Unlocking Growth: 9 Compelling Reasons to Outsource SaaS Link Building
We know that backlinks are one of Google’s top 3 ranking factors. It builds trust, increases rankings on SERPs, and attracts more audience to your SaaS business.
But carrying out link-building activities isn’t as easy as it seems. You need to find relevant opportunities, locate the right people and their email addresses and craft a persuasive outreach email. Then, wait for weeks to get a reply - if you get a response.
The result is often ignored emails and a lot of frustration.
That’s why outsourcing SaaS link building is a great solution. As a link-building and SaaS SEO agency, we have helped clients like Good Annotations build 300 new backlinks in 90 days. Let’s discover why you should outsource link building for your SaaS company.
What We'll Cover:
Why You Should Outsource Your SaaS Link Building
Below are eight reasons to outsource SaaS link building.
Outsourcing Makes Link Building Faster
Our SEO experts have been doing link-building for many years. When they started, they had to figure out how to do things which took them quite a bit of time.
After all, authoritative websites get an avalanche of emails every day for guest posting or link-building.
Training someone to find the right opportunities or get their emails noticed by top sites like HubSpot can involve spending thousands of dollars and weeks of precious time.
But when you outsource this job to a trusted SEO agency, you get instant results as they have already established relationships and understand how to do things.
Outsourcing Link Building is Cheaper
Many marketers think that building links in-house is way cheaper. But if you want to build high-quality links, here’s a breakdown of the costs you’d have to incur:
- Hiring a link-building expert with 5+ years of experience
- Email finder tools, SEO tools, and outreach tools that cost hundreds of dollars.
- A team of freelance writers to write quality guest posts if you’re aiming for 70+ DA links
- A manager to look after all these activities.
When you calculate all these costs - not to forget the time you’ll have to spend on getting even a single link - you’ll find that outsourcing link-building activities is cheaper.
Outsourcing Allows to Collaborate with SEO Experts
When you outsource your link-building strategy to an agency, you get to collaborate with SEO experts with vast experience and knowledge. These SEO experts have worked with many SaaS companies and have a great idea of what works and what doesn’t.
This not only helps you create strong backlinks, but you can also leverage their expertise to get guidance on other SEO campaigns and activities you undertake.
Outsourcing Requires Consistency
You got two great links from authoritative websites. Should you put up your feet and rest now? No, especially when your competitors are trying to get more and more backlinks.
When you conduct link-building efforts in-house, you might get five backlinks this month, three backlinks the next, and four backlinks in the month after. Some months you may get none at all.
Link-building agencies deliver what they promise more consistently, as they have experts who do this job all day.
Outsourcing Gets You to High Authority Sites
Not all links hold the same value. Links from websites with high domain authority and monthly traffic are more valuable than links from other sites.
Link-building agencies generally know how to separate the best from the rest and spend time cultivating relationships with the best companies.
This helps them get easy access to build links and thus helps your business reach high-authority sites.
Outsourcing Does Not Require Multiple Skill Sets
Even if you hire an in-house link-building team, you need teammates with multiple skills. Here are some skills link-building requires:
- SEO expertise to find the right opportunities
- Writing/Content creation
- Project management
- Negotiation/persuasion ability
- Expertise in using several different tools (Tech savviness)
- Project management
When you work with an SEO agency, you get access to experts who have built these skills and worked on many link-building campaigns over the years.
Outsourcing Helps You Get Accountability for Results
You need to be consistent with any SEO strategies to achieve success. The same holds for link-building. To keep getting featured in the top SERPs, you need to keep building more backlinks.
By partnering with an SEO agency, you increase accountability as they have a wide range of resources to get the job done. As they are experts in their field, there’s a minuscule chance of underperforming.
Link Building Requires Full Commitment
Link building isn’t as simple as sending a great outreach email to a high-quality website and getting a link the next day. Sometimes, months can go between contacting the website and getting your link or post published.
It's why you need to keep shortlisting websites and reaching out to them on a daily basis. This requires full commitment and isn’t a one-person job. By sharing this responsibility with a link-building agency, you can save a lot of time.
How to Outsource Your SaaS Link Building
Now that you know how beneficial outsourcing your link-building can be, here’s how to get started.
Pick the Right Agency for You
There are a lot of agencies that provide link-building services. Which one should you opt for quality link-building services?
Here is a checklist you can use:
- Check their specialization: SaaS businesses require a unique strategy and perspective. Check if your agency has experience working with SaaS clients.
- Finalize your budget: Different agencies will have different charges. As backlinking generally takes time, you need to figure out how much you’d like to spend for 3-6 months. Check if the agency’s rate card comes under your budget.
- See their case studies: If they provide link-building, check if they have any client success stories.
- Check if they offer any guarantee: Do they promise to build backlinks from authority and relevant domains? What would happen if they fail to provide these backlinks?
MADX is one SaaS agency that hits all the points in this checklist. Check out our link-building service.
Research the Agency’s Backlinks and Off-page SEO
If an agency claims to provide you with relevant and high-quality backlinks, it’s expected that they follow the same for their business.
You can check the agency’s backlinks and off-page SEO to get an idea of the links they will help you attain.
Ahrefs has a free backlink checker tool where you can put the agency’s website and see their backlinks.
When you check these backlinks, don’t only consider the DA of the referring domain. These backlinks must be helping the business. For example, we get many quality backlinks from listicles of top agencies, helping us grow our business and rankings.
Similarly, you can check the backlink profile of their clients as well. To do that, head over to their customer stories and see the clients that opted for their link-building services. Put their website in Ahrefs and gauge the results.
