Guide
Link building for SaaS
Advertisers pay about twenty dollars for a single click on this phrase.
We know because we measured it before writing this page, and it explains the advice you have already read: when a click costs that much, the people bidding are selling retainers, and the articles that rank are their brochures.
So the genre starts at “audit your competitors’ backlink gap” and never mentions that a small SaaS can collect its first batch of links for roughly the price of lunch.
This page is the sequence we use ourselves, cheapest lane first, with what each one actually returned. The dollar figures are our own receipts, not industry estimates.
Spend the free lanes first
Directories and launch platforms are where links are lying on the ground. A form, sometimes a fee, no persuasion required, and for a domain that is weeks old they are usually the only links available at all: nobody cites software that has no users yet.
What the lanes return varies more than their marketing suggests, which is why we check rather than assume.
Our own results, all from this year: a free launch queue listed us in three days and the link came back nofollow. A $99 paid listing also took three days and came back dofollow, on an indexable page of a DR 77 domain.
Both are fine outcomes. The point is that the free one and the paid one cost three days each and only one of them passes anything, and you cannot tell which from the invoice.
The lane has a ceiling, and it arrives fast. The directory guide covers where it stops paying.
The short version: the first few listings are the cheapest links you will ever get, the fiftieth is landfill, and a burst of hundreds in one afternoon is the exact pattern that gets a profile discounted. A handful at a time, spread over weeks.
Price the trades before taking them
The second lane is links you pay for with something other than money.
Some platforms make the trade explicit: one launch platform we use lists you free on the condition that you link back from your homepage or footer, and sells the requirement away from $29. That framing is unusually honest, because it names what the free tier costs: a permanent slot on your own page.
Badges, link-backs and swap deals all price out the same way.
Early on the trade is good: if your homepage carries few or no reciprocal links, a swap is among the cheapest dofollow links a new product can get.
The cost compounds later, because reciprocal links need to stay a minority of your dofollow profile, and a homepage wearing a wall of mutual badges is the pattern search engines discount. The exchange guide explains why that limit is a ratio and not a number.
You will notice we never say how many badges is enough. That is deliberate: the honest advice only ever says when to stop, never to add more.
Count the links your product creates, correctly
A SaaS generates link surfaces as a side effect of existing: marketplace listings, an integration partner’s directory, docs on a subdomain, a repository, a changelog somebody quotes.
Founders tend to either forget these entirely or count them all as backlinks, and both are wrong in instructive ways.
We shipped a Chrome extension this summer, and the store listing links back to our site. Measured, that link carries nofollow.
Real page, real referral traffic, nothing passed for ranking, and most marketplace links work the same way.
File them under distribution. They are worth having and they are not link building, and knowing which of your links is which is worth more than either.
The tempting version of this lane is the “powered by” footer link in every customer’s site. It works until it looks like what it is: branded anchor, fine; keyword-stuffed dofollow injected at scale, a widget link scheme by Google’s own definition.
Keep the anchor your name and let the traffic be the point.
Half of this section was the word nofollow. Before counting any link you did not build yourself, read its rel. Check yours now, no account needed.
Build one thing worth citing
Past the self-serve lanes, links have to be earned from people who owe you nothing, and the reliable way is to make the thing a writer links to instead of explaining.
A checker, a calculator, a dataset only you can produce: something that answers a question in one page. This is the oldest play in SaaS marketing and it still works, because it converts your engineering advantage into citations.
Disclosure rather than case study: the free checkers on this site are us running that exact play, and they are new enough that we will not pretend to results.
What we can say is what the play costs, which is real engineering time, and what it is for, which is links nobody can discount because they were given for a reason.
One good tool beats five thin ones, and a tool that restates a competitor’s tool earns nothing.
Where the retainer belongs
Agencies sell labour: prospecting, outreach, content production, follow-up, at a volume a founder cannot sustain.
That is a real service in the right position, and the right position is after the lanes above are spent, because an agency hired on day one starts by doing what you could have done in an afternoon, at retainer prices.
Outreach and guest posting each have their own guide, including the one question that keeps a guest post on the right side of the spam policy.
