SaaS link building: which pages earn links and how to build them

SaaS link building is getting other websites to link to a software company's site. A software company has page types that other businesses do not: free tools, original research, integration pages and documentation.

This page sets out what studies of 300 and 420 SaaS sites show about links, which SaaS pages earn links, how integration directories and listings work, how to find where competitors are linked, and how we build links for SaaS companies.

What is SaaS link building?

Link building for SaaS companies is the same job as link building for any site: getting links from other websites to yours. Two things are different for a software company.

The first difference is the pages worth linking to. A SaaS site can offer a free tool that does one job in the browser, a data report drawn from the product, and an integration page describing how the product works with another product. These sit alongside the feature and use-case pages that describe what the software does.

The second difference is the places that link. Beside the blogs and news sites that link to any business, a software company can appear on software marketplaces, integration directories and partner pages, each with its own conditions.

SaaS backlinks are the links that result, and a SaaS link building strategy is the choice of which pages to build links to and which routes to use. The rest of this page takes each page type and each route in turn.

Our position: followed links from relevant, indexed, read publications are one of the strongest ranking levers a site has.

What a study of 420 SaaS sites shows about links and traffic

A study of 420 established SaaS sites measured the relationship between referring domains and organic traffic and found a correlation of 0.673. The study is by Digital Gratified, a SaaS SEO agency, published on 29 March 2026 with the data pulled in March 2026.

The study covered, in its words, "420 SaaS websites with 20,000+ monthly organic traffic and DR 70+". DR is Ahrefs' Domain Rating. A referring domain is one website that links to you: several links from the same site still count as a single referring domain.

The headline measure: "The Pearson correlation between log(referring domains) and log(organic traffic) across all 420 sites is r = 0.673". In plain terms, a correlation of 0.673 means that across those 420 sites, the sites with more referring domains tended to have more organic traffic.

Digital Gratified also divided the 420 sites into tiers by referring-domain count. The 61 sites with fewer than 5,000 referring domains had median monthly organic traffic of 35,811. The 21 sites with 100,000 or more referring domains had a median of 966,023. The median is the middle value: half the sites in a tier sat above it and half below. These tier figures describe the sites inside the dataset; they are a description, not a target to aim at.

The study states its own limit: "correlation is not causation, and the causal pathway may run in both directions (sites with more traffic also attract more links organically)". The sample is selected, too: every site in it already had a DR of 70 or more and at least 20,000 monthly organic visits. Read the study as a description of established SaaS sites, measured in March 2026.

Which SaaS pages earn links

The evidence in this section covers three page types: free tools, original research and statistics pages.

Free tools

A free tool is a standalone page that does one small job: a calculator, a checker, a template or a generator, free to use and related to the product. Stratabeat, a B2B SaaS marketing agency, measured what happened to sites that offer them.

Stratabeat published its 2025 B2B SaaS SEO Performance Report on 17 March 2025. In its words: "The study involved the analysis of 300 B2B SaaS websites." Performance was measured by comparing data from January 2025 with January 2024.

On free tools, the report states: "Among the websites offering free online tools, 93.9% increased the number of referring domains (websites linking to them). The average increase in referring domains among the websites offering tools was 88.0%, which is 3.5X higher than those without tools."

The report is careful about what its figures show: they "represent correlation, not necessarily causation." So the 88.0% is an average across the tool-offering sites in that 300-site dataset, between those two Januarys. It is an association, not a prediction for any one tool.

One company's own numbers give a ground-level view. Lambert Le Court De Beru runs growth at Morgen, a scheduling app, and published his account of building four free tools with Morgen's Google Search Console data attached. The account was published on 25 March 2026 and updated on 26 August 2026 to cover twelve months, from August 2025 to July 2026.

He writes: "Across the twelve months, the site took 242,980 organic clicks. The tool pages took 25,559 of them, and 75,276 unique visitors from every channel combined."

He is open about what he cannot explain. The rest of the site's clicks turned upward in January, when the tools then live had only a small share of its traffic. He writes: "I don’t know what caused that January step."

Original research

Original research means publishing figures nobody else has. For a SaaS company, that can be a survey of your users, or figures drawn from your own product's data, published as a report that other writers can cite.

The same Stratabeat report measured sites conducting original research: "Among the websites conducting original research, 97.0% increased the number of referring domains (websites linking to them)." The average increase in referring domains among those sites was 80.0%, 3.4 times that of the sites without original research, in the same January 2025 against January 2024 comparison. The report's own framing applies here too: correlation, not necessarily causation.

A writer putting together an article about your market needs figures. If your report holds a figure that answers the writer's question, your page gives that writer something to cite. The figure has to be yours: a count from your product, a percentage from your survey, a change over time that you measured.

Statistics pages

A statistics page collects figures on one subject in one place: some from the publisher's own surveys or product data, many from other publishers, each attributed to its source. Foundation, a marketing agency, measured how the format performs across a large sample.

Foundation's analysis, last updated on 30 July 2026, covered 12,154 content pages across 24 leading B2B brands. In that dataset, statistics pages were 1% of the content and earned 4.1% of all referring domains.

Read that 4.1% with the sample in mind. The figure describes what happened on those 24 brands' sites. The measure is a share of referring domains across the whole dataset, not a count for any one page.

For a SaaS company, a statistics page might gather figures about the problem your product solves: how teams spend their time, what a process costs, how a market is growing. Each figure is attributed to whoever published it. The page gives a writer one place to find the numbers, and a reason to cite your page as the collection point. Keep the page dated, figure by figure, so writers can judge what they are citing.

