Last Updated on by Artem K.
Wondering what link building statistics look like for a SaaS link building campaign?
Producing results like these takes a lot of boring, monotonous work but it’s all worth it.
So in today’s post, I go over the exact number of emails we send out, the amount of quality of backlinks that we received for our link building service agency client, and everything that’s in between.
Let’s jump right to it!
We use only 2 link building techniques to produce 100% of backlinks for our SaaS clients.
If you are somewhat familiar with link building, you know that there are tons of link building strategies and techniques.
The most important thing is to find the ones that work for you and go all in.
Is guest posting your forte? Go for it!
Love HARO? Shoot!
Just don’t to do everything at once as it’s overwhelming.
See link building tips to speed up SaaS rankings and some other link building strategies.
We send out up to 100 emails per email address on any given day
Cold email outreach is an essential part of outbound link building and we send out a lot of emails on a daily basis.
The average conversion rate for the links placed is <1%
So to get 10 high-quality backlinks, we need to contact more than 1000 separate recipients but…
Our link building quality standards are really high as we only get links with the highest metrics – DR40-70+, 1000+ monthly traffic and place links on relevant pages (i.e. These source pages contain the keywords our clients want to rank for themselves).
Our conversion rates would be significantly higher if we were getting links with, say, DR20+.
See our link building campaign outline.
Our VA can find up to 160 qualified prospects per day
You can define a “qualified prospect” as a relevant URL with DR40-70+ and 1000+ Monthly Traffic overall.
It also wouldn’t have any significant traffic drops during the last years.
It also wouldn’t look like a link farm website that exists solely to sell backlinks.
Last but not least, a qualified prospect would also include an email address that we then use for pitching.
Don’t make these link building mistakes that slow down organic rankings.
We follow up 2 times to get the most quality backlinks
In link building, even though a lot of replies come from the first point of contact (contrary to what people are saying) some of the juiciest, most hard-to-get links require more touch points because, let’s be honest, a random link building message from a random internet person is not a top priority on anybody’s to-do list.
We only follow up twice after sending the initial message because it seems to be the ideal number of touchpoints.
PRO TIP: At times I like going back to the list that we previously contacted 2-4 months ago and…pitch them again using a slightly different outreach template. The conversion rates are lower for it but I was surprised to learn just how many great opportunities we were able to obtain from doing this!
Check out these 8 types of content that attract backlinks for SaaS.
We build 10 backlinks per client per month
This seems to be the golden number of targeted backlinks our clients choose to be supplied with.
Granted, they obtain a good number of links naturally but our work helps to make link acquisition more targeted.
To give some context…
SaaS companies tend to get ~85% of their links directed to the homepage.
While it’s great and everything, it doesn’t help much with ranking specific URLs because…they have competitors outranking them based on the number of backlinks they get to the individual pages.
This is when we come in building backlinks directly to the pages that need them the most.
The results are great because we are able to mimic a natural link building pattern where some links go to the homepage whereas others flow to other URLs.
Google loves that.
Learn about effective outreach for SaaS!
We pay $40-60 per link placement
Gone are the days when you could get your links free of charge simply because you had published “great content” (hello 2018!).
Right now we pay based on the website’s DR as follows from Ahrefs.
So a DR50 website is priced at ~50 USD, whereas a DR60 website would be priced well at ~60 USD.
Naturally, a lot of replies that we get quote a price that’s too high for us.
I see DR50 websites going for $100, $200, and $350 per link.
Arguably, they are, on average, of better quality because far fewer people would actually purchase a link for that much.
However, it’s not uncommon to see these sites relying on inexperienced SaaS SEO professionals with little understanding of what’s “quality” (e.g. Very frequently DR can be unnaturally overblown whereas you’d see a massive DR with a tiny amount of monthly traffic – huge red sign).
Important: not all DR50/60 websites are made equal! We end up NOT working with far more websites than we get backlinks from. That’s how we are able to almost guarantee long-term growth for our clients.
See also – Recover SaaS SEO From Google Algorithm Update Fast
It takes up to 12 back-and-forth emails to place an A-B-C link
If you read any of my previous posts, you know that we use a lot of A-B-C link exchanging and that too requires email communication.
To quickly recap the technique…
Our client gets a backlink from a website that we supply with a backlink from a 3rd party website that we can get a link from.
This is the best way to obtain high DR backlinks but…it requires a lot of emailing and negotiation (not including the bits where one or the other party starts ghosting our requests).
We get backlinks with DR40-70+
In fact, our previous campaign for a SaaS operating in cloud cost intelligence field brought in 6 DR70+ backlinks.
The breakdowns for this campaign are:
- Average DR:
- Max DR:
- Min DR:
- Max Traffic:
- Min Traffic:
If we are getting links by “simply paying” for them, we need approx. 7 emails to get the placement confirmed – it’s far easier because it also doesn’t require any additional work on the background.