3 Leading SEO Experts On Link Building and Keyword Research For SaaS Start-ups

At Outseta almost all of our customers are early stage SaaS start-ups; in many cases just a single Founder or a small group of Co-founders. Every single one of these companies knows they “should be doing SEO,” but between building your product, incorporating your business, testing other marketing channels, and hustling to make some early sales SEO too often gets pushed by the wayside.

That’s too bad, because the sooner you start taking SEO seriously the sooner your business will realize the the benefits of sustainable organic traffic. Even if you’re investing heavily in SEO, this often takes 12-18 months.

With this very challenge in mind, I decided to ask three leading SEO experts about two of the biggest SEO related challenges I see early stage SaaS start-ups face; both of which I'm wrestling with at Outseta.  

Let’s meet our experts.

Neil Patel, Co-founder of Kissmetrics, Crazy Egg, and Neil Patel Digital

Miguel Salcido, Founder and CEO, Organic Media Group

Marty Martin, Founder and CEO, Adapt Partners

Let’s do it.

Question #1 - Link building with limited resources

Geoff Roberts: We are an early stage, bootstrapped SaaS business. I am the Co-founder responsible for go-to-market strategy; I own all of our marketing efforts as well as sales. Link building is a very time consuming task, so I’ve basically chosen not to spend time deliberately building links and am instead focusing on content quality and occasional guests posts on other sites. I feel like I should be spending more time specifically on link building, but it’s such a time-suck and I have other competing priorities (sales for one!). What’s your advice for other bootstrapped start-ups when it comes to link building - how much time is “enough,” and how would you recommend they tackle link building in a more deliberate, cost effective way?

Miguel Salcido: Well, it's never ‘enough’ time. Link building needs to be an ongoing effort, like any marketing channel. You will need to prioritize. 

Focus more on content for third-party sites like LinkedIn, B2B blogs, and Medium which seems to be a great place for start-ups. Because at this point, your product is fairly unknown and very niche. You need to get the word out and build brand. So put most of your energy here to start out. Use ghostwriters if necessary to save time. Once you’ve established the brand and traffic to your site, you can shift the focus to more content for your own site. 

Make sure that you have at least 2-3 very high quality guides or content pieces that you can use to drive people to, making sure to have a lead magnet (tools/checklist/calculator/etc.) that you can offer with each piece of content so you can capture emails.

For your content, try to focus on use cases for your software if possible. And interviewing SaaS startups is also a good route.

Create “teasers” for every piece of content you have and post those out through your social channels, focusing on LinkedIn. Schedule these to post regularly. The teaser should entice readers to “click here to see the full article” in order to get them to your site. Schedule all of this using Buffer + Quuu.

Neil Patel: I would follow the tips in this video. And as for time, I would spend at least 5 hours a week building links. After a year you can slow down.

Marty Martin: Link building is a hateful, extremely time consuming, onerous task, and not one that many people have a real knack for. Being successful in link building is all about your creativity, process, and breaking it out into manageable tasks. Otherwise, it can take an unending amount of time.

Link building at scale, as a siloed task, can be broken out roughly into the following steps that can be run in parallel, saving you time and frustration:

1. Research
2. Content Creation
3. Outreach
4. Placement Negotiation

This is typically the realm of agencies, and not something a bootstrapped startup can pull off on its own.

But don’t despair! As a startup, there are other options to consider. If you’re getting a lot of press because you’re amazing, ask for the links. One option is to use a tool like Ahrefs’ Alerts.  It will notify you of any mentions of your brand name, where the citation is not linking to you. Then simply email the journalist or website editor, thank them for the mention, and ask for the link back to your home page so their readers can find you. That’s an easy, manageable, once a week type activity that will earn you links over time.

