 increase in Organic Traffic Value and 3x in MQLs
• Toast POS – Added $300,000+ in Monthly Organic Traffic Value

Pricing

Rock the Rankings provides custom pricing based on your SaaS company’s goals and the number of links needed. They focus on creating high quality backlinks over quantity, ensuring each backlink is from a relevant, high-authority source. You can request a free consultation to get a tailored quote.

9. Blue Things

Blue Things is a SaaS-focused link building agency that helps companies improve search rankings and organic traffic through high-quality, relevant backlinks. Their approach is centered on content-driven link building, ensuring that links come from reputable, industry-specific sources rather than generic directories or spammy sites.

Key services

• Guest posting & editorial links
• Content-led link building
• Competitor backlink analysis
• Custom outreach campaigns

Notable clients

Blue Things has worked with a range of SaaS companies to strengthen their backlink profiles and improve organic visibility. Some of their notable clients include:

• Meridian Compensation Partners
• Axify
• Hurom

Results

Blue Things has helped SaaS businesses grow through effective link building and content marketing strategies. Some of their key results include:

• Axify – Improved SEO performance by 175% with strategic link building and blog content.
• Hurom – Improved organic visibility and search rankings by 88%.

Pricing

Blue Things offers custom pricing based on your link building needs. Their focus is on securing high-quality, niche-specific backlinks, ensuring long-term SEO benefits rather than short-term link quantity.

10. Digital Olympus

Digital Olympus is a full-service SEO and digital marketing agency specializing in SaaS link building. They focus on creating custom, white-hat link building strategies to help SaaS companies improve their search rankings and increase organic traffic. Digital Olympus takes a data-driven approach, ensuring that each link is earned from high-quality, relevant websites to build your brand’s authority online.

They work closely with clients to develop tailored link building plans that align with their overall SEO and content marketing strategies, providing sustainable and long-term SEO success.

Key services

• Guest posting
• Digital PR
• Content marketing
• Link reclamation
• Competitor backlink analysis

Notable clients

Digital Olympus has helped a variety of SaaS companies and businesses grow their online presence, including:

• Credo
• G2
• Pitchbox

Results

The agency has delivered measurable results for their clients, including:

• ramp – Increased organic traffic to 70k with new 54 links to build domain authority through high-quality guest posts and digital PR strategies.
• SwagDrop – Improved search rankings with 21k organic traffic and secured valuable 232 backlinks through targeted link building campaigns.
• Discover Car Hire – Achieved 127k organic traffic in SEO visibility by focusing on content-driven link building and acquired 192 new links.

Pricing

Digital Olympus offers custom pricing depending on the average DR, number of links, no. of guest posts, and months you want to work with them. Their approach is tailored to your SaaS company’s goals, ensuring that each backlink adds long-term SEO value.

11. uSERP

uSERP is a well-known SaaS link building agency that focuses on securing high-authority backlinks to improve search rankings, organic traffic, and brand visibility. They work with fast-growing SaaS companies and enterprise brands, helping them build strong backlink profiles through content-driven, white-hat strategies.

Key services

• Editorial backlinks from high quality websites
• Digital PR & HARO outreach for media placements
• Guest posting on relevant, high-authority sites
• Competitor analysis to find backlink opportunities

Notable clients

uSERP has worked with some of the biggest SaaS brands, including:

• Freshworks
• Monday.com
• ActiveCampaign

Results

Their link building efforts have delivered real business impact for SaaS brands. Some key results include:

• Preply – Got the website to rank #1 for alternative keywords with 58,000 monthly searches
• Monday.com – Improved search rankings to over 77% for high-value 23k new organic keywords

Pricing

uSERP offers custom pricing based on the number and quality of backlinks required. It ranges from Startup plans ($10,000/month) to the Authority plan ($30,000/month) Their services are designed for high-growth SaaS companies looking for premium backlinks from high-authority sources.

