Content Promotion Link Building For B2B SaaS Companies: Our Playbook in 2022

Whether you are a new or established SaaS company, you are probably already creating a ton of amazing, jaw-dropping content.

I’m guessing your blog is filled with articles like:

The ultimate guide to X and Y, the top X tools, how to do X, the top X statistics for 2022, etc.

Everyone talks about creating great content and how this will land you amazing backlinks naturally with time, right?

After working with SaaS companies for the past 2 years though, I’ve noticed a pattern…

Backlinks for SaaS companies very rarely come naturally. Especially cause everybody and their mom are starting a SaaS company in 2022.

No matter the niche, you are most likely going to have to manually build backlinks to your SaaS company to get your amazing content seen and consumed to eventually acquire new customers.

In this article, I won’t talk about specific techniques or tactics (plenty of that already online).

What I will do is give you the general frameworks that we at Growth Gorilla use to find link opportunities and ideas for SaaS companies based on what your target pages are.

let’s get to it 🙂

Unique challenges for B2B SaaS companies

Before we even get started with the juicy stuff (I know you’re looking for that secret sauce), I’d like to talk about a few things.

SaaS companies have to face a few pretty unique challenges which might make the link building process a bit more difficult.

1) Let’s be honest, most SaaS look the same.

It’s become very hard for software companies to differentiate themselves from the competition.

The first questions I ask new clients are:

• What’s your USP (unique selling proposition) against your competitors?
• What should make someone pick your product and not someone else’s?

If they can’t answer these, they are usually not a good fit for us.

The first rule to stand out in link building is to have something unique to offer. If you don’t have it, you shouldn’t even be in business.

2) Bro, that’s SUPER niche

A lot of SaaS companies, on the other hand, have a very unique offering. Too unique.

These are companies where it’s pretty evident that the product-market fit has not been achieved yet.

If this is you, don’t waste your time trying out link building, chances are the pool of possible prospects would be too narrow and you won’t have enough people to even send emails to let alone get links.

3) Where’s the blog?

The last issue with a lot of companies I’ve seen is the lack of informational content and of a solid content marketing plan and strategy.

They would come to me asking for link building help with just a few pages like:

• “Use cases” pages
• “Feature” pages
• “Alternative” pages

Those are all great middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel pages and you definitely need them.

The problem is that nobody wants to link to them.

While it is possible to build some links to those pages (and we’ll take a look at those later on), In order to do link building at a bigger scale, you really need to have some top of the funnel, informational content.

And it MUST be amazing.

4) Booooring.

Some SaaS products are just plain boring.

This is where you need to shine as a content marketer and come up with something very creative and unique to get through the noise.

Write great content

With those out of the way, it’s time to talk about the main principle and probably the most over-utilized advice out there.

Create great content.

What does this even mean?

In theory, great content is:

• Original
• Actionable
• Shareable
• Readable
• Quotable
• Memorable
• Visually appealing

That’s all and nothing, I know right?

Honestly, the best way to create great content is to see what’s already ranking for your keyword and produce something better and/or different on all those fronts.

If you can’t do this, it’s gonna be hard to compete.

That said, I think that most of the time as with everything in life, people will judge a book by its cover.

Let’s look at this example:

This is an article by Paul Graham:

This is an article by Podia:

Now,

Say we are in an alternate timeline and you don’t know who Paul Graham is…

Ask yourself:

Which article would you rather read first just by skimming those images?

I’m sorry but I’d pick the article from Podia, just by looking at it.

In reality, I’m perfectly aware of who Paul Graham is and I know his piece is stellar (and I’ve read it multiple times over), which gives him instant credibility even if, let’s be honest the design and readability aren’t the best.

This is a very simple check anyone can do to see if their content can compete at least visually.

Once you are on par with the visual aspect, then you must also make sure that your content is actually very good and useful.

Great looking content like this, makes people more willing to read it which in turn makes acquiring backlinks 10 times easier.

