Effective Link-building Techniques for SaaS Websites

Content Partner -

For SaaS (software as a service) businesses, link building is even more important than it is for other types of businesses. Backlinks from high-quality sites not only help in the search engine ranking but also provide credibility and authority to a SaaS platform.

Read on and get a list of the best white hat link-building tactics that you can apply to your SaaS website in 2025 and onwards.

Create Detailed Tutorials and “How To” Guides

To attract backlinks organically, publishing in-depth tutorials, guides and thought leadership content that addresses the real problems of your target niche is one of the best ways. For instance, a SaaS consulting could make step-by-step guides for compliance issues, and a marketing SaaS may describe the new techniques and strategies in a long-form article.

Instead of forcefully attempting to rank, one should focus on tackling the questions and pain points that people really have. These detailed, well-researched guides, which were 2,000+ words long, ranked highly with search engines and in your industry. 

Curate Industry Studies and Original Research

Original research and surveys on the topic of your SaaS niche will put you in the point of view of a thought leader and give you backlinks that are high authority. Let’s say an HR software company undertakes an industry benchmark study of employee retention rate problems or a project management tool analyzes the data to ascertain what it can do about changing workforce dynamics.

The content could also take the form of case studies, profiling customers who found success with your SaaS product. Such research and data not only allow you to connect with industry professionals but also get coverage on news and research websites, leading to powerful .edu and .org backlinks.

Influencer Marketing and Guest Posting

In the early 2010s, low-quality guest posting on spammy websites was a common black-hat SEO tactic. However, outreach to relevant sites and influencers in your niche is still an effective link-building technique. Today, the focus is on building genuine relationships with sites that would benefit your audience.

Identify industry experts, brands and publications that share your SaaS buyer’s persona. Get in touch with them to coordinate interviews, contribute quotes/statistics for their articles or provide guest posts that would interest their audience. 

Repurpose Content

Creating original long-form tutorials and research content requires significant time and resources. An efficient way to multiply your link-building results is to repurpose the same content across different formats:

  • Take a section from your research paper and create a short video tutorial
  • Convert the key findings into a visual infographic
  • Transform your interviews into a podcast series
  • Create a presentation deck from your case study and host it on Slideshare

The different formats allow you to target additional websites/channels and compound your linking opportunities. 

Optimize Assets for Search Engines

The digital assets of a SaaS website can be anything from blog posts, whitepapers, ebooks, case studies, webinars and more. While keeping premium assets gated behind a lead capture form makes sense, it doesn’t expand link-building potential.

Remove gateways (or at least host them on separate landing pages special to search serfs) to consider optimizing 5-10% of your best assets specifically for the serfs of search engines. For instance, some of your most popular ebooks could be housed ungated on an asset library. So, long-form can also be changed to search-friendly landing pages.

This allows your assets to rank for various keyword targets and gain direct traffic as well as referral links. 

If your SaaS business has been around for a few years, old links may have gone stale or inactive due to domain changes, expired partnerships etc. Link reclamation involves tracking down such backlinks and restoring them by updating the URLs they point to.

Start by exporting your backlink data into Ahrefs or a similar link analysis tool. Sort and filter to identify links from misspelled URLs, 404 errors and outdated pages. Then, use the “request backlink” feature to notify site owners and ask them to update or reinstate the link.

While very time-intensive, this tactic truly pays off. Mature links tend to carry more weight in search rankings, and breathing new life into existing links avoids the need to build additional ones.

User Generated Content

User-generated content in the form of real customer reviews, discussions, and feedback signals authority to both search engines and potential buyers. Integrating UGC across your SaaS website provides abundant linkable assets:

  • Customer testimonials can link back to their company/personal websites
  • Showcase client logos in your footer with links to their homepage
  • Feature case studies linking to your customer’s sites
  • Embed social media posts/tweets mentioning your brand
  • Enable user comments on blog posts to encourage links

The advantage of UGC is that the links feel natural and relevant instead of forced guest posts. This contributes greatly to overall domain authority.

Contribute to Forums and Communities

Niche communities like Reddit, Quora and industry forums have high domain authority and tremendous search visibility. Identifying and participating in popular conversations related to your SaaS product is an excellent opportunity to insert links organically.

For example, a recruitment software provider could provide value on subreddits like r/recruiting and r/HR. Avoid overt advertising and instead focus on solving people’s queries about automation, AI, etc. Active contribution raises your profile as a subject matter expert. Moderators may even whitelist your domain, allowing links in signatures and profiles. 

Conclusion

To succeed with link building for SaaS businesses, a combination of content creation, relationship building, and technical optimization is needed.

To achieve strong backlinking for sustainable growth, companies need to focus on creating valuable resources, staying in touch with all the industry communities, and making genuine connections, which ultimately builds up a strong backlink profile.

The key is simply to make sure the quality is there but that there isn’t too much of it; each one should add actual value to users and search engines.