12. Growfusely

Growfusely is a content-driven SaaS SEO agency that helps companies improve search rankings, domain authority, and organic traffic. Their link building team specializes in securing high-quality, white-hat backlinks through strategic content marketing and outreach.

Key services

• Guest posting
• HARO & PR outreach
• Content-led link building
• Competitor backlink analysis

Notable clients

Growfusely has partnered with several leading SaaS brands, including:

• Shopify
• Semrush
• Sunsama

Results

Their link building strategies have helped SaaS businesses grow their organic presence. Some notable results include:

• Mind the Graph – Increased its organic traffic by 217% within 6 Months through content marketing and SEO
• Whatfix – Built 250+ high-quality links from authoritative publications in their niche with content-led link building approach.

Pricing

Growfusely provides custom pricing based on your SaaS company’s goals, focusing on quality, relevance, and long-term SEO value.

13. Skale

Skale is a SaaS growth marketing agency specializing in high-quality, scalable link building to help companies improve their organic search rankings and domain authority. They focus on securing contextual, white-hat backlinks that drive long-term SEO success.

Key services

• Guest posting on quality domains
• Digital PR & HARO outreach for building relationships
• Creating content for SaaS marketing
• Competitor link analysis

Notable clients

Skale has worked with some of the biggest SaaS brands, including:

• Happy Scribe
• Piktochart

Results

Their data-driven link building strategies have helped SaaS companies achieve strong SEO growth. Some key results include:

• Happy Scribe – Helped them reach over 70k organic signups with revenue-driven link building services
• Piktochart – Increased thier signups to 10X within 3 months

Pricing

Skale offers custom pricing based on your SaaS company’s SEO goals. Their focus is on securing authoritative, niche-relevant links that provide long-term SEO benefits.

14. LinkyJuice

LinkyJuice is a SaaS-focused link building agency that helps companies improve their search rankings and organic traffic through high-quality backlinks. Their approach emphasizes white-hat, editorial link building, ensuring that each backlink is relevant, authoritative, and contributes to long-term SEO growth.

Key services

• Guest posting on quality domains
• HARO outreach
• Niche edits
• Competitor link building

Notable clients

LinkyJuice has worked with a variety of SaaS companies and startups, helping them strengthen their backlink profiles. However, they don’t publicly name their clients in their portfolio.

Results

Their strategic link building campaigns have led to significant SEO improvements for SaaS businesses. Some key results include:

• AI-powered writing tool – Improved organic search rankings to 24k with 65 organic keywords and increased DR to 19 with high-quality editorial links.
• Social media ads tool – Help them increase organic keywords in the SERP from 10 to 208, traffic from 1k to 19k, and DR from 43 to 61, within a span of 3 months.

Pricing

LinkyJuice offers custom pricing based on the number and quality of backlinks needed. Their focus is on securing high-authority, niche-relevant links that drive real SEO growth.

15. Jeenam

Jeenam is a B2B SaaS link building agency that helps companies strengthen their organic presence through high-quality backlinks and authority-driven placements.

The agency focuses on strategic, white-hat link building for SaaS businesses, ensuring every backlink supports long-term SEO growth, trust, and visibility in both Google and AI-powered search results.

Key Services

• Contextual backlinks from niche-relevant websites
• White label link-building solutions for agencies
• SaaS-focused outreach and guest posting
• Listicle and brand mention placements
• Continuous performance tracking and reporting

Notable Clients

Jeenam works with SaaS platforms, SEO companies, and digital brands that want to scale their organic traffic via credible, authoritative backlinks. Some real clients from their site include:

• Superside
• CloudTalk.io
• Omnisend
• systeme.io
• Other SaaS and tech brands

Results

Jeenam’s clients consistently achieve measurable SEO growth and sustainable traffic improvement through its targeted link-building strategies.

Pricing

Custom pricing based on backlink quality and campaign goals.

How the best SaaS link building agencies compare

Here’s a comparison table summarizing the details of the top 15 SaaS link building agencies:

Each of these agencies specializes in high-quality link building for SaaS businesses, with varying approaches and pricing models. If you’re looking for affordable, flexible pricing, Quoleady is a strong option, while agencies like uSERP and Skale cater to larger SaaS brands with premium, custom solutions.

