7 Proven SaaS Link Building Strategies

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SaaS link building is crucial to elevate your organic rankings.

Building high-quality backlinks are hard—Harder when you are in a competitive market like SaaS. And with good reasons. 

After all, establishing trust and authority amongst your community takes time, resources, and energy. You can hardly find an overnight Winfrey Oprah or Seth Godin to arise magically. 

So what’s the secret of becoming a backlinking ninja? 

Look within. 

Backlinks are nothing but relationships, people whom we trust and rely upon. This means the only way you can grow and hack your way is to innovate ways to start a conversation. 

Luckily for you, we have done all the hard work.

This post will reveal the top strategies that your SaaS company can use to supercharge your backlinks in 2021. 

The core of SaaS link building is relatively simple. Organic link building has a direct correlation with high-quality content. Some of the most linked content pieces share the same traits. They are all valuable, shareable, and engaging. With intellectual food, they fulfill the emotional appetite of their audience. 

Related: Best Dofollow Links To Acquire

Following are the top 9 SaaS link building tactics to ensure you stay ahead of your competitors. 

1- Invest in Primary Data Research

Primary Data Research

Original, research-driven content on link building pricing has always had a special place in the SaaS industry. In 2018, Mantis research found that marketers who relied upon original research to create their content drove a significant amount of traffic to their websites. If you are wondering why, the answer should not be hard to find. 

Modern businesses run on data. If you are offering solutions to your audience backed up by recent industry findings, you are not just giving them advice but strategic advice. However, to truly make it successful, you need to be aware of a few key elements. 

  • Invest in unique data: Data mining is expensive. If you are investing resources in mining data that your competitors are already feeding your audience, you probably will lose your appeal. Doing thorough competitive research can help you map out the data topics on which you should be investing your resources. SEMrush can help you with this. 
  • Action-driven data: Data facts that render actionable insights resulting in almost immediate effects are the ones that your audience is hungry for. If you have to beef up your overall data mining strategy, relevant, actionable data is key.
  • Invest in rare data: The principle of scarcity holds here completely. The rarer, the better. The harder it is to find your data in data research, the more it is likely to be valuable to your audience. 
  • Make your data shareable: No matter how unique, valuable, and insightful your content is, it does not matter if your research is not shareable. This means figuring the content format that it is most suited for is critical. Whether a blog post works the best or an infographic, it is based on your audience preference and content type. 
  • Be as detailed as possible: The finer the details, the more comprehensive the takeaways. While your research data, ensure you get into the nuances of it. There is so much value that supplementary data can bring to your audience. 

Related: SEMrush Review

2- Curate Relevant Research

If creating original research creates a strain on your budget, you can complement it with other high-authority original research. This not only builds your networking strength in your respective industry but puts you as an authority whenever someone links to you. 

The only catch here is you have to be a master curator. If this method has to work for you, there are a few things you have to be mindful of. 

  • Be inspiring: Admit it. Looking at dry, dull facts and figures is boring. More so, it makes the comprehensibility factor of your data low. Data visualization is indispensable when you are curating your data. Your fundamental goal here is to make easily consumable infographics. 
  • Add your angle: Linking to other people’s data research is a great way to add credibility to your own business. But simulating a smart syndication and curation site does not make the cut. Go deeper. Add your authentic style. Experiment with the content format. For instance, if you found data research on Gartner on content marketing trends that have a steep comprehension curve, create an infographic to simplify it.  
  • Be data-heavy: The key goal of curating original data research sources is to provide your audience with the maximum details of actionable data in a short period without going to different places. 

Related: Will You Use A PBN To Build Links?

3- Create Authority Content

If you have to establish yourself as an expert in your industry, creating authority content is one of the best ways to do so. But, building authority does not only indicate that you ‘know it all’ when it comes to your industry best practices but the top problems of the practitioners. If your authority content has to stand out, you need an advanced plan. 

Related: Ways To Repurpose Digital Content

Here are a few considerations to follow.

