What makes certain SaaS companies stand out from the others?
How are some SaaS brands able to crack an increasingly competitive industry?
That’s what we’re going to explore in this piece from an organic traffic point of view, and how brands like HubSpot have grown from 500,000 monthly visitors to over 7,000,000 monthly visitors in just 4 years.
SaaS (software as a service) covers a very wide array of companies – marketing automation, sales CRM, SEO tools, document signing – you name it. The business model is essentially the same across the board, charging customers a recurring monthly or annual fee for use of the product.
It’s an insanely hot industry right now, on course to grow by approximately 20% per year until 2025, with hundreds of large acquisitions per month.
After growing 100s of SaaS brands including fortune brands, I’m gonna share everything I learned to help you to scale your link building and get out the most
Organic Traffic for SaaS Companies
Many successful SaaS brands follow a very similar pattern of gaining success. They drive organic inbound traffic to their website in order to build a readership base that will convert into a paying customer. There are some incredible examples of brands who have done this in competitive spaces, such as GrooveHQ in the support desk space. HubSpot focus heavily on organic search traffic – It saves them a huge amount on ad spend, as you can see below.
However, as we’ll soon see, there’s also a ton of companies that don’t do this very well – They don’t have a cohesive SEO strategy, and they invest far too much in paid advertising when they could easily attract more organic customers through their website.
3 SaaS Brands That Crush SEO & Link Building
First, we’re going to look at 3 brands who are performing extremely well in terms of their organic traffic and highlight some key reasons that make them stand out.
1. HubSpot – CRM
This is one brand on the list that everyone’s heard of. Pretty much the undisputed king of inbound marketing and CRM software, at least from an SEO point of view.
👆 Examples of Top Ranking Keywords
- Marketing
- Advertisement
- Brand Guide
- CRM
- Resignation Letter
- Best Time To Post on Instagram
- To Do List
- Free Email
- URL Shortener
- Marketing
- Advertisement
The point is – these guys rank for just about everything…
What’s So Impressive About Them?
- They get more organic traffic than any other SaaS company out there – More than 7M visitors per month, up from just 500,000 visitors in 2015.
- Their biggest source of traffic is organic search.
- HubSpot is earning over $500M in revenue per year through their marketing & sales products
- They’re such a highly authoritative blog that they rank for just about any given category – Whether that’s real estate, marketing, sales, photography, web design etc.
- They run an incredible content strategy that has a highly focused methodology and keyword research behind it (I’ve seen it first hand). They’re also masters at creating highly linkable content assets, as we’ll see further down this article.
2. FollowUpBoss – CRM (for Real Estate)
👆 Examples of Top Ranking Keywords
- Real estate leads
- Real estate lead generation
- Real estate CRM
- Real estate coaching
- Real estate landing pages
- Real estate team structure
- Best CRM for real estate
What’s So Impressive About Them?
- Generating over 30,000 visitors per month to blog content
- Outrank all of their major competitors in the Real Estate CRM Space
- The value of their organic traffic per month is easily in excess of $40k (if they were to spend on Google Adwords to achieve the same)
- Drive an incredible amount of traffic via organic search into their blog, which translates to hundreds of new customers
- They attract traffic from keywords they know real estate professionals are searching for
- Combine SEO-focused content that drives organic traffic, along with inspirational content (e.g. stories of real estate teams who have incredible sales records)
- Built a ton of relevant backlinks through relevant real-estate websites, but also sales/marketing blogs, bringing their expertise in real estate to a wider audience
3. GetVero – Marketing Automation
Examples of Top Ranking Keywords
- Welcome email
- Email marketing best practices
- Promotion emails
- Retention email
- Persuasive email example
- Transactional emails
What’s So Impressive About Them?
- Generating over 20,000 visitors per month to highly targeted blog content that converts
- Rank for a ton of informational keywords that other companies are paying Google Ads over $20 per click for!
- They’ve breached the incredibly competitive email marketing space against some other companies with mammoth budgets
- The blog is incredibly well written with actionable strategies
- Actively create ‘Epic’ content pieces they know will earn links, attention & traffic
- They’ve built a ton of backlinks through the quality of their content and by actively marketing their content in the industry
See exactly how it’s done…
Follow Up Boss is the company is actually one of our highly performing clients. You can see a case study detailing exactly how we built links for them in this article.