Choosing the right SaaS link building agency

Not all link building agencies are the same, so choosing the right one depends on your marketing goals, target audience, and the level of expertise you need. Here’s how to find the best fit for your SaaS business to increase search engine rankings and build quality links.

Understanding your marketing needs

Before selecting an agency, define your digital marketing goals and objectives. Do you need:

• Authority backlinks from high-traffic sites?
• Content-driven link building to support your blog strategy?
• Industry-specific placements to reach a niche audience?

Knowing who your target audience is and where they spend time online will help you choose an agency that secures links on high-authority, relevant websites.

Related: Effective SaaS Link Building Tips: Proven Strategies to Boost Your SEO in 2026

Evaluating an agency’s content, SEO, and link building expertise

A strong SaaS link building agency should have:

• Proven experience working with SaaS companies
• A track record of securing high-quality backlinks
• Content and SEO expertise to create link-worthy assets

Check their case studies, client testimonials, and previous results to see if they’ve helped other SaaS brands grow through their effective link building services.

Transparency and reporting in link building efforts

A reliable agency will offer:

• Regular progress updates
• Detailed reports on the types of links they’re building
• Insights into the high authority websites they’re targeting

Make sure they’re open about their outreach methods and willing to adjust their link building strategy based on your feedback. Transparency is key to ensuring you’re getting high-quality, white-hat backlinks that contribute to long-term SEO success.

Final thoughts

Investing in SaaS link building is a long-term strategy that helps improve search rankings, organic traffic, and brand credibility. The right agency will not only secure high-quality backlinks but also provide transparent reporting and a strategy tailored to your business goals.

If you’re looking for a trusted partner to build high-authority backlinks for your SaaS company, Quoleady is ready to help. With proven results for fast-growing SaaS brands and affordable, flexible pricing, we can help you strengthen your search engine rankings and grow your business.

Book a 1-1 SaaS Content Marketing Strategy Call today to start building links that drive real results.

FAQs

Here are some frequently asked questions about SaaS link building:

What should I look for in an SEO service for SaaS link building?

Choose an agency that offers white hat manual link building services, transparent reporting, and a track record of success in the SaaS industry. They should secure contextual, high-authority links that contribute to your SEO strategy.

What makes a high-quality backlink for a SaaS website?

A high-quality backlink comes from relevant and authoritative websites in your industry. These links improve your search rankings, drive organic traffic, and build brand credibility.

Why are white hat links important for SEO?

White hat links follow Google’s guidelines, ensuring your web page gains long-term search engine ranking benefits without the risk of penalties. They come from natural outreach, high quality guest posting, and high-quality content.

What are some common SaaS link building strategies?

Some common SaaS marketing strategies for building backlinks include:

• Guest posting on authoritative industry blogs
• HARO outreach (Help a Reporter Out) to get media mentions and backlinks
• Broken link building, where you find broken links on other sites and suggest your content as a replacement
• Competitor backlink analysis to identify and replicate high-value links your competitors are using
• Creating valuable, shareable content like case studies, research reports, or interactive tools that attract natural backlinks

These strategies help SaaS companies build strong, relevant backlinks that boost SEO performance and drive organic traffic.

How to build links with content marketing?

Building links through content marketing involves creating valuable, shareable content that naturally attracts backlinks. This can include writing guest posts on industry-relevant blogs, creating content like in-depth guides, case studies, or research that other websites want to link to.

You can also create infographics or other visual content that’s easy to share and resource pages or directories that highlight your content.

Does link building process helps SEO strategy?

Yes, link building is a critical component of any SEO strategy. High-quality backlinks show search engines that your content is valuable, leading to higher search rankings for targeted keywords, increased organic traffic from backlinks, and improved domain authority, boosting SEO.

Effective link building helps establish your site as a trusted source, improving visibility in search results.