You won’t get a link back if someone doesn’t even want to read your content in the first place.

Link building strategies that work for SaaS

I originally wanted to write an article with the best strategies and techniques that SaaS companies can use to build backlinks (stuff like podcasting, guest posting, resource pages, broken links, unlinked mentions and so on) but when I stopped to think about it for a minute it hit me…

The internet is full of articles like that and most of all, those are all tactics that almost any kind of business can use, nothing makes them better or worse for SaaS companies.

I guess the problem is that people always try to look for that one secret technique that might make their life easier and magically save their business.

Yeah, it doesn’t exist.

So, instead of writing the same regurgitated list of link building techniques, I thought I would go over my own “Playbook” for building links specifically to SaaS companies.

This will be more of a strategic path and plan than exact techniques, although I will also include the general how-to for every step.

Our SaaS link building playbook – the only strategy you need

Step #0 – Identify what you have to work with

The first step in our process is identifying the kind of content that we have available to work with.

We usually split the content into these 4 buckets:

1. Home page – brand, authority
2. Linkable assets – infographics, research articles, ultimate guides (top of the funnel)
3. Quick win pages – Usually blog articles that are on the verge of getting significant traffic, ranking at the bottom page 1, top page 2 (top of the funnel)
4. Main landing pages (middle/bottom of the funnel – use cases, case studies, white papers, comparison or review pages)

Bucket 1 – Home Page

You’re probably wondering, well, the home page is usually the most naturally linked-to page, isn’t it?

Not necessarily.

Especially for newer companies who are facing tough competition, building backlinks to their home page is usually our first recommended step.

Why?

It’s quite easy (compared to other pages) and it helps build your overall authority as well as your brand reputation.

As a bonus, It could also bring in some referral traffic and the first few customers, win-win.

Bucket 2 – Linkable assets

These are any content asset that is created specifically to acquire backlinks. Think of infographics, industry related studies, and research articles, visual content, etc.

Content in this bucket is usually great to get some high-quality PR mentions and create relationships with bloggers on high authority websites.

You can essentially think of buckets 1 and 2 as your foundational backlinks. They will build your website’s authority and trust in the eyes of Google. Once you have enough of those, you can move over to the next 2 buckets (or if you have the resources, work on all of them at the same time).

Bucket 3 – Quick win pages

These pages are essentially the pages that your website is already ranking quite well for, but that with just a bit more effort could get a substantial boost and rank in the top 3 spots.

The best pages for this bucket are usually top or even middle of the funnel blog articles that are targeting very specific keywords.

They are your weapons to increase targeted traffic to educate your audience and spread your link profile to inner pages instead of just the home page.

If you have an established website with a ton of links to the home page already, this is usually the first bucket that we work with.

It’s also important to mention that these pages should be part of content hubs within your site and if possible, topically relevant to your main landing pages.

This way, the links you build to them will flow naturally throughout the entire hub helping all pages within it rank higher.

Bucket 4 – Main landing pages

These are your money pages. 

Middle and bottom of the funnel pages that serve as lead generation for your company.

Think about all your use cases, case studies, white papers, comparison, or review pages. Even free ebooks, templates, or research studies pages where you take people’s email addresses.

Building backlinks to these pages is obviously harder than all the other ones, but it can be done, and the ROI is way higher.

It’s essential for a good link building strategy to be able to work on all 4 content buckets and we have come up with specific strategies and approach for each of them.

Let’s take a look!

Step #1 – How to build links to your home page

Reverse engineering your competition using “patterns”

The first step in finding link building opportunities for your home page is to reverse engineer your competitors’ home page links.

Let’s say you are a direct competitor of Zoom, the video conferencing software (now it’s your time to shine!).

It’s as simple as going through Zoom’s backlinks in Ahrefs and looking for pages that are mentioning them.

These will most likely be “List” kind of articles.