Check the Agency’s Reviews and Past Clients
SaaS companies usually require a laser-focused approach and specialized SEO strategies that help them beat the competition. This is why checking the agency’s past clients is a must. Agencies generally showcase this information on their website; you can even ask them for their client list.
To check the effectiveness of the agency’s strategies, you can go through their past client reviews.
You will generally find these reviews on their website.
If there are no reviews on the agency’s website, it’s best to avoid them.
If you want SaaS-specific reviews, many companies contact the agency’s clients to ask for their reviews. Instead of doing this step at the start, shortlist some agencies and then conduct this research to avoid wasting time.
Make Sure the Agency Doesn’t Do Black Hat SEO
While link-building is important to establish trust and increase rankings, engaging in black hat SEO practices can penalize and severely damage your business.
Black hat link building is the process of acquiring links through unethical or illegal means. These strategies are frowned upon by search engines like Google and may result in your website getting a hit in rankings.
In some extreme cases, this can lead to your website being de-indexed from search engines and not showing up in any queries.
Some of these black hat strategies include;
- spamming blog comments to get links,
- writing low-quality guest posts,
- creating private blog networks,
- engaging in devious redirects,
- and buying links from spammy websites.
You must be sure the agency only follows white hat link-building techniques. You can contact the shortlisted agencies on your list and ask for their link-building process to check the practices and strategies they deploy.
Set Expectations and Success Metrics
It’s important to have clear goals and expectations for your link-building activities. This helps you shortlist the right agency and enter the process with relevant success metrics.
Here are some success metrics that are often used to check backlink growth and relevancy:
- Growth in new referring domains: How many new domains have you got backlinks from? Is this graph increasing or steady?
- Increase in target page positions on SERPs: Are the pages you’re getting backlinks seeing an increase in rankings?
- Organic traffic growth: Do you see growth in the organic traffic for those linked pages and your overall website?
While on a meeting with the agency, let them know your expectations and the purpose for engaging in link building. This will also start a conversation on how they set success metrics for their clients and their previous campaigns. Depending on this information, you can decide whether the agency will be able to meet your goals or not.
Understand That Link Building Takes Time
Like any SEO strategy, link building takes time to perfect and get results. After all, you’re not in it to acquire 5 or 10 links and call it a day.
You need to keep grinding to see an increase in page ranking and a boost in website traffic. For example, it took us two months to get over 300 new backlinks for our client. And it didn’t stop there. We had to keep working to keep getting better results.
This can be difficult to execute every single day. That’s why outsourcing your link-building activities can be so effective. Your team can focus on creating top-notch content, while ours can focus on getting you relevant, high-quality backlinks.
How Much Should SaaS Link Building Outsourcing Cost?
Many factors determine the pricing of link-building activities. Some of the more critical factors are the quality, number of backlinks that will be provided and additional services included, like guest posting or backlink audit. You can opt for payment options like per-month or per-link pricing with some agencies.
While the monthly pricing varies from agency to agency, the per-link pricing rates are anywhere from $150 to $1500, depending on the kind of links you wish to acquire. This price may vary from agency to agency, depending on the strategies they use.
Compared to the cost of hiring a full-fledged link-building team, the costs involved in outsourcing this activity are quite less.
Avoid These SaaS Link-Building Outsourcing Mistakes
While outsourcing link building is a great option, you must still be wary of some common mistakes that SaaS businesses make. Here are three of them.
Cheap Link Building Service
In the hunt to get a lot of backlinks, you may be tempted to select an agency that promises to provide you with hundreds of backlinks at a cost-effective rate.
But should you select an agency based on the cost alone?
We beg to differ. Many agencies follow black hat link-building practices or practices that get you a lot of backlinks but from low-authority sites.
Instead of correcting these low-quality links later on, pay a little more upfront but select an agency that will dedicate proper time and get you relevant, high-quality links.
Quantity Over Quality
Many SaaS businesses make the mistake of prioritizing link quantity over link quality.
For example, take these two examples:
Link A: Comes from a highly reputed website that falls in your niche
Link B: Comes from a low authority website that doesn’t have any relation to your niche
Which do you think is the better option? Link A, right? Creating relevant and high-quality links takes considerably more time than the latter links, but it’s also more effective in the long run.
It also gives an added boost to your business’ credibility and trust. So, don’t worry if your agency provides you with fewer links but high-quality ones. If the links have high domain authority, are relevant to your page’s topic, and are from a trustworthy domain, the agency is delivering for you.
Expecting Link Building to Solve Everything
Link building is one element of a successful SEO strategy. While it can help you improve your rankings and get more traffic, you need to use that to supplement other important strategies like creating great content and targeting the right keywords.
You must also focus on website factors like indexing issues, mobile responsiveness, and loading time.
If you are not well-versed in how SEO works or how you can build an effective SEO strategy, many agencies provide SEO services at a specific cost when you subscribe to their link-building service.
Kickstart Your Backlink Strategy Today!
Outsourcing your link-building activities instead of conducting them in-house has many benefits:
- It makes link-building faster
- It makes link-building cheaper
- It allows collaboration with SEO experts
- It delivers consistency
- It opens the door to high-authority sites
- It reduces the workload for your team
- It saves time and money on training
- It increases accountability for results
- It frees you to work on other parts of your business
While getting a stellar link profile for your business may take some time, you can set your SaaS business for success by ensuring the agency you select meets all the above criteria.
If you’re looking for an agency that helps you with the right link-building strategies, feel free to get in touch with us to see if we’re the right fit for your SaaS company.
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