3 Incredible SaaS Brands Who Could Easily Improve
Next, we’ll take a look at 3 companies I’ve handpicked who are undoubtedly incredible brands with incredible products, but who deserve to be attracting more organic traffic to their website.
1) Nimble – CRM
Nimble is definitely in the top 10 when it comes to CRM products. They clearly have a phenomenal product that’s passed the test of time. Obviously, to become this successful you also need an incredible marketing team in place, so kudos to them?
However, in my opinion, when it comes to the specific matter of organic search traffic, they’re lagging behind rivals in the space.
Nimble vs. Key Competitors
They’re only receiving approximately 20,000 organic users per month, which is a drop in the ocean compared to Hubspot (7M organic visitors per month) and SalesForce (3M visitors per month).
OK, perhaps it’s unfair to compare them to those behemoths… But if you take a brand like Prosperworks (Now Copper.com) – They have substantially fewer branded searches on Google each month (around 16,000 vs. the 38,000 people searching for Nimble CRM), and still get almost double the volume of organic traffic.
🚀 What Could Nimble Do Better?
Focus more on content quality and depth – Many of their blog posts are far too brief to even compete. Take a look at one of their top-performing pages ranking in position 4 for the word ‘Sales Playbook’. It’s only 650 words in length and not particularly detailed. Compare that to Hubspot’s article ranking in position 1, and you’ll notice the difference – It’s triple the length and far more conclusive. Nimble quite clearly has the domain power to compete, that’s not an issue, but a lack of depth in their content is hurting them organically.
Engage in link building & outreach – Nimble does have some decent content on their website that I’d consider ‘Bookmarkable’ and ‘Linkable’ – But they need to establish an outreach strategy to help drive more links and get them positioned on top. We’ll shortly go into that in more detail.
2) Olark – Live Chat
Olark is one of the OG’s of live chat & customer support software?
If you look at any top 10 list or search for the best live chat software, they’re guaranteed to be there.
They also have an incredibly strong domain rating of 91 and over 92,000 referring domains linking to them. This is an extremely trustworthy website which ‘should’ be able to easily rank for a ton of target keywords.
Olark vs. Key Competitors
- Livechatinc organic monthly traffic – 1,200,000
- Zendesk organic monthly traffic – 280,000
- Freshdesk organic monthly traffic – 70,000
- Olark organic monthly traffic – 40,000
🚀 What Could Olark Do Better?
Develop a content strategy to target more keywords – Competitors such as LiveChatInc are miles in front here – Not only do they rank incredibly well for the keywords you’d expect like “Customer Service Experience” and “Customer Support” but they also have ‘outside the box’ pages like their typing speed test.
Olark’s blog, on the other hand, doesn’t have any real visibility for major keywords. Their content is more focused on random ‘fun’ pieces rather than keyword-researched guides. In fact, their blog is probably only picking up perhaps 1,000 organic visitors per month. As an SEO this seems crazy to me – They have an incredibly powerful domain sitting there, and if they focused even a modest amount of budget into developing some excellent guides and content in-line with their competitors, they would attract significantly more traffic from search engines.
Create more linkable assets – Olark doesn’t really have any content or linkable assets that I’d want to link to. Compare that to LiveChatInc with their typing speed test, Zendesk with their data-driven infographics, and even Freshdesk with their incredibly helpful customer service resume guide.
3) Customer.io – Marketing Automation
I’ve heard truly incredible things about this product. They’re a marketing automation company competing against some incredible brands in a tough space. They’re even featured number 1 on Neil Patel’s list of Marketing Automation tools.
One thing I can’t wrap my head around, however, is why these guys aren’t investing more into driving organic traffic. The fundamentals look incredibly promising to me – They actually do rank pretty well for the small number of blog posts they’ve put out there in the last 5 years, and the domain is a very powerful one with over 6,000 sites linking it to it (Which speaks volumes as to how good this product is).
For example, this article they published back in 2015 actually ranks in the top 4 for “Welcome email template”. That’s very impressive for a 4-year-old article, especially given the tough competition in the space. It’s a website screaming out for some TLC in this department.
What Could Customer.io Do Better?
Publish and develop more blog content – According to their blog, the last time they published an article that wasn’t related to product updates was in April 2018! What I would say is that blog content they published before then was fairly solid but just lacked consistency and volume which is key.