To do that go to Ahrefs > Input your competitor’s home page URL > select “Exact URL”

Then, I like to select

• “Group Similar” to show only unique backlinks or “One link per domain”.
• “Dofollow” to only show the links that I’m interested in replicating
• (Optional) English

Last step, and this might be the most important, is to add specific words or as I call them “patterns” within the title of the pages that are linking to your competitor.

Think about it this way…

If we are looking for “list” articles, what do most of them have within their titles?

• Best
• Top
• Tools
• Software

I call these “patterns” and we’ll use them to filter out the irrelevant results and only see what we need.

input those in the “include” search bar and only select “Titles of referring pages”. That’s because we’re only looking for those patterns to be contained in the title. Makes things simpler.

This will only show you the pages where the word is somewhere in the title.

Boom. The search for “Best” alone brought up 3,109 backlinks.

The next step is to do the same for all the other patterns. This will give you a ton of backlink opportunities to try and replicate for your business.

You can also try this to get “software X alternative” pages:

Once you have all of those, you can also run them through Screaming Frog to only get the ones that are not already linking out to you (you might get some of those in there depending on how established your company is).

Find the contact details and send your pitch explaining why your tool should make the list and what’s unique about it.

Most times you’ll have to send them a unique paragraph about your tool but that’s no biggie.

Job done!

Reverse engineering your niche using “seed topics”

The second step in finding link building opportunities for your home page is to reverse engineer your niche.

If you are a SaaS company, chances are your software solves one or more specific problems to people, or it’s useful in a few particular scenarios.

• Maybe you are a project management tool to help freelancers work remotely?
• Maybe you are a workflow software to help HR departments grow companies?
• Maybe it’s a team productivity product to help managing remote workers?

Zoom even has some of those in their main title tag:

Whatever it is, someone has probably written a list article like “The X Best Y tools for Z“, right?

For Zoom, like we’ve seen before, it could be “The 6 best video conferencing apps for teams“

I call “Y” and “Z”, our “seed topics”.

You can just do a simple Google search for them:

(Here, I used -microsoft to remove all results related to Microsoft Teams)

What’s better, is that now you have a huge list of titles of pages that are linking out to your competitors from the first step we’ve covered.

Why not just extract all the different seed topics from those to find as many extra opportunities as you can?

You see…

if 1 page about Y is linking to your competitors, chances are that there are 10 or 100 other similar articles around the web which maybe are not even linking out to anybody!

Go get them!

This 2-step approach is our main strategy for home page links and all editorial links in general.

You’ll probably wonder, but what do I do once I completed the first campaign? What if I need more links to my home page?

The answer is simple, you can repeat the same exact campaigns 2/3 months later. What you’ll find is that in the meantime, other website will have published very similar articles containing your patterns and seed topics.

With time, the opportunities are virtually unlimited.

The main idea behind this kind of campaigns, is similar to the “Skyscraper Technique” in the sense that we will be reaching out to pitch our link placement because it’s better, unique, different etc…

What’s unique about our approach is that we don’t focus only on the pages that are linking to our competitors.

We want to maximize our efforts and find as many suitable pages as we possibly can.

Here’s the Skyscraper in a nutshell:

Here’s our approach:

Step #2 – How to build links to your linkable assets

This is pretty straightforward. Linkable assets are content pieces that are built from the ground up with the intent of attracting backlinks.

The best way to come up with ideas for these is as usual to reverse engineer what your competitors are doing.

Let’s say I have an email outreach platform or a lead generation platform. One of my main competitors will be Mailshake.

The first step is to go through their “Best by links” pages report in Ahrefs > only show 200 ok status pages then sort by pages with most referring domains.

Then go through the list starting from the top and look out for pages that seem linkable assets.

What does this mean?

• ⛔️ No blog articles
• ⛔️ No feature pages or other landing pages
• ✅ Unique pages that have some of the classic linkable asset “footprints” within their URL or title.