  • Get the attention of the top 1% of practitioners: If you are to become an authority, you need to be influencing the top 1% of your industry people. This will growth hack your way to becoming an influencer a lot faster than you think.
  • Create solid proof: If you do not have proof of your skills, it does not matter at all. This means having a solid track record of your industry expertise can help you climb the ladder in no time. 
  • Sharing is caring: Share your knowledge with the world. In the current times, sharing anything is easier than ever. Use the power of social media to be available in front of people who want your advice. This not only places you to be helpful but approachable too.

Related: How To Find Duplicate Content?

4- Invest in Thought Leadership Content

Thought leadership is the next level of authority content. Invested well, it can skyrocket your position and brand in your industry. But doing this takes more than just putting your best advice in front of your industry people. Instead, here’s what you can do. 

  • Foster an innovation culture in your industry: Innovation singularly marks you as a thought leader in your industry. Ask a simple question to yourself. “Do I think about ways to disrupt the status quo of my industry?” If the answer is positive, then you are on your way to becoming a thought leader. 
  • Be heavy on experiments: Only thinking about disruption doesn’t give testament to you being a thought leader; you need solid proof to establish your hypothesis. This is where experiments come in. But while you do so, ensure you run testing sprints, where you can find out what is working and what is not. 
  • Create a forecast of the near-future industry trends: The world has several experts, but now they need visionaries. If you can predict the future of your industry, you are already an authority. But your convictions need to be validated through logic. Simply put, go for the ‘why’ after you state the ‘what.’ 

Related: Plagiarism Free Content: Importance In SEO

5- Guest Post Frequently

If you thought that guest posting is only powerful when you have to drive new traffic to your site, think again.  With strategic guest posting, you not only improve your chances of high-quality leads but improve your backlinks. However, while working on guest posting, ensure that your efforts and results are correctly balanced as you would not want your link building cost to go above what it should be. 

Related: Guest Posting Sites List

Here’s how you can do this right. 

  • Choose authority sites relevant to your industry: Guest posting on sites that has absolutely no relevance to your product will not do you any good. Even your indirect competitor sites are less valuable here. Guest posting works best when you create content for your direct competitor’s platform. This way, you know that you are getting a rich, high-quality audience relevant to your product. 
  • Request a do-follow anchor link: Your link-building strategy works when your content is indexable by search engines. This means before you contribute to their site, you have to ensure you are findable.

6- Use The Skyscraper Technique

Brian Dean’s famous skyscraper technique is everyone’s favorite. The reason? It works. But reaping results from this today is much more complicated than 10 years back. A good starting point here would be to keep the goal to be the be-all, end-all answer to this particular question. 

Here are a few elements you need to keep in mind. 

  • Be detailed: Going specific and as much as detailed as possible builds dynamic and meaty content for your audience. The benefit? You are already on your way to being better than any other content on that topic. 
  • Be insightful: Going one step further, transform your details into actionable insights. This is going to increase the value of your content even more. 
  • Keep fresh: Creating unique, fresh content relevant to your audience is a great way to generate backlinks consistently. You start to be perceived as a trusted source of information. This means you need to keep updating your content to stay connected with your audience. 

Related: Link Building Outreach Tools

7- Choose High Volume Topics

If you thought creating posts that are lengthier than your competitors to be the only form of long-form content, you need to reset your mindset. Investing in long-form, evergreen content is critical for long-term content marketing and backlink generation success. Every keyword query that your audience types in is not urgent. 

Even the best content takes time to yield results. 

Related: SEO Link Building Tools

To Conclude

The backlinking game is not a 100-meter sprint but a marathon. To see impactful results, you have to be consistent in your efforts. This brings you back to the core of backlinking, content. If you have some unique value to give to your audience, generating organic backlinks should not be difficult.  

With the above SaaS link building tactics, you already have a solid edge over your competitors. Now, all you need to do is get your hands dirty.