According to Statista, over 2 billion people worldwide are expected to buy goods and services online in 2021, up from 1.6 billion users in 2016.

Link building is essential to grow and maintain a top presence in Google’s SERP. However, in-house link building can often become quite a challenge in terms of funds, resources, and time, especially for new businesses operating in highly competitive industries such as SaaS businesses.

In today’s article, we will take you through the benefits of SaaS link building, reasons on why you need to consider outsourcing SaaS link building, and tips to hire the perfect partner for your website’s link building tactics.

How Link Building Benefits SaaS Websites?

Now, link building helps all the websites out there.

How different is its impact on businesses, especially SaaS websites?

Below are some of the best benefits that link building offers for SaaS websites.

1. Better Credibility in the Eyes of Search Engines

Search engines like Google consider backlinks from external sources as a vote of trust. Therefore, the more number of external backlinks to your site, the better credibility your website has in the eyes of search engines.

This statement is further cemented by a Backlinko study where over 11 million web pages in Google’s SERP were analyzed. The results show that website’s with more backlinks from higher authority external sites rank at the top spots in Google.

Source

2. Build Trust Among Targeted Audience

A Salesforce research publication found that over 95 percent of customers stay loyal to a brand if they trust it.

By building high authority backlinks to improve your search rankings, you get placed on top spots in SERP for all the important keywords of your niche.

Thus, anyone who searches for keywords related to your niche will find content from your website on top, which increases the authority and sense of trust among your readers.

3. Generate Better Leads

You generally do a guest post on a website that is relevant to your niche and business. When you contribute a high-quality & helpful article to someone else’s website, there are great chances that you will get referral traffic. Ultimately, such referral traffic may improve your leads and sales figures.

4. Better Ranking for Your Key Pages

As Neil Patel puts it in his guide for link building strategies, building high-quality and authoritative backlinks to your business website directly improves the SERP performance of your website’s key pages such as the landing page, product page, blog posts, etc.

Thus, you also get to experience better organic search results with a proper link-building strategy in place.

5. Become an Authority in Your Business Domain

Why do SEO professionals religiously follow guides from websites like Search Engine Journal, Moz.com, etc?

It’s because they are considered as the authority when it comes to providing informative and valuable information to the users.

Link building plays an essential role to make sure that the content from such websites always appears on top of the SERP.

Similarly, as link building improves your website’s ranking and overall reach, your website and its content will also be referenced by many people out there, thus making your business an authority in its domain.

When to Outsource Link Building for your SaaS?

Link building is essential for all business websites.

But, when should you consider outsourcing the task?

Below are some key points that can help you decide on whether to outsource your link-building efforts.

• Instead of throwing your funds and resources at the wall to find out effective link building tactics, hiring a professional agency will help you achieve the same goal at an affordable price.
• Outsourcing makes sense if you have a limited team with too many tasks to handle.
• If there are no SEO professionals in your team, then outsourcing is better than hiring new personnel.
• In case you’re considering link-building as a serious mode to grow results, then outsourcing to experienced professionals guarantees you better results.
• If you wish to bring quick results, then outsourcing the link-building tasks can guarantee the same.

11 Reasons to Outsource Your SaaS Link Building

Below we have discussed the top 10 reasons to outsource your SaaS link-building efforts.

1. Outsourcing is Affordable

SaaS startups often have a funding crunch and want to spend it the best way possible.

Keeping the cost of links aside, which itself costs $100 and above depending on quality, there are several other costs involved in having an in-house SEO team.

Based on our industry experience of over 10 years, below is the average time required to build 15 links in a month.

Task	Average Monthly Time Requirement
Building a list of websites that meet your quality and niche requirements.	8 hours per month.
Implementing outreach campaigns to proceed with the link building.	16 hours per month.
Negotiations and follow-ups with websites.	40 hours per month.
Researching content ideas.	12 hours per month.
Creating high-quality content (15 Nos)	120 hours per month.
Result analysis and off-page SEO implementation	16 hours per month.

As you can see from the above table, the efforts to build just 15 high-quality links per month require more than 200 hours.

If you combine the time commitment expenses with the sky-rocketing salary scale of an SEO professional, which exceeds over $47,000 per annum (according to Glassdoor), it isn’t difficult to understand why outsourcing makes complete sense.

Instead of building a team of SEO professionals by spending tens of thousands of dollars each month, you can get the task outsourced for monthly costs that range anywhere between $500 and $20,000.

The cost variation depends on the quality and number of links built.

2. Dedicated Service Providers Are Always Industry-Updated

As MOZ puts in their article on SEO basics, the principles used by search engines to rank sites are crawlability, site structure, keywords, and backlinks.

Even though the basic ingredients haven’t changed, Google’s algorithms have become really smart in analyzing whether a website’s link building techniques are genuine or not.

This is well-proven by the frequent link spam updates by Google that finds websites that follow spammy link building techniques and penalizes them.

Professional link building agencies are well-versed on the latest changes in Google’s techniques and will only follow practises that aren’t deemed spammy by the search engine.

3. SaaS Link Building is a Long-Term Commitment

SEO success isn’t just about building a few hundred backlinks and then enjoying your organic reach. Even if you can see immediate improvement by building a few backlinks, the results aren’t sustainable.

A long-term and focussed approach of rinse & repeat is essential for sustained SEO success. Achieving such a level of long-term commitment with an in-house team can be quite difficult.

Hiring an outsourced team as your SEO partner will help you in achieving sustained and long-term growth. Especially as the outsource team will be able to regularly assess your website’s growth and implement necessary changes.

