Link building is essential for making a SaaS company stand out from its competitors.
Quality link-building can build quality leads for your SaaS company and generate more significant profit.
But, besides having an excellent link-building strategy, it is just as critical that your content is exceptional.
There’s an old saying for SEO that content is king, and the best way to increase backlinks to your website is to create valuable content and create them consistently.
Links are the foundation of Google’s search engine, and relevant links from websites indicate to Google that your website is producing trustworthy content.
However, link-building has always been difficult, and the most significant change is that Google is focusing more on the quality of links to a post.
But by having quality backlinks to the company website, Google will leverage your website over your other SaaS competitors.
What is Link Building?
A link is similar to a referral by a friend for a product or a service. For example, an article on Moz describes a link as a vote of confidence by a friend giving a referral for an excellent restaurant to check out.
And a link intends to tell the reader that is currently viewing a page that there is a resource on another page that they will find helpful.
Here is the more official definition given by the previous article from Moz on what is link building:
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the Internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web. They will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites.
A link is similar to a route from one place to another, and without links, the internet would be unnavigable. Links signal to Google that your website is a valuable resource of information or service.
And the more links to your posts, the easier it will be for Google and the more straightforward it will be for Google to find your posts. And link building is essentially the marketing effort of getting other websites to link to your page(s).
Difference Between Internal Links, External Links, and Backlinks
External/Outbound Links: A link from one of your posts to another website’s page.
External links to other people’s pages work like the reference area on the back of a book, and it provides Google with the idea that you have some solid to back up what you’re saying.
According to this source, linking to authoritative resources outside of your website will not hurt your PageRank, as long as it is from a trustworthy source.
As for what that is, PageRank is pretty much google’s way of quantifying the importance of your website by determining the number and quality of the links to a particular page.
And linking out to high-quality sites for your claims will increase the authoritativeness of the way your content appears for Google SEO purposes.
Internal Links: A link from one of your posts to another post of a place existing on your website.
Internal links can serve a specific purpose as a sales conversion for a SaaS company website by helping direct users to the next step of their buyer’s journey.
Internal links can be a form of call-to-action for SaaS companies by directing the reader to a contact page where they can contact a sales representative.
Also, it can encourage the user to learn more about your product by clicking on internal links that direct them to other pages that describe more about what your product can do for their business.
Also, providing quality content for readers can increase the user’s trust in the SaaS company’s brand or make them become a follower of future products or SaaS services that your company offers.
Another purpose of internal links includes creating a website structure that will help the Google search engine understand your website and better rank your pages.
Backlinks: A link from another website’s page to one of your articles published on your website.
Backlinks are similar to external links, except it is a vote of confidence from another website citing back to your content.
And for SEO purposes, backlinks from a highly authoritative source to your content will have an extreme impact on ranking.
Having a sizeable authoritative site like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal link to your content is almost like having Elon Musk or other media influencers give a referral to your product.
Building quality backlinks from existing trusted sources to quality content may be one of the ways to raise the ranking of a website.
And having a couple of backlinks from influencers in the industry will snowball to more backlinks, as it gives a sign of credibility for other website owners from social proof.
Email Outreach for SaaS Link Building
What is Email Outreach?
The purpose of email outreach for content marketing is different than for B2B sales.
In sales, the purpose of outreach is to connect with someone to pitch them a product or service.
But the goal of email outreach for content marketing is not to sell but to establish a long-term partnership with someone to promote content or build backlinks.
Does email outreach for link-building still work?
Brian Dean from Backlinko writes that email outreach is still relevant for building backlinks, provided that the emails are not spammy and can provide value for the people you’re emailing.
Often, the emails are not productive because the outreach approach is wrong, and secondly, there are no tangible benefits for the person on the opposite end that you’re asking a favor.
To truly grab the reader’s attention, you must personalize the emails. For example, in his post, Brian records that people ignore 91.5% of outreach emails in a study.
In contrast, his study shows that personalizing the content for the emails can boost the response rate by 32.7%.
And it is the reader’s fault for their lack of response when most emails come across as spammy without even mentioning the person’s first name.
Writing High-Response Emails for Outreach
There is an excellent post on email outreach for creating backlinks by Tim Soulo.
He highlights the importance of being genuine and having the mindset that a human being is just like you is on the opposite side of the screen.
Moreover, he points out that most emails fail because it immediately comes off as being automated:
You know this person doesn’t care about your website and cares for only their benefits on their end.
In contrast to a preformatted pitch, Tim prescribes a different strategy that would add more personalization:
And it goes beyond any outreach pattern by leaving more room for adding personalization directed to the person.
Pitching Your Content
The second part of email outreach is showing the person why they should add your content link to their existing website by having a unique linkable asset.
Linkable is anything that can generate backlinks or social shares to your website. Besides long-form articles, here are some other linkable assets you can consider adding:
- Case studies
- Research and statistics
- Infographics
- Images
On this point, an article highlights that a proposition must stand out by having a reason that stands out immediately to the person why your content deserves a link:
Tim Soulo mentions a couple of examples that give a unique reason for a website owner to link to the content.
And the key is to show not how your content is similar but what is different about it in comparison to existing posts:
And it is easier to get a backlink from influencers if you have engaged with their content previously, such as through sharing or commenting on their posts, because you would have a favorable position in the back of their mind.
Outreach is not only about emailing potential sources for backlinks.
One source describes link building as any effort that a person uses to get backlinks to their website.
Building relationships with website owners relevant to the SaaS niche can also be applicable.
How to Choose Websites to Build Backlinks to Your SaaS Blog
When choosing a website for building backlinks, one crucial thing to look for is the website’s domain authority.
What is domain authority?
According to the source from Moz:
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking.
In layman’s terms, a website’s domain authority is how trustworthy the website is.
Since not all links are equal in their value, a link from a website with higher domain authority will help your content from your SaaS website rank on Google better than a link from one with lower domain authority.
You can discover the domain authority of a website in many different ways. And one of the easiest methods is to download the Mozbar Chrome Extension tool:
You can find an excellent resource to understand how to find a website’s backlinks through this post from Backlinko.
And the main idea of finding is to reengineer the backlinks to an existing page.
You can use an online tool like Semrush, but there are many other resources.
Search the through Semrush by pasting the competitor’s website link on the top:
The final step is to find the backlinks to this competitor’s page from the sidebar:
After locating a website that links to one of your competitor’s content, the next step is to find the website owner’s emails.
And the top resource for locating the blogger’s email is to use an email finder, and here are the top resources for doing that (not sponsored):
For hunter.io, you can search the website on the search bar, and then it will locate the emails for you:
