Is link building important?
Simply put, without it, your marketing strategy doesn’t exist.
When it comes to SaaS marketing, a proper approach to link building is even more important than for regular product promotion.
When you are selling services, not products, you need to boost your link building efforts substantially.
Your marketing team is sweating to choose the right strategies, find the best approach to social media marketing, SEO, website building, and more.
Put all of the above aside to beef up your link building.
As a SaaS company, you need to understand the power of link building and the importance of improving this strategy on a regular basis.
This extensive guide can help you stay on top of your game and take a deep dive into the backlinking realm.
1 Backlink Worthy Content: Your Key To Success
While you are designing strategies and looking for top-notch marketing specialists, content is still king.
According to experts at Miromind , content on your website should be informative and most importantly, shareable.
The more amazing content you can produce, the more websites will link back to it. It’s as easy as one-two-three but harder than you think.
SaaS is a highly competitive niche with thousands of businesses trying to produce stellar content.
Use your own experience in the industry to create something truly worthy of someone’s attention.
Be smart about the way your content looks. If you add a bunch of statistics, a nice graph, and an informative GIF to boot, you can jump ahead of the competition.
Smart Tip: These days, visual aids inside the content are highly demanded. Their older siblings are videos.
If you manage to produce high-quality informative videos that don’t slow down your website loading time, top-notch backlinks are guaranteed.
2 Guest Posting: Smart, Fast, and Effective
One of the simplest ways to get a nice backlink is to write a guest post. What could be easier than writing a post and inserting the link to your website into it?
The above is harder than you think because not all guest posts are created equal.
If you want your article to be posted on a high-quality website, you need to make sure that your content is relevant.
Forget about fluff and rewrites. For your guest post to be accepted on respectable websites, spend time on researching, polishing, and tweaking your articles.
Otherwise, you’ll either get rejected or get your article posted on a useless website.
Valuable, worthwhile, interesting, attention-catching, and entertaining. Does your article fit these criteria? If not, it’s a lousy guest post.
Remember, the website you chose for guest posting must be related to your industry.
The easiest way to find websites for guest posting is simply googling the most popular keywords for your niche.
Once you get a list of 100 websites, you should visit them to find out if they accept guest posts.
Smart Tip: The majority of respectable websites have guest post guidelines. Try to choose those that do.
It means that website owners take a careful approach to guest posting and are more likely to be rated as respectable by Google.
3 Competitive Collaboration: Don’t Hesitate To Share
While your marketing team is working hard to outrun the competition, consider making frenemies.
You can get amazing backlink opportunities by joining your marketing efforts with a competitor.
Of course, promoting someone else’s business may seem counterproductive. However, competitive collaboration offers numerous benefits.
While you may not be ready to make your enemies full-time partners, you can start with something as small as backlinking.
Contact your competition to ask about backlinking collaboration. More often than not, you’ll hear a positive answer.
When you are choosing competitive collaboration, you have to be ready to follow your frenemy’s rules.
You may have to create a blog post related to the competitor’s products or place their backlinks on your landing pages. All terms are negotiable.
Smart tip: Just be careful about choosing the right companies to work with. Don’t contact direct competitors.
For example, Prezi and PowerPoint are unlikely to help each other build backlinks.
Meanwhile, presentation-making services can collaborate with image and video making SaaS.
4 Corporate Profiles: Slowly but Surely
Getting quick results from backlinking strategies is nice. But sometimes, you need to choose a slow way to get where you want. One of such ways is creating corporate profiles.
List your business wherever you can get organic backings. Start with the following sources:
- Google Places
- Yellow Pages
- Yelp
- Yahoo Local
- City Search
- Business.com
- Manta
Wherever you list your business, you give links to your website. It’s a nice way to boost your marketing campaign efforts and an excellent way to get noticed.
Smart Tip: Start with free listing services. More often than not, they are just as efficient as paid ones.
5 Review Services: An Automatic Backlink
Customer reviews and testimonials are highly valuable for any business.
If you are ready to make such reviews, you can get automatic backlinks without too much effort.
Of course, you’d have to buy the product or spend time to use the free version to create a valuable customer testimonial.
However, the time and money spent on such a backlinking strategy are likely to be worthy.
Add the link to your testimonial. It will be posted automatically.
Sometimes you don’t even need to stuff a link into your review. The company will insert it to prove you are a real person or business.
Testimonial backlinking for SaaS marketing is so powerful that some companies tend to buy products they don’t really need just to leave a review.
Smart Tip: Make sure the link is to your landing or About Us page. Don’t try to trick the company into inserting links to paid services and such. They may not be happy with such an approach.
6 Surveys and Statistics: Works Without Asking
If you want other websites to link back to yours, you can consider investing in surveys and studies.
If your study or survey provides valuable information for the players in your industry, you can get hundreds of backlinks without even asking for them.
Share the results of your surveys and studies across social media channels, websites, guest blog posts, and more.
The wider you spread them, the more backlinks you can get.
Smart Tip: A study doesn’t have to be huge and involve thousands of participants and experiments.
You can run a local study within your company or among your clients. Even a small study is something industry players can take advantage of.
7 Infographics: Make Them Shine
A linkable infographic is an excellent way to get organic backlinks with minimal investment.
In fact, all you have to do is find the right infographic designer.
If you manage to create something packed with information and highly valuable to your clients and competitors, the infographic could become the main marketing tool for your campaign.
Information coupled with entertainment works every time.
Smart Tip: You can promote your highly successful infographic by asking website owners to embed it on their websites.
8 Check the Competition: Become a Copycat
If you are still at a loss as to how to build backlinks, we recommend monitoring your competition.
Many backlink checker tools exist to help you find out which websites link to your competitors.
All you have to do is make a list of such websites and send them offers. It could be guest posts, infographics, competitive collaboration opportunities, and much more.
Being a copycat is perfectly normal in the world of SaaS marketing.
Once you establish a successful backlinking strategy, some SaaS startup is bound to check which sources backlink to your website.
Smart Tip: Don’t make the copycat link search the only way to find backlink opportunities. Otherwise, you may never outrun the competition.
9 Work with Influencers: Be Ready to Pay
Finding influencers in your niche and asking them to promote your business is one of the oldest marketing strategies.
It works amazing for backlinks. You can offer valuable information to bloggers and other industry influencers in exchange for backlinks.
Or, you can go further and pay for linking to your website.
Of course, none of the influencers is ready to make links to invaluable content. Make sure you have something top-notch to offer them in exchange for the link.
Smart Tip: Influencers change on a regular basis. Follow the trends to make sure you are paying to the right influencer.
Final Thoughts
Even though backlinking for SaaS companies is somewhat different from what other companies are used to, the general rules are the same.
You have to start with creating high-quality content and then find places to post it.
The more top-notch content you can offer, the more likely you are to collect backlinks.
Finding sources that can link to your website can be tough. Use the above guide to help you make the right decision for your link-building strategy.