The post Top SaaS Link Building Agencies in 2026: Who Delivers the Best Results? appeared first on Quoleady.

The problem is, getting links is neither cheap nor simple. An even bigger problem is, there are lots of people offering to sell you links at suspiciously low prices. I’m pretty sure you came across one of these:

They reach out on LinkedIn…

and Skype…

You see their ads all over the net.

On paper, these links look great, but not all links are equal and some may even harm your website’s performance rather than improving it.

With so many temptations, even the wisest SaaS marketing manager starts to wonder – how do I choose which websites I want backlinks from? How do I know that a website is good enough quality to link from?

At Quoleady, we build hundreds of high-quality links for our SaaS clients every month. For each website, there are strict criteria on whether we accept it or not for our clients. Today I’ll share how we choose which websites we get links from and why it matters for your SaaS brand.

Which places NOT to get links from for your SaaS website

Before going into tips and best practices, let’s first go over the places where you don’t want to get links from since that list is far more important.

First of all, avoid any “SEO expert” selling you links from a list of the websites that they manage like in the images above. These links are low-quality and the sites that they offer are usually private blogging networks, linking to each other.

Your website’s link will be placed with thousands of other paid link insertions. Search engines will consider these links as spammy and irrelevant and when these sites get taken down and penalized (which is a matter of time), your site will be affected too.

It’s also a good idea to avoid freelancers from platforms such as Fiverr (no offense) offering links or link packages for X amount of money. At the very best, they will give you a link to an irrelevant page with your desired anchor. SaaS link building takes time and effort and you cannot expect high quality at $50 spent on 100 links.

Moreover, avoid content farms. These are websites that seemingly have no niche or topic and you’ll find them writing about lawn care in one blog and digital marketing in another one. These websites push out any content just to be able to insert links from clients such as yourself.

Content farm example

You also do not want to build links from articles that are filled with a large number of backlinks. If someone offers you a link from a page where every other word is a link (we call that a link cemetery) – it was written for links only.

Unless the bunch of links in the post are internal links (links to the other pages of the same website) these posts do not hold much value for search engines, so skip them.

In general, avoid paid links. Arguably, you could say that every link costs money – you have to pay the agency, the writer, the outreach manager, the link builder, the SEO specialist, you name it. However, these are the usual costs associated with a high-quality campaign.

A checklist – how to know if a website is good to get a link from

Having said all that, there are countless websites online that are great to get links from. To separate the good from the bad as well as learn how to choose the very best, we’ll give you our checklist to go through every time you want to build a link from a new website. 

The domain authority

Every website online has a certain domain authority (DA) ranked from 1 to 100. This metric was introduced by Moz back in the day and the bigger the number is, the more trustworthy the website is and the better the opportunity to get a link from it.

Every time we want to build a link from somewhere, the first step is to check a website’s domain authority. You can do this by logging into Moz.com and looking up the website address.

The domain authority as shown on the Moz dashboard, for the Hubspot website

An even easier way is to install MozBar – the Chrome plugin for Moz which conveniently shows you a website’s DA as soon as you open it in Chrome.

The domain authority, as shown in Chrome on the Mozbar Chrome extension

For our clients, the minimum DA we want to build links from is DA20. Of course, your own personal preference could be different but this is a reasonable number that keeps our goals high.

If you don’t want to use DA as a metric, you can also use DR or domain rating, a metric introduced by Ahrefs, the famous SEO tool. It too tells you how strong a website is, but the values are sometimes completely different.

The domain rating of the same website as shown in the Ahrefs dashboard

In this specific case, the DA vs DR values for the Hubspot website are very close, but sometimes they could differ as much as 20-30 points.

In the battle of DA vs. DR, choose the metric that you like better because both are great starting points.

The traffic volume

The second detail is the website traffic for the website we want to build a link from. A website that has a good domain authority but no traffic is a sign that something is wrong and you should avoid it. A lot of websites that fall into this category have been built for link schemes only.