Another option, is using Ahrefs (as mentioned above), or another tool such as Majestic that will show you your competitors’ broken links. A small amount of checking and you may find a resource your client used to have that now 404s, and that’s an opportunity for you. Build the same resource, download the list of broken URLs, use an intern or other internal resource to find contact info for all of those websites, and write to them to tell them their users are missing out as the site they’re linking to no longer has the resource in question, but your site does. Ask for them to update their broken link to your website. This is a task that can be broken out into a process as described above, and tackle a bunch of links at once. We’ve found broken resources with thousands of link opportunities this way.

Does your college or university have an online magazine and/or alumni magazine? Pitch them to write about your recent advancements as an entrepreneur. Do you have business partners and other principals? They should pitch their schools as well!

Build a useful asset, driven by data, that can be a useful resource to journalists or other websites. For example, the government has tons of freely available, regularly updated datasets you can use to build a data driven piece of content on your website. We have used data from the Census Bureau, US Patent & Trademark Office, and other resources to build amazing pieces of content for our clients. They attract links naturally, and with a little outreach effort, you can draw in additional links.

Having the right tool helps as well.  We use a tool called Pitchbox to manage our outreach and follow ups.  It makes the outreach and response process a breeze.

Question #2 - Keyword selection in established, competitive categories

Geoff Roberts: At Outseta we offer a platform that integrates CRM, subscription billing, email marketing, help desk and knowledge base, and reporting tools. “CRM,” “Email marketing,” and “Subscription billing” are insanely competitive keywords - to the extent that I feel like it’s not even worth us really targeting them. Also, we sell a platform solution that isn’t nicely categorized as “marketing automation,” for example. As a result, I haven’t been very deliberate in selecting keywords to date; our SEO strategy has instead primarily been…

1. The “normal” build your first few links stuff that start-ups do - building social media profiles, an Angellist profile, some start-up directories, reviews sites, etc.
2. Creating very high quality, long form content - the idea being if the content is good enough, it will naturally build backlinks.
3. Guest posts on other topically relevant blogs.

What’s your take on this approach? How would you recommend start-ups in established, competitive categories get more deliberate with keyword selection given these challenges?

Miguel Salcido: You are a hyper-niche B2B SaaS startup. There are no keywords to describe everything you do. So you will have to focus on the solutions your platform provides, and yes those are super competitive terms. I’d also focus on “startup” related terms (startup tools, SaaS startup tools, etc).

If you can find a similar company and see what they target, using SEMrush, then that’s a good idea for keyword research. 

Your approach so far is solid, just make sure the content is in fact really high quality and you do that by measuring engagement, email signups, links, and sharing. If you’re not getting those things, then your content is not resonating.

Neil Patel: I wouldn’t worry about keywords. Just blog about content that is super highly relevant (to your audience) and you will start to rank for terms. Next, place banners and links within blog content to landing pages to drive signups.

Finally, go into Google search console and see what pages get the most traffic. Look at the list of keywords that you are getting impressions for and then sprinkle in the keywords you haven’t mentioned on your site yet. The key isn’t to just add keywords, but it is to also expand the content.

Marty Martin: If you are starting a new niche or opportunity with your SaaS product, why not come up with a catchy industry name (think how Rand Fishkin of SparkToro and Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot coined the phrase "Inbound Marketing"), and start using that name in all of your marketing. Eventually, when people start searching for that phrase, you’ll already be the dominate player. Now, this isn’t an easy thing to do, but if it catches on, you’ll be set.

I think your approach above is time tested and can pay dividends with time, but most startups don’t have the luxury to wait for good content to become seasoned and linked to. Good, long form content can draw links over time, but it is a very slow process without outreach.

One thing that may get you more awareness is to build integrations for Zapier, IFTTT and similar services. I’ve become aware of many amazing tools just by browsing their integrations.

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Thank you to Miguel, Neil, and Marty for weighing in on these questions. For any SaaS start-up that’s resource constrained, I hope this provides some clarity on your approach to link building. And for any start-up competing in an established and extremely competitive category, hopefully the advice this group shared will help identify the keyword targeting strategy that will yield the most meaningful results for your business.