4. They Know What Works Best for Your Business

When it comes to SaaS link building, the goal isn’t just to build links, but also to improve the awareness of your business.

As professional SEO service providers work with different kinds of websites and businesses, they will know what type of links work best for your website, in terms of passing both link juice and page rank.

5. It Allows You to Manage a Simple and Effective Workforce

As pointed out by Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, in an Entrepreneur article, having lots of employees increases the burn rate of your business, thus losing you money.

Thus, startups, especially new ones, must try to have a short and effective workforce consisting of only the necessary personnel.

For most startups, in-house SEO professionals aren’t necessary.

Thus, outsourcing your SEO needs helps you to have a simpler workforce and also get the most benefit for your money.

6. Service Providers are Always Result Hungry

The number of SEO service providers has exponentially increased, especially in the last decade.

Thus, just like any other business venture out there, SEO service providers must produce results to keep their existing clients happy and gain new ones.

So, by hiring a professional and competitive link building agency to handle your business’s link-building tasks, you can be guaranteed of best results.

7. They Can Get You Links from High-Quality Sites

Links from high-quality websites are essential for the success of any link-building strategy.

Professional link building agencies will have a list of high-quality websites on various niches from which they resource backlinks depending on client requirements.

Thus, you can get backlinks from high-authority sites with little to no effort from your side.

8. Outsourcing SaaS Link Building Helps Improve Your Profits

By outsourcing your link-building efforts, you no longer have to spend on the workforce, tools, and other necessities required to build worthy backlinks.

Instead, all you’re charged is a reasonable monthly fee for the availed services.

This guarantees an increase in profits which otherwise would be spent on resources and workforce.

Moreover, by outsourcing the task, you can periodically assess the efforts put in by the link building agency and if required re-negotiate the prices or hire a better team.

9. They Build Great Content As Well As Links

Well, it is not impossible to find high-quality and high-authority websites in a niche relevant to your SaaS business.

Why is it then difficult to build backlinks from such websites?

It is because high-quality websites don’t give away backlinks easily to not lose their existing value.

High-quality websites demand, well, high-quality content that is unique, well-researched, and offers some valuable information to their audience.

Generating high-quality content is a prime factor to get high-quality backlinks. Link building agencies have dedicated content creators that spend hundreds of hours weekly researching and writing content that impresses editors of high-quality websites.

10. They Can Target Broader Keywords to Improve Your Reach

Proper keyword research is also an essential SEO tactic. Link-building tactics can only be fruitful if proper anchor keywords are targeted.

Link building agencies will ensure that your backlinks are made via a variety of anchor texts including keyword-rich anchors, generic keywords, business-specific keywords, LSI keywords, etc.

Moreover, link building agencies that have SEO professionals in the team can also suggest you with keywords that can improve the overall link building results.

11. They Can Help You with SaaS SEO Strategy

In comparison to ordinary websites, the search ecosystem works differently for SaaS websites.

Thus, by hiring agencies experienced in SaaS link building, you get to enjoy the benefits of their knowledge in how the SaaS search ecosystem works and how it can be tweaked to benefit your business.

5 Tips to Keep in Mind While Outsourcing SaaS Link Building

By reading this article until now, you got to know the benefits of outsourcing SaaS link building.

However, that doesn’t mean that you go out there and hire a SaaS link-building agency right away.

Below are 5 tips to keep in mind while outsourcing SaaS link building.

1. Do Your Research

Well, if you outsource SaaS link building, it means that you don’t have to worry about it anymore, right?

No, definitely No!

It is essential that you have the basics of link building in general, as well as link building techniques for SaaS businesses. By having a basic idea, you will be able to easily understand any briefings given by your SEO service provider.

2. State Your Expectations Clearly

For best link building results, request backlinks from the below kind of sources.

• Websites with Domain Rating (DR) of 30 and above.
• Sites with an average Ahrefs traffic of at least 1000 visitors per month.
• Websites with Domain Authority (DA) of 40 and above.
• Sites with a growth in their backlinks profile and organic traffic.

3. Ask for a Brief Overview of their Link Building Strategy

Once your expectations are explained to the service provider, you must take a briefing from them about how they’re planning to proceed with the link building for your business.

The service provider won’t be going through everything in detail. However, knowing about the techniques that’ll be followed gives you an idea about when to start expecting results from the link-building tactics.

4. Evaluate Your Options

There are lots of SEO service providers out there, especially ones that focus on SaaS link building. Therefore, as with any other type of purchase, make sure to evaluate your options before making a choice.

Make sure to consider the past work experience, cost structure, and result guarantee, while evaluating your options.

5. Don’t Commit for Long-term, Initially!

Businesses always love to gain long-term partners, and the same is true with SEO service providers as well.

However, as a business availing services from a SaaS link-building agency, you shouldn’t make any long-term commitments during the initial stage.

Check out the service provider for a few months. If you’re able to see positive results out of the partnership, only then work out a long-term commitment.

Bonus Tip:

Always ask for sample of their work so that you can judge the backlinks-quality they have create for other SaaS businesses. You need to ensure you are not getting low-quality links for your website.

Last But Not Least, before Outsourcing SaaS link building…

Lastly, we would like to remind you that link-building agencies are modern marketing firms.

So, it is only common for such service providers to market their services and expertise as something out of this world.

Never fall for false commitments and promises made by any link-building agency.

Always ask for proof of any claims made.

And more importantly, don’t blindly follow any service provider based on just the initial results that they provide.

Make sure to periodically evaluate the results of their link-building efforts to ensure that you get sustained results.