Some of these footprints could be:

• Statistics
• FREE (training, ebook, etc.)
• Infographic

You get the idea…

Here’s what I found on Mailshake’s report:

The first is a free online course on cold email:

The page is custom-designed, amazing to look at and most of all it looks like it gives a ton of value FOR FREE.

This is the perfect linkable asset if done well.

The second is an article with a ton of sales statistics:

Again, the overall design looks very good, readability is great and the statistics are divided into sub-sections to make it more digestible.

So you’re probably asking:

Well, there’s no way in hell I can compete with them now is there?

Actually, there is 🙂

You see…

The fact that they have created these resources, doesn’t mean you can’t create them as well.

The main caveat is the you should find your unique spin or angle to it!

A few examples:

Instead of a free course on cold email, why not create a free course on cold calling, lead qualification, lead nurturing or even sales strategy?

There are a ton of different but related topics you can use for this.

What’s important is that it should be aligned with your brand, with what your software does as well as with the sites you want to pitch it to.

What about the statistics article?

Last year, I was doing some research for a client to try and do this exact same thing. What i came up with was a slightly different variation on the same topic.

Example:

Instead of “sales statistics” we used “AI statistics for sales: how AI is impacting sales”.

We validated the idea with a simple google search:

From this you can see articles about AI statistics are getting quite a lot of links.

Our angle of making this specific for “AI statistics in sales” would just help make the piece stand out and be more relevant to the client.

The article was pretty successful and generated some very nice backlinks.

That’s basically it for linkable assets.

Obviously quality matters A LOT here. You are competing with some amazing pieces of content and most often than not, this will require some budget.

If you can come up with a good, unique angle and stand out from the pack though, you might as well be fine 🙂

I won’t go in-depth on how to find the sites to pitch this content to, but if you’re interested in learning more on that, I’d recommend this link prospecting guide by Giselle at Neomam.

Step #3 – How to build links to your “quick win” pages

What are “quick win pages” and how do I find them?

The concept of “quick win” pages is something I learned from Robbie Richards in his course “The SEO Playbook” (affiliate link) and it completely revolutionized how I think about approaching SEO.

The basic idea as I’ve mentioned in the intro, is to find those pages that are already being “liked” by Google which means they are ranking between the bottom of page one and the top of page 2 of the search results.

If these pages have made it there with minimum or sometimes no effort at all, what would happen if you can just build 10, 5 or even just 2 backlinks to them?

If you can do that and get into the top 5 or even top 3 rankings, that will be a very nice boost in traffic.

Now, it’s not so simple and it depends a lot on the competition.

The process that Robbie teaches goes like this:

1. Establish your “keyword difficulty baseline” – the average keyword difficulty number of the pages where your site is ranking in the top 3 positions. This will give you a baseline for the difficulty that you know your site can compete with. (it uses Ahrefs keyword difficulty metric)
2. Export all the keywords that your site is ranking for between positions 5 and 15 (these are your low-hanging fruits)
3. Go through the list and decide which ones you can go after based on KD baseline (step 1) and how relevant it is for your business + your chances of competing.

Another important step is manually checking if your page can actually compete for that keyword, this means looking at the page types, number of referring domains and overall domain rating.

Our main goal was to adapt this process for link building.

To do this we want to find keywords that:

• Have the potential to rank higher with minimum effort (new backlinks).
• Are also linkable topics (i.e. there is a pool of people/prospects that are willing to link to this topic).

What I’ve found though, is that the lower the KD score in Ahrefs, the lower is the amount of backlinks to the top 10 results.

What does this mean for us?

It usually means that the specific keyword you are looking at, although being less competitive, is not very “linkable”.

You see…

Some topics lend themselves to be linked to or mentioned to better than others, it’s just how it is.

How do we overcome this?

First off, I’d only use keywords that have a KD of 5 at a bare minimum. This usually means there are some backlinks there.