You can check how much traffic a website has in Ahrefs. Note that this is not the most accurate tool for measuring website visits (as we’ve seen discrepancies between Google Analytics almost every time), but it’s good enough for the job. You can also use SimilarWeb extension to analyze website’s traffic, but its data is just as well far from being accurate.  

The overview of our client Ringblaze’s website in Ahrefs – their traffic is 5,300 visits per month organically

Most of the times the number you’ll see in Ahrefs is far lower than the actual traffic coming to the website. In case of RingBlaze, it’s the 3X difference. So normally, we’d avoid getting a link from any website that has fewer than 1,500 visits per month according to Ahrefs.

If our client’s target audience is in the US, we do our best to stick to the platforms with the traffic from the United States – you can also see this in Ahrefs:

Organic traffic by countries

Finally, you want to ensure that the organic traffic is evenly distributed among a website’s pages. For example, you could find a website that gets 90% of traffic from their home page, with other pages contributing very little.

While it’s not unusual for the home page to bring in the majority of traffic, you want to target a website that has an even distribution of traffic among their blog and other pages.

Again, you can check this in Ahrefs by navigating to the ‘Top Pages’ report:

Top pages report by Ahrefs

The consistency of metrics

When you open up your target website in Ahrefs, you can see lots of information about it. Besides the information on traffic mentioned above, you want to look at how consistent the website metrics are.

An overview of a website’s traffic and organic keywords through time – we would not recommend placing a link on this website because the sudden drop in mid-2020 could mean a Google penalty

Take a look at the organic traffic graph and the backlink graph of every website you want to get a link from. You don’t want to see any drastic changes in either – such as huge drops and sudden rises at a single point in time.

This means that something shady happened with their backlinks and traffic – possibly that they got penalized by Google. You want to target websites with consistent growth over a long period of time: 

Example of a website with a consistent backlink profile growth

The topic relevance

We work with SaaS clients only. That means that when we build links, we build them mostly from other SaaS websites that write about similar topics. When Google interprets these links coming to your website, it needs to see that they are relevant and contextual and in general, that they make sense.

A link from a news outlet here and there is not so bad but you want to stick to websites that matter for your industry. Getting a backlink from a website with a huge DA is always good, but there’s not a lot of use if the niche is completely unrelated. Imagine getting a link from a carpet manufacturer to your project management app blog, for example.

The surrounding content and links

When you’re looking for link placement, you want to take a look at what the website general writes about and what other websites they link to. That way, you’ll know if you’re in good company or not.

An example of a website covering digital marketing, SEO and for some reason, blackjack. On paper, the website seems like a great opportunity (DA44), but is most likely a scam

In general, you want to avoid websites that write about porn, casinos, and gambling. This is just asking for trouble and no good SaaS content writing agency will touch anything that has to do with these niches. Moreover, you want to avoid all websites that give links to porn, casino and gambling websites. If they give a link to you, you’ll be in that same crowd.

Dofollow and previously published check

When you build links for your website, you want to ensure that each link you get is labeled dofollow. That means that search engines will “see” this backlink and that it will count towards your backlink profile. We’ve written about the difference between nofollow and dofollow links before and while the occasional nofollow link is not harmful, it’s better to avoid them.

Moreover, if you have lots of backlinks, there is a chance that you already have a link from a website that you’re reaching out to. You can go to Ahrefs and check if a website you’re targeting already gave you a link or not – it’s a fairly quick and easy process.

Simply navigate to the ‘Backlinks’ report in Ahrefs and type in the url of the website in question like in the example below: 

Backlink report in Ahrefs – checking if the website already has backlinks from a given domain

Linked vs. referring domains

Every website has a number of linked domains – these are the websites that website A gave links to. On the other hand, the referring domains are websites that gave links to website A. Consider it as a ratio of links coming in and out of a website.

You want this ratio to be as close to 1:1 as possible. For example, if a website has 1,300 linked domains and 300 referring domains, that means that it gave out more links to other sites than other sites linked to it. It gave out 1,300 links while only earning 300 links itself.

