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What Is an SEO Agency: Everything You Need to Know

Posted 1 month ago

Gareth Hoyle

What Is an SEO Agency: Everything You Need to Know

An SEO agency is a business that can help your company improve its online visibility by offering a variety of SEO services and industry expertise. If you’re a business unsure if hiring an SEO agency is right for you, then you might be wondering what they actually do, what the benefits of working with an agency are, and how to spot a reputable provider.

Let’s take a closer look at everything you need to know about working with an SEO agency.

What is an SEO agency?

Online visibility is essential for UK businesses of all sizes. But with fierce competition across every industry, standing out and driving consistent organic traffic isn’t easy. To grow effectively, you’ll need someone in your corner, someone who can craft a smart SEO strategy, conduct SEO campaigns that get results and ultimately, help your website climb the search engine results pages. And this is the role of an SEO agency.

What does an SEO agency do?

When hiring an SEO agency, it’s easy to think that all they’ll focus on is improving search engine rankings and online visibility, but in truth, the role of an SEO agency goes far beyond getting you onto page one of Google (and if that’s all they’re offering, then you need to look elsewhere). The best SEO companies offer strategy, expertise, and ongoing support to help your business grow online, and not just with a quick fix, quick results approach, but in a sustainable way that can shift and adapt with ease to the changing needs of your business.

Whether you’re new to search engine optimisation and SEO strategy or you’re looking to build on your existing efforts, the right SEO agency will work hard behind the scenes to make sure your website and online visibility are as strong as possible. Here’s a snapshot of how they might do this.

Keyword research & strategy

As part of an effective SEO strategy, an agency will take the time to research and understand how your audience searches online. They’ll do this by identifying specific search terms and phrases that your target audience uses when looking for products or services like yours.

This kind of keyword research is usually standard practice when hiring an SEO agency, but it’s more than just finding popular keywords and trying to rank for them; it’s about looking closely at keyword rankings and search volume, and aligning these with your specific goals and the user intent. From here, an SEO agency will develop a tailored SEO strategy to target those keywords and drive the right visitors to your site.

On-page SEO optimisation

On-page SEO involves making sure that each page of your website is fully optimised in a way that is user and search engine results-friendly. The goal here is to help search engines understand your content and consider it to be of high value, as well as to improve the user experience for your website visitors. An SEO agency will be on the lookout to fine-tune a range of website elements such as meta descriptions, meta titles, image tags, headers, and content structure to ensure that everything is aligned with current best practices. This will help with your website’s organic search rankings.

Technical SEO

An SEO agency will know that every website needs a solid technical SEO foundation, and this includes aspects of your site structure that help search engines to crawl, index, and understand your content. Your SEO agency will carry out a detailed SEO audit to help identify and fix any technical issues that might be holding your website back. This often means taking a closer look at site speed, mobile-friendliness, URL structure, crawl errors, and XML sitemaps.

Content strategy & creation

A good content strategy is like the beating heart of any SEO strategy. And a good SEO agency should recognise the importance of developing one that targets the right keywords whilst speaking directly to your audience’s needs and interests, all while aligning with your business goals.

Content strategy and creation take various forms, but they could involve optimising your existing pages or creating fresh blog posts, guides, or landing pages. Regardless of what form it takes, the goal here is to provide valuable, engaging content that drives traffic and encourages action. The right SEO agency should also recognise it’s not just about quantity but about developing high-quality content that helps you build trust with your audience, showcases your expertise, and supports your search engine visibility in the long term.

Link building

High-quality, relevant links from other reputable sources act like a vote of confidence in your content. And search engines take notice! A link-building strategy is the process of earning these backlinks to boost your site’s authority, which in turn, will improve your rankings.

Your SEO agency can develop a link-building strategy in a range of ways, securing links that genuinely add value and signal trust to search engines through strategies such as digital PR, guest posting, and content outreach.

Local SEO

A local SEO strategy is essential for any business that serves a specific area or has a physical location. Appearing in local searches when potential customers are looking for services “near me” or in a particular town or region is key to your online success.

To help you boost your performance in location-based searches, an SEO agency can help optimise your Google Business Profile and ensure your website includes relevant information that will help search engines to recognise the area and locations you serve. This could mean NAP consistency across your website and local directories, embedding you in Google Maps and including location-specific keywords on your website, such as “plumber in Manchester” or “Dog groomers in Leeds”.

SEO audits & competitor analysis

Do you know how well your website is currently performing? Or how it compares to your closest competitors? Before looking at improving search engine rankings and boosting your organic traffic levels, SEO companies will offer a detailed audit of your site, identifying technical issues, content gaps, and missed opportunities for search engine optimization.

Alongside this they’ll also take a closer look at what’s working for your competitors, analysing their keyword targeting and backlink strategies. Once armed with these detailed insights, they’ll be able to create a data-driven SEO strategy that’s fully tailored to your business and your needs.

Analytics & reporting

Any SEO agency can promise the world, but all SEO strategies must go hand in hand with detailed analytics and thorough reporting. It’s from information and data gathered from SEO tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console that your SEO team can measure how well your website is performing, where improvements can be made and where your investment is delivering.

Clear, transparent data that highlights everything from traffic volumes to keyword rankings, user behaviour and conversions helps you and your SEO agency make smarter decisions, highlights what’s working and what’s not and ensures the SEO strategy stays aligned with your business goals.

Top benefits of working with an SEO agency

Partnering with an experienced SEO company comes with a whole host of benefits. Search engine optimisation is an ongoing process, and one that can quickly become overwhelming and complicated, hiring an SEO agency to do all the heavy lifting simply makes sense.

Let’s explore some of the benefits and why working with an SEO agency can be a smart investment for your long-term digital growth.

Expertise & experience

For those unfamiliar with SEO services and search engine algorithms, SEO campaigns can be complicated and difficult to manage. This is why one of the biggest benefits of hiring an SEO agency is having full access to a team of specialists who have a real passion for digital marketing and SEO success. From content creation to local SEO, on page optimisation and link building, they’ll bring years of experience across different industries and platforms to your business, taking the guesswork out of digital marketing.

Ultimately, it’s this level of expertise that SEO agencies offer that helps you avoid all those common pitfalls and gets you results faster and more efficiently.

Scalable solutions

To develop a successful SEO strategy, a good SEO agency will understand that all businesses are different. Maybe you’re a small start-up looking to tap into local SEO, or you’re a well-established company that’s outgrown its in-house SEO team and needs more support. Hiring an SEO agency means that they can tailor their services to match your current goals and grow with you over time.

Services can be tailored or scaled depending on your needs and current budget, and it’s this flexibility that means you can continue to grow digitally, without overstretching your budget.

Access to premium tools

SEO is data-heavy, from keyword research to backlink analysis, to SEO audits and performance tracking. Reputable SEO firms will always invest in premium SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, and others to gain deep insights that would be costly or complex for most businesses to manage in-house.

When you opt to work with an SEO agency, you’ll benefit from the power that all these tools can bring to your latest campaigns, along with all the expertise and know-how that’s needed to interpret the data and turn it into action.

Time & resource efficiency

Developing, monitoring, and adapting any digital marketing strategy takes time, consistency, and a huge amount of attention to detail. For many businesses, especially those that are just starting out or companies with smaller in-house SEO teams, managing their digital marketing efforts effectively can stretch their resources a little too thinly, which in turn can leave their SEO strategies floundering.

Partnering with an SEO agency means that you can focus on running your business while letting the experts handle and manage your growing online presence. It’s a more efficient use of your time and ensures that SEO tasks aren’t pushed aside or rushed, which ultimately means better results.

Adapting to AI overviews & LLM-driven search

The digital landscape is always changing, and one of the biggest shifts is the rise of AI-generated results such as Google’s AI Overviews and search tools powered by large language models (LLMs). 13.14% of queries triggered AI Overviews in March 2025, more than double the number in January 2025.

Instead of simply listing websites, search engines are beginning to deliver direct, summarised answers. This can have a major impact on how people find and interact with your business online.

For many companies, keeping up with these changes and understanding how to optimise for them can be overwhelming. An SEO agency can take this pressure off by monitoring how AI-driven results are evolving and refining your content strategy so that it remains competitive. This includes creating clear, authoritative content, structuring it in a way that AI tools can easily interpret, and strengthening your brand’s credibility with E-E-A-T signals.

What to look for in an SEO agency

With so many SEO companies out there, it can be difficult to know where to turn. Choosing the right SEO agency can make or break your online success, but it’s not always easy to know who to trust, especially with so many firms promising the best results.

Ultimately, any reputable SEO agency will feel more like a partner and not just like a service provider. Let’s take a closer look at SEO agency hiring tips and some key factors to consider so you can make an informed decision that aligns with your business goals, needs, and budget.

Proven track record and case studies

Top SEO companies are built on trust, and any trustworthy SEO agency will be able to demonstrate and happily share real results. When looking for the right agency, make seeking out client testimonials, case studies, and examples of their previous successes a priority.

This should give you confidence in their abilities as an SEO services provider and that they have a proven track record of adapting strategies to different industries to achieve SEO success.

Transparent processes and reporting

From content creation and link building to technical SEO and effective keyword research, when you’re working with an SEO company, you should always know what’s being done, why it matters and what the results are. Any reputable agency will always prioritise transparency with their clients and demonstrate this through regular updates and clear reports that you can understand.

They should happily explain metrics and the performance of your strategies in real time, in plain English and also be upfront about what’s working, what’s not, and where improvements or a change of direction could be needed. This is the simplest and most effective way to build trust and ensure you’re working well together.

Realistic expectations

Reputable SEO companies know that SEO is not a quick fix. It involves the development of multiple strategies over the long term, and it takes time to deliver the sustainable results you need. If your chosen agency is realistic, is honest about how long these things take and manages your expectations from the beginning about what can be achieved and when, then take this as a green flag.

Always be wary of SEO agencies that offer numerous SEO tactics without any real strategy, or those who promise amazing overnight rankings or guaranteed top spots on the first page of Google. A genuine partner will focus on steady growth and long-term success, not quick wins or shortcuts.

Alignment with your business goals

When it comes to SEO, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach, and a reputable SEO agency will invest time and resources into learning as much as they can about your business, your industry, and what your goals are.

From here, their SEO efforts should always be tailored to suit your specific needs and what matters most to you. When an agency aligns closely with your vision, you’re far more likely to see meaningful, measurable results that move your business forward.

Have a discovery call

Finding out if an SEO firm is right for you starts with a discovery call. This initial conversation should be used as an opportunity for you to ask questions and explain your goals, all whilst getting a feel for how you and this agency might work together.

For them, it’s a chance to assess whether they’re the right fit for you. They might offer insights, outline how they can help you achieve your goals and showcase their previous successes. All this should be done without you feeling any pressure to commit or make a financial decision.

Red flags to avoid

There are many reputable SEO providers out there, but it’s important to be aware of the warning signs that might indicate that an agency isn’t as trustworthy or effective as they claim. Let’s take a closer look.

Guaranteed results

Always be wary of agencies promising SEO services that guarantee top positions on Google. As SEO is influenced by a variety of factors that can’t be fully controlled, such as algorithms and user behaviour, no SEO agency should guarantee specific results. Remember, unrealistic promises could mean the use of risky tactics that could be doing your online presence more harm than good!

Lack of transparency

SEO firms that hide results, refuse to share regular reports, or how they’re achieving results should be approached with caution. Any reputable provider will always be open about their processes, provide clear updates, and explain their actions in a way that makes sense to you. If you’re left in the dark or constantly chasing answers, it may be a sign they’re not confident in their work!

Black-hat tactics

SEO best practices should always be ethical and never manipulated to get results. When SEO agencies use questionable techniques such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, or link schemes to deliver quick wins, your website could be penalised and even removed from search results entirely, causing serious damage to your online presence.

Remember, a trustworthy SEO agency will always focus on sustainable strategies that will build long-term success; they’ll never risk your business reputation or online presence to hit targets or meet deadlines.

Final thoughts

Working with the right SEO agency