The second step is to determine if you have the potential to rank higher for those keywords, is to check the SERP for them and look closely at the DR of the sites that are ranking.

If your site has a DR within +/- 5 DR pts of the competing assets in the top 5, you usually have a solid chance of moving it up, even if you’re starting from scratch.

Especially if your content is similar or better quality.

How do I find backlink opportunities for these pages?

Now that we have our shortlist of quick win keywords and their pages, it’s time to build some links to them.

This boils down to our “pattern + seed topic” method.

The difference now is that we don’t necessarily want to be looking at “list” articles only.

Our goal is to find all kinds of informational articles that might want to add a link to our page.

The “want to add a link” is the most important part.

This is why we mostly target blog articles for this method.

We are going to find seed topics and pair them with patterns to find pages where it makes sense for them to add our link.

This is basically pitching a link insertion.

The caveat here is that our page should:

• Add unique or new insights to the other page
• Correct some wrong data on the other page.
• Complement the other page with something that was missing.

If we can do this, we have a good chance of getting a link. If not, we might still get a link IF we have something in return to offer to the other person (more on this later).

The first step in this process is to find the patterns.

The main patterns to find informational articles are the following:

• how to
• guide
• what
• why
• when
• where
• resources

This means we want to find pages that have those patterns inside their title.

Next, we will find our seed topics, which as we’ve seen earlier are specific topics that we want to be mentioned in the title as well as the pattern.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say I want to build links to an article on cold emails.

I’ll take a look at the main keyword in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer:

As we’ve seen before, what most people would do here, is just the standard “skyscraper” method = export the competitor backlinks and reach out to the same people to try and replicate those links.

What we want to do instead, is look through their backlinks to find our seed topics, so that we can then use them to find a ton of other untapped opportunities.

Let’s take the number one page as an example and go through its backlinks. As usual we’re only interested in their dofollow links, and we’re mainly looking at the page titles here.

Here are just a few of the seed topics I’ve found:

The next step is to pair these seed topics with our informational article patterns. We can then combine these with some advanced search operators and we’ll get stuff like:

• intitle:”how to” intitle:”attract new clients”
• intitle:”why” intitle:”getting new clients”
• intitle:”guide” intitle:”internship”

and so on…

These will give us a ton of other extra opportunities that we would’ve never found if we had just stopped at scraping the competitor’s backlinks.

Once you found these opportunities, you can export the SERP results, run them through a tool like URL profiler (affiliate link) to get all of the SEO metrics and filter the list down to only the best ones.

Find the contact details manually or with a tool like Hunter (affiliate link) and reach out!

Note: As this is basically the skyscraper method on steroid, it’s very important to only do this with your best content assets and only with the ones where it makes sense to do so.

In a lot of cases you’ll be faced with site admins asking for “something in return” for the backlink.

This can take a few different forms, but for the majority of SaaS companies it can be one of the following (or all of them):

• Free subscription of your product or free trial extension.
• Affiliate link for your product.
• Link exchange.
• Monetary compensation to cover their time to add the link.

Although we do offer all of these depending on the situation, the client and the budget, it’s obviously a good idea to minimize them as much as possible and only keep them for the best opportunities.

Whew, that was a lot of stuff!

Moving on 🙂

Step #4 – How to build links to your main landing pages

What I call “landing pages” for SaaS companies can fall into a few different sub-groups:

• “Feature” pages – those pages that describe a specific feature or benefit that your software provides.
• “Dashboard” or “Template” pages – those pages where you provide a standardized dashboard or template that is made with your software and that is geared towards a specific industry, niche or that is solving a specific issue. These could contain free downloadables or gated content (ion exchange for email or subscription).
• “Uses case” pages – those pages where you basically show how your product can be used to solve a specific problem that people have.

As you probably already know, link building to these pages is very hard.

The main issue with them is that, for the most part, they don’t offer much information and have mostly a commercial intent.

So, for most people the best and only solution ends up being guest posting.