The other way around is great too: let’s say that a website has more referring domains than linked domains, it means that it earned more backlinks than it gave out – and this is definitely a site you want a link from.

This ratio could mean that a website is selling links and giving out links to others, often in return for money. You want to avoid websites with a poor ratio of linked and referring domains, just to be on the safe side.

To check the number of linked domains navigate to the ‘Outgoing links’ -> ‘Linked domains’ report in Ahrefs and you’ll instantly see the exact number as well as the whole list of the domains.

Linked domains report in Ahrefs

The number you’d want to compare it to is the number of referring domains that is also available in Ahrefs:

91 linked vs 369 referring domains is a great score meaning that a link from this website will be valuable and beneficial.

The Trust Ratio

MajesticSEO is a tool that has its own system for rating the quality of a website. Without going into too much detail, Trust Ratio determines how valuable of a target is for links based on the overall flow of links coming to the website you’re targeting. In general, if the website itself has great links, you’ll benefit from getting a link from them as well.

You want the trust to citation flow of a website to be at least 0.50 – you can easily check this metric in MajesticSEO before proceeding to build a link.

Avoid sponsored posts

Every now and then, you’ll run into a website that wants to charge money to publish a guest post or link to you. While this isn’t inherently bad, it is against Google’s best practices that strictly forbid selling links. Of course, people sell links all the time, seemingly without penalty.

The problem is, a website that will accept a sponsored post usually has very low (or non-existing) standards for what they accept. They commonly disregard the quality of the content and publish anything for a quick buck. Needless to say, avoid these websites.

Last but not least – use your common sense

One final check that our team makes is to manually look over the website to make sure that it’s up to standard. This means checking out the blog posts, the overall design, the content they publish, the product they offer, the internal and external links they have, and more.

In general, you want the quality of their content to be at a high standard and the topics relevant to your industry and business. After reviewing a few hundred websites, you’ll get a good sense of what websites are good targets and which ones are not.

Combine your common sense with a wide range of metrics you can get from Ahrefs, and you can tell within minutes if a website is a good target for a link or not.

Examples of some good backlinks for a SaaS business

Our SaaS SEO agency had the pleasure of working with a variety of SaaS brands and we’ve built some great links for them in the past. Consider this guest blog which we did on the Pics.io blog on behalf of our client, Ringblaze. 

Titled Boost Your Team’s Productivity Like Nobody’s Business, it was published in November 2020. Looking at the Pics.io blog, you can see why this is a good target for a link:

• This is a reputable blog in the SaaS industry
• The DA of the website is 51, the DR is 63
• They get over 63,000 visits every month
• They have been consistently growing their website for 4 years now
• The overall quality of the surrounding content is superb

Let’s show you one more example. This one is called How To Use LinkedIn Contacts For Email Marketing: A Step-By-Step Guide For Startups and it’s the one we helped our client Expandi.io and their CEO, Stefan Smulders with.

The website is great because it’s

• in the email marketing niche
• has a DA of 65 and a DR of 83
• it also has more than 65,000 visitors every month and they are very likely to be interested in a LinkedIn outreach tool such as Expandi.

Wrapping up

As you can see, choosing a website you want to get a link from is a lot of work. Every choice you make has to be backed by careful research and solid data. Only by taking this approach can you ensure that all of your links are high quality and they will make an impact on the SEO performance of your SaaS website.

Does this seem like too much work for you? No worries – we have you covered! Our expert team has built hundreds of high-quality links for SaaS clients from different niches and we can help you too. If you’re looking for one of the best SaaS marketing agencies that can build quality, relevant links that make an impact, reach out to us today to get started!

The post How to Choose Websites to Build Backlinks to Your SaaS Blog appeared first on Quoleady.

However, there is something that many SaaS marketing agencies often forget. Besides links from external websites, your own internal linking can bring you a massive boost in organic traffic and improve your SEO performance. For example, the folks at Ninja Outreach saw a 40% traffic increase after redoing their internal links.

