Ever used screenshots in your marketing, emails, SOPs, articles or slack conversations?
I’m sure you have.
Screenshots are 90% of the images I use on this blog, and there’s a reason for that, they’re one of the best ways to quickly show people how something is done.
Screen sharing and capturing technology has changed quite a lot in recent years with the creation of SaaS platforms that allow us to share our screens in real time, capture images and edit all of that in a snap.
Today we’re looking at two of the best screen capture and sharing tools on the market to see how they’re doing in terms of link building:
Enter, Droplr and CLoudApp.
Let’s fire up the good ol’ Ahrefs account and put both domains into the batch analysis tool:
At a first glance, I noticed:
1. They both have similar DR (strength of the domain, in terms of links)
2. CloudApp has a ton more traffic than Droplr.
3. They both have a similar number of referring domains (unique sites linking to them) but a bit less dofollow ref. domains (links passing “juice”).
At this point, my question was…
Could number 3 be the reason for number 2 (traffic discrepancy)?
So I took a look at Droplr’s link growth for the past few months and noticed it’s been a bit slow (although they are recovering from that dip there):
If we look at Cloudapp’s link growth, on the other hand, it’s been quite steady (same dip there though, I wonder what happened to both of them in January?).
I dove a little deeper and noticed CloudApp’s best pages by incoming links are “deep” internal pages or landing pages:
Droplr, on the other hand, has mostly links to the home page and other “top level” service pages:
Don’t get me wrong,
Those kinds of links are good, but this might explain why Droplr is getting substantially less traffic than CloudApp.
You see…
When done well, Internal pages like blog articles and “use cases” pages can (and should) target relevant top and middle of the funnel keywords to attract visitors and/or help them make a decision.
It looks like CloudApp is doing this pretty well.
If we take a look at their top ranking keywords (positions 1 to 5), they rank for a ton of informational type keywords that are relevant to their business and have search volume:
What about Droplr?
Nope.
You can see, Droplr is mostly ranking for brand terms, personal names and other not so great keywords.
My guess is this is why with a similar DR and similar number of referring domains, CloudApp is able to attract a ton more traffic than Droplr.
It’s because they prioritized link acquisition to those deep internal pages that have informational intent and a ton of search volume.
That said, Droplr does have some very good content published, that’s unfortunately just sitting there on page 2 of Google, like this one:
droplr.com/blog/best-ux-tools-comparison/
Here are the metrics for this page:
It only has 1 backlink and it’s nofollow.
I checked the keywords that this page is currently ranking for and I noticed it’s ranking in position 6 for the keyword “balsamiq vs sketch”, which has 200 searches per month.
Not a ton, but not bad.
How’s the competition for that keyword?
Pretty damn weak if you ask me.
Most pages ranking in the top 10 have zero backlinks.
I’m assuming with just a few links (2/3 to be pessimistic), Droplr’s article would probably to jump straight into positIon 1, going from 31 to 135 traffic (Ahrefs estimation).
The number 1 ranking at the moment also has a DR of 69, which is lower than Droplr’s DR of 72, meaning, if they were to compete on backlinks, the higher DR would probably win.
Ok, yes, on page optimization plays an important role here as well, I haven’t checked, but this was just a quick example.
But, the gist of this is, 2 or 3 links to this page aren’t super hard to acquire. The problem with a lot of companies is that they don’t have the time or resources to do these kinds of things.
Building a prospect list, reaching out to them, negotiate and secure the link placement takes a hell of a lot of time.
This is what we do, we help SaaS companies get more traffic and customers from their existing content that’s not performing as well as it could because they don’t have the time or resources to promote it (build links).
Want help building links to your content?
We work with a limited number of SaaS companies on a monthly basis to get them quality links through outreach link building.
If you’re serious about making your content work for you, you need backlinks. Click here and complete the form. I’ll be in touch with our next steps!
What do you think about this article? Would you like to see more like this? Let me know in the comments 🙂