With guest posting, you write the article and you have total control over which links to use within that article (as long as the destination site allows it).

What most people do then, is write a guest post article on a topic related to their landing page and then cleverly link to it within the article in a way that looks as natural as possible.

With us at Growth Gorilla though, we made it our “mission” to only work with existing content that the clients have and for this reason we decided not to do guest posting.

How do we build backlinks to these pages then, you might ask?

It’s pretty simple…

Just because most landing pages are not informational in nature, it doesn’t mean they can’t be!

The content injection method

First off, I don’t take credit for this.

What I call the “content injection” method, is an idea that I came across while talking to the guys at Quickbooks.

Check out their page on sales tax:

Looks like a normal landing page (a feature or use-case page to be exact), right?

It has a nice hero image, benefits throughout the page and pricing tables at the bottom.

Let’s take a closer look though:

Are those sub-headings? Jump links? What the hell is that??

All of that and more!

You see…

What they are doing here, is injecting informational content into a landing page.

What happens when you click on them?

Boom! the page turned into an article!?

And again…

Another article with an interactive map to show each state’s unique sales tax laws.

Cool!

And again…

Another article or better a survey result article full of interesting (and mentionable) statistics.

Nicely done.

I’m pretty sure until a few days ago, they also had a free calculator within another sub-section, guess they removed it.

The point is, they have found a very clever way of injecting content into a page where this would’ve otherwise been impossible.

Want to know the best thing??

Let’s look at how the URL structure changes when you click the different sub-headings:

The normal URL is this:

• https://quickbooks.intuit.com/accounting/sales-tax/

When you click on the first sub-section it changes to this:

• https://quickbooks.intuit.com/accounting/sales-tax/#how-to

This is how it changes for the other sub-sections:

• https://quickbooks.intuit.com/accounting/sales-tax/#sdakota
• https://quickbooks.intuit.com/accounting/sales-tax/#sales-tax-survey

You can clearly see how they are using these “jump links” to target very specific keywords while still keeping the main page’s URL in place.

What does this have to do with link building then?

Pretty simple…

They have created informational articles within the main landing page, this allows them, in turn, to build links to the informational articles (a lot easier) while still sending the “link juice” to the main landing page because essentially, they are one and the same!

Using this strategy, you can potentially turn any kind of landing or sales page into a linkable asset.

When you have these assets ready, it’s just a matter of using the same “pattern + seed topic” technique that we’ve covered earlier.

Forget about guest posting, content injection is the future 🙂

Now before the haters say anything, I know.

Not everyone has the budget to do this, it can potentially require some custom coding = big money.

That is, unfortunately, true.

What’s also true is that the ROI for backlinks to these landing pages is WAY higher than backlinks to a blog article for example.

So, it’s just a matter of deciding where to direct your budget based on your priority and strategy.

It’s also important to mention that diversification is always a good thing. Why not use a mix of guest posting and content injection for landing pages?

In the end…

I always try to see link building with curiosity and a “newbie” eye.

The worst mistake we can do is to pick a strategy or tactic and keep using that until the end of time.

I know I said these frameworks are all you need and that is partly true.

The fact that these are “frameworks” and not specific tactics, makes them more flexible. That said, it’s also important to always keep testing and trying new things. Even the best framework will not be 100% adaptable to everyone and will eventually fail.

The more companies we work with, the more we also realize that there is no 1-size-fits-all process.

I do think it’s important to create and use frameworks though.

They are what allowed us to scale to more than just a handful of clients while still keeping the quality of our work high enough.

No matter what people say, everybody uses systems and processes, even when doing things at a smaller scale, you still have to follow some kind of process.

At the end of the day, every company is unique, each with its own goals and priorities and the ability to create frameworks and systems to accommodate that is, ultimately, what keeps our job fun and interesting 🙂

This was a long article! I hope you enjoyed it. Curious to know what you think in the comment section!