The lane to skip entirely is bought placement. Sites that sell links host an audience made entirely of other people buying links, on pages built to carry them, and the same budget put into one useful free tool produces links that need no laundering.
That is the whole argument; it does not need a lecture.
The step every plan skips
A link is not an asset until it is verified
Live is one check. The rel is a second. Whether the page carrying it is indexable is a third, and whether robots.txt lets a crawler reach it at all is a fourth. A link can pass the first and fail the other three while looking identical in a backlink report, and each of the four can change months after you stopped looking.
Every lane above feeds the same ledger, and the ledger rots quietly: listings get pruned, templates get rebuilt with a new rel, pages fall out of the index. Nothing notifies you.
The lost backlinks guide covers the four ways a link dies.
The operational answer is to check on a schedule instead of on suspicion, which for a SaaS founder means automating it, because nobody re-reads fifty listing pages monthly by hand.
Questions people actually ask
How do you build backlinks for a SaaS or startup?
In a specific order, cheapest first. Directory and launch-platform listings come first because they are lying on the ground: a form, sometimes a fee, and a link a new domain can get in days. Trades come second, priced honestly, because a badge or a link-back costs a permanent slot on your homepage. Then the surfaces your product creates anyway: marketplace listings, integration pages, docs. A linkable asset, something people cite instead of re-explaining, comes after that, and cold outreach last, because it only starts paying once there is something to point at.
How much does link building for SaaS cost?
Our own receipts: most of our first links cost nothing but the form. One paid directory listing cost $99 and produced a dofollow link on an indexable page in three days. Agencies quote monthly retainers in the low thousands, and what that buys is labour, outreach and content production at a scale a founder cannot do alone. The mistake is buying the retainer before the free and cheap lanes are spent, because the agency will start by doing what you could have done in an afternoon.
Are directory backlinks worth it for a SaaS?
The first handful, clearly yes: they are the cheapest links a new domain will ever get, and some are dofollow on indexable pages of strong domains. After the first batch the returns fall off sharply, and a burst of hundreds of directory links in one afternoon is the classic pattern search engines discount. A handful at a time, verified, beats any bulk submission, and no, four hundred is not the goal.
Do Chrome Web Store or app marketplace listings count as backlinks?
They are real links and mostly nofollow. We measured our own extension listing: the link back to us carries nofollow, which means real referral traffic and nothing passed for ranking. That is not a reason to skip marketplaces, it is a reason to file them under distribution rather than link building, and to know which of your links are which instead of counting them all as equity.
Should a SaaS buy backlinks?
Buying placement on link-selling sites buys you links whose entire audience is other people buying links, on pages built to carry them, which is the precise pattern the link spam policies describe. It also wastes the money: the same spend on one genuinely useful free tool or dataset produces links that nobody can discount. Hiring an agency for outreach labour is a different thing and can be worth it once the self-serve lanes are exhausted.
Do "powered by" footer links from customers work?
They work exactly until they look like what they are. A branded link in the footer of a product built on yours is a real citation. The same link with a keyword-stuffed anchor, injected dofollow into every customer site at scale, is a widget link scheme by Google’s own definition and gets discounted or worse. Keep the anchor your brand name, let customers remove it, and treat the traffic as the point.
How many backlinks does a new SaaS need?
Nobody can tell you, including us, and the number you have is probably miscounted anyway: links die, flip to nofollow, or sit on pages that fell out of the index, and none of that announces itself. The useful questions are whether the links you already earned still exist, still pass anything, and still sit on pages search engines can read. Those are checkable, one page at a time.
The lanes are the easy part. Knowing what they produced is the product.
ShipDR tracks every listing you earn across all of these lanes, reads each one on a schedule, and reports whether the link is live, dofollow and on a page search engines can read, plus what each one cost you. Adding a website and charting its DR is free; the engine is $10 once, per website.
- Every listing rechecked on a schedule, not once
- Live, dofollow and indexable, read from the page itself
- Told the day a backlink drops or flips
Adding a website and charting its Domain Rating is free, no card. The backlink engine is $10 once, per website, with no subscription.