Build links to key posts & pages – This is always the missing piece of the puzzle beyond just having the content & pages in place. You need to actively build links to specific pages in order to outrank the competition. There are plenty of good starting points and good content to promote that I’m sure people would love to link to.
Check out some examples of our work in the SaaS space below, where we’ve helped elevate organic traffic through link building, and help our clients overcome their over-reliance on paid ads.
Case #1 – Website in the SaaS Marketing niche
We doubled the traffic from around 3k visitors/month to 6k visitors/month in three months.
Case #2 – Website in the CRM niche
We started working with them in April 2018, growing from around 13k visitors a month up to the 35k mark.
Why Should You Work with B2B SaaS Link Building Agency
Now that you know the benefits of B2B link building, one question remains.
Should you let the B2B SaaS link-building agency take care of backlinks, or do you want to take care of that in-house?
Let’s see what you get by hiring an agency:
- Link building agencies specialize in building high-quality links for businesses in your industry. They have the expertise and knowledge to create effective B2B link building strategies and execute them successfully.
- Link building can be a time-consuming process, and outsourcing it to a B2B SaaS link building agency can free up your team’s time to focus on other important aspects of your business.
- B2B SaaS link building agencies often have established relationships with other businesses, bloggers, and influencers in your industry. These relationships can provide valuable opportunities for link building and collaboration.
- link building requires ongoing effort and resources to be effective. A B2B SaaS link-building agency can provide scalable solutions to meet your business’s growing needs and help you achieve your goals.
- Top B2B SaaS link building agencies are results-oriented and focus on achieving measurable results for your business. They use data-driven strategies to track the performance of your link building efforts and adjust their approach to improve results.
How to Choose the Right SaaS Link Building Agency
Choosing the right SaaS Link Building Agency is a challenging task. But once you find the right fit for your website, then you will notice your website growing.
Outsourcing your link building is the best thing you can do for growing your website.
Here is what you need to consider when choosing a link building agency for SAAS websites.
- Research the niche of the agency. Are they specialized in SAAS or any relevant industry?
- Look at their clients’ portfolios and what links they provide them. Examine these links and get an idea of the quality.
- Book a demo call and learn about the service in detail; ask all the questions, such as whether they will sign a contract, as the contract strengthens the partnership and guarantees that you will get quality backlinks. GoPeak always signs an agreement with the clients, providing all the promised backlinks and respecting the deadlines.
- Make sure they use white hat strategies, as spammy and low-quality links can harm your website.
- What sets them apart in the market? For instance, LoudGrowth offers the first link for FREE, giving a chance to learn about their service for free and make a relaxed decision.
- A professional SAAS link building agency should be transparent and provide all the details of its link building strategies. Thus, we offer a tracking sheet that makes it easier to follow all the live links and make comments when needed.
- Make sure that their link building team is professional and responsive. As in link building outsourcing, you need to find a link building agency that is responsive, reliable, and respects deadlines.
- Most importantly, avoid link building agencies that use black-hate strategies or buy unreliable lins. Link building is the best investment for your website, but spammy links can ruin the authority and rank of your website in the long run.
FAQs
What is a SaaS link building agency?
A SaaS link building agency is a company that specializes in creating and managing backlinks for Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. These agencies use various strategies and techniques to help SaaS businesses improve their online visibility, drive more traffic, and improve their search engine rankings.
What kind of results can I expect from a top SaaS link building agency?
While results can vary, you can generally expect to see an increase in your website’s search engine rankings, an improvement in your site’s domain authority, more organic traffic, and, ultimately, more conversions. However, remember that link building is a long-term strategy and it may take some time to see significant results.
How much does it cost to hire a B2B SaaS link building agency?
The cost of hiring a SaaS link building agency can vary greatly depending on the scope of the project, the agency’s reputation and experience, and the specific services provided. It’s best to reach out to several agencies for quotes to get an idea of the average cost for your specific needs.
Why is link building important for SaaS companies?
Link building is essential for SaaS companies as it significantly impacts the visibility of their website on search engines. The more high-quality backlinks a website has, the more likely it is to rank higher in search engine results. This can lead to increased traffic, brand awareness, and ultimately, conversions.
Why Should You Outsource Link Building?
You pay for tools, subscriptions, link building specialists, backing managers, guest posts, and content writers for in-house link building. If you outsource your link building, you pay for the links. Most companies pay only for the links and do not have extra operational costs. It would help if you outsourced your link building to get both cost-effective and result-oriented solutions.