Backlink building (both external and internal) is an integral part of the SaaS content marketing strategy. One thing to keep in mind though is having high-quality, value-packed articles on the blog, otherwise no amount of links in the world will help you rank high. Read our SaaS content writing guide to get that part right.

When your blog articles meet the quality and SEO standards, it’s time to give them an internal link boost. But how do you do internal linking properly and where do you even get started? Let’s show you how you can make some quick wins with internal links.

Be strategic about internal linking

I’ve worked in marketing for long enough to know what “internal linking” means for most SEO/marketing managers and business owners. They will write up a new blog post, insert some links to their landing pages and older blog posts, hit publish and call it a day.

A good start – but not enough.

The only way to make this strategy work is to constantly build new external backlinks to your newly written post. That way, the older posts that you linked to (internally) will get a boost as well. This is a poor long-term strategy because you have to rely on a constant flow of new backlinks to your new content. It’s not only impractical, but it can also get pretty expensive.

The better way to go about internal linking is to the opposite – visit your older blog posts (that already have a good number of external backlinks) and put links in them – to your newly published content.

This strategy is easier to pull off, requires less work and less money spent on building new external backlinks. However, there are a few important rules to keep in mind.

Best practices for building links internally

If you want to build some internal links, don’t just link from any older piece of content to a newer piece of content.

The first rule is to only link to pages that you need to rank. Let’s say that you published a new post on the best CRM software and you want to rank for the keyword “CRM software”. This new post now needs a link from your older bits of content. For every new piece of content that you want to rank, find a suitable place in an older article. However, don’t overdo the number of your internal links – but more on that later.

The second part is trickier. You can’t just choose a post from 2015 and assume that just because it’s old, linking from it will make sense. As you probably know, age alone does not guarantee that a certain blog post will perform well.

You need to choose an older post that has a solid number of external links pointing to it. Let’s say that you wrote a post on business apps in 2018 and 30 people linked to it. This is a post that Google considers authoritative because other people liked it. In other words, this is a page that Google considers relevant.

Finding your own articles that have lots of external backlinks is actually quite easy if you use a tool such as Ahrefs (more on that in a minute). You can easily sort your pages and find your top-performing content in terms of backlinks and you now have a great starting point. These posts have lots of value from Google’s point of view, so you will link from them to your newer content to give it an authority boost.

The anchor text

The text that you use when creating a link is called anchor text. This isn’t SEO 101, you’re thinking, but hear me out – your anchor text matters greatly for internal links, just as much as external ones.

Your new post is on CRM software and that’s the keyword you want to rank for on Google. (This is just an example, ranking for the keyword “CRM software” is close to impossible.) is When you place internal links to this post (from your older content), make sure to use your desired anchor text. This way, you’ll send another signal to Google that this is the keyword you want to rank for.

However, don’t use just one anchor text and spam it 100+ times. Diversify it a bit so that search engines don’t think you’re spamming. This is where a keyword research tool such as Ahrefs can come in handy to come up with keyword variations. For example, instead of using “CRM software” all the time, you can use any of the following:

• CRM system
• CRM tools
• CRM platform
• CRM program

All these keywords have the same meaning and they all have a decent search volume to boot. I didn’t just come up with these variations on my own – these are all keywords with excellent search volume and it took me 3 minutes of research to find them.

Just mix things up so that you don’t over-optimize for one keyword only. This way, the links and traffic coming from them will appear more natural.

The placement of internal links

Okay, now you know which pages to link to and from and which anchor text to use. The question remains: where in your old posts should you link to your newer content?

In reality, any place is good enough, but you can get strategic with your placement too.

The best place to put links to your newer content is somewhere at the beginning of your old posts. This will make sure that if your visitors do leave the page they’re reading, they will leave to your newer content instead of some other website. As a consequence, this will improve your bounce rate and send another signal to search engines that your website is trustworthy.