Free tools, original research and statistics pages have one thing in common. Each gives another writer something to cite: a tool to point readers to, or a number to quote.

Integration directories and listings

If your product works with another product, that product's marketplace can list you, and each marketplace states its own conditions. Software products connect to other software products, and each connection is a potential listing. Four sets of conditions, in the platforms' own words:

• HubSpot. HubSpot's developer documentation sets out HubSpot's app listing requirements. Two of them: "Installs: your app must have at least three active, unique installs." and "All URLs in your HubSpot Marketplace listing must lead to live, publicly available, and functional pages." A HubSpot Marketplace listing carries URLs, and HubSpot requires those URLs to work.
• Zapier. Zapier's page on private and public integrations states: "Building a private or public integration on the Zapier Developer Platform is free." A public integration is published in the Zapier App Directory.
• Slack. Slack's Marketplace review guide lists the apps the Slack Marketplace is not the right place for. One is an app that "Doesn’t yet have any customers or isn’t fully built out."
• Atlassian. Atlassian's Marketplace documentation sets the expectation on timing: "It usually takes 5-10 business days for our team to start a review."

Read together, the four pages put the integration first: the listing follows it, not the other way round. Build the integration, get the installs or customers a marketplace asks for, then apply.

Startup directories are a different kind of listing. No integration is needed; you submit a product name, a URL and a description. Ben Peetermans, a builder who runs several products, measured what directory submissions sent four of them and published his 90-day account, with a measurement window ending on 29 August 2026.

For one of his products, he writes: "In April I submitted itbroke to 18 startup directories over two days. Ninety days later, my analytics showed three referred sessions for the whole site: one from Bing, one from Baidu, one from Facebook. From the 18 directories, combined: zero."

A second product of his did receive visits from directories. His conclusion across the products: "The variable is category, not effort."

These are visits, counted for one builder's own products in one 90-day window. Peetermans measured referred sessions and says so. Treat the account as his count, not a rate for directories in general.

How to find where competitors are linked

The direct way to build a list of link prospects for a SaaS site is to look at where competing products are already linked. A link intersect report does this, and four steps take you from the report to a list of pages to approach.

1. Pick three to five SaaS companies that sell to the same buyer as you. Direct competitors are the right set, because the sites that link to them have already linked to a product like yours.
2. Run a link intersect report in a backlink tool. SEO SpyGlass's documentation, dated 2 September 2024, describes the report as showing how many backlink sources you and your competitors have in common. The same guide suggests replacing competitors' broken backlinks with your working ones.
3. Sort the result by page type: marketplaces and integration directories, articles that cite a tool or a statistic, and comparison and "alternatives" articles. The page type tells you what the linking site publishes.
4. Match each group to a page of your own: an integration page for the directories, a free tool or a statistics page for the citing articles, and a feature or use-case page for the comparison articles.

The matching step is where free tools, research, statistics pages and integration pages come back into play. If three competing products appear in the same integration directory, that directory is a candidate for your own integration page, subject to that marketplace's conditions. If articles cite a competitor's figures, a statistics page or a research report of your own gives those writers something new to cite.

Our walkthrough of checking a competitor's backlinks covers that step in more detail. The wider gap pass is set out in our guide to backlink gap analysis.

How we build links for SaaS companies

We build links for SaaS companies by placing guest posts and curated links to the pages the client chooses, on publishers we vet, with checks before and after publication.

Guest Posts are new articles of 750 words or more, written in-house by our UK team and published on a real, independently owned website in your niche, each with one contextual link. Curated Links are links added to articles that are already published. For SaaS clients, the target of a placement can be a feature page, a use-case page or an integration page. You specify the target URLs and the anchors, and we secure each placement by manual outreach.

We choose publishers by weighing indexed pages, organic traffic and its trend, Moz DA, Ahrefs DR, referring domains and the strength of the link profile together. We turn away sites whose metrics look impressive but whose traffic does not hold up.

Before a placement goes out, we check the HTTP status code your target URL returns, so no placement points at a dead page or a redirect chain. After publication, we check that the page is live, that the link is in the body copy, that the anchor and target URL match the order and that the page is indexable. Only then is the URL reported to the dashboard. This quality assurance sequence runs on every link we place, and every link carries 12-month replacement cover.

Our SaaS link building service page sets out the service for software companies, and our SaaS case study records one engagement. If you are comparing providers of trusted link building services, our notes on outsourcing link building and our link building services compared guide cover the buyer's side.

Frequently asked questions

What is SaaS link building?

SaaS link building is getting other websites to link to a software company's site. The links point to the pages a software company can offer: free tools, original research, statistics pages, integration pages, feature pages and use-case pages.

What is a good link building strategy for a SaaS company?

A good link building strategy for a SaaS company places links to its feature, use-case and integration pages and publishes pages other writers cite: a free tool, original research or a statistics page. It also lists each integration in the partner's marketplace and finds where competitors are linked.

How do SaaS companies get backlinks?

SaaS companies get backlinks from placements such as guest posts and curated links, from software marketplaces and integration directories that list the product, and from articles that cite the company's tools and data.

Do free tools earn backlinks for SaaS sites?

In Stratabeat's report of 17 March 2025, which analysed 300 B2B SaaS websites, 93.9% of the sites offering free online tools increased their referring domains between January 2024 and January 2025. The average increase across the tool-offering sites was 88.0%. The report presents this as a correlation.

What do SaaS link building services do?

A SaaS link building service places links on behalf of a software company. In our case, we place links to the pages you choose, on publishers we vet, and we report each live URL to the dashboard after our post-publication check.