Moreover, make sure that every internal link you place is labeled dofollow. You can find out more about the difference between dofollow and nofollow links in this blog post, but the important thing is to keep your internal link structure dofollow.

Use your homepage for internal links to important pages

You’ve probably seen a SaaS homepage or two with a list of important pages in their home page footer. This is not a coincidence – they’re placing internal links to the pages that bring them the most traffic and revenue.

For example, this is what we did at Chanty:

You can see that “Slack alternatives” is one of the most important keywords for this company, which is why we linked to this page from the footer, with this anchor text. Here is another example from Expandi:

Of course, do not overdo this because your homepage footer may end up looking like a wall of text. Prioritize and only link to a handful of your most important pages.

How often to build internal links (and how many of them)

Internal linking is an important on-page SEO activity, just as optimizing your content and doing keyword research. Depending on how much content you publish, we recommend doing a round of internal links every 2-3 months. The more often you do it, the less of it you’ll have to do at once.

Once you do this strategy a few times, you may start overcrowding your older posts with links to your new content – which is what you want to avoid. 

Having too many internal links in a blog post is not a good look. It will make the reader think that you’re desperate to keep them on your site and it will make Google think that you’re not linking to authoritative external sources. For an article that’s 2-3,000 words long (which is what we recommend to our clients), do not place more than 10 internal links.

Finally, make sure that the link you place is relevant for the older article. To use the same example, if your older post is on social media management, do not force the keyword “crm software” in it just to link to a new post you wrote. It’s unnatural and out of place and the chances of anyone clicking through are rather slim.

Can you automate building internal links?

Sure you can. There are even WordPress plugins that do this job for you. When you write a new post, the plugin suggests which older posts to link to and vice versa. However, we do NOT recommend using any tool to automate building internal links.

Would you trust a tool to automate the external links you build to your site? Probably not, since it’s too important of a task to be left to AI. Plus, there are too many factors involved for an app or plugin to make a good choice on its own. 

In other words, you’ll have to do it manually for the best results – and these are the tools you will need.

The tools you will need for internal link building

The good news is, two out of three tools you will need are completely free and one will cost you a small amount of money per month. Even better news is, all three are super easy to use.

Ahrefs is a paid SEO/digital marketing tool that can be used for a variety of content marketing tasks. In this case, you’ll need it to check which of your pages have the highest number of external backlinks pointing to them, as well as for keyword research to find the best anchor text. The pricing for Ahrefs starts at $99 per month, which can be a bit too much if you use it just for internal linking. However, it has so many good uses besides this application that it’s a small investment to make compared to the results it can get you.

Google Analytics will tell you which of your articles convert the best. If you haven’t already, set up goals in Analytics for your most important conversions. For example, a conversion from a visitor to a free trial user or from a free trial to a paid user. Once you set this up, you will be able to tell which pages bring the most conversions and revenue. These are the pages that you want to build internal links to.

Google Search Console will tell you the positions of the articles that convert very well – as discovered in Analytics. If your new article on CRM software is ranking okay (let’s say it’s at the bottom of the first page of search results), it could definitely use some help from a good internal linking strategy.

Summary

Internal linking is one of the most important on-page activities you can undertake. As you can read above, it’s not a simple matter of placing a link to your new blog inside of an older blog. Make sure you:

• Visit your older posts and insert links to newer ones
• Choose the older posts that rank well and have lots of backlinks
• Carefully choose (and vary) your anchor text
• Label all your internal links dofollow
• Place your internal links near the beginning of your content
• Never automate internal linking
• Rely on three crucial tools

Check out the link building strategies of the best SaaS content marketing blogs.

Having said that, internal linking can be too much for your brand, especially if you don’t have a strong content marketing team. If you’re looking for a SaaS SEO agency with a strong record of creating amazing content that rocks Google search results, reach out to us today! We’ll give your SaaS brand the content it needs to get on page 1!

The post The Power of Internal Linking for a Quick Ranking Boost of Your SaaS Blog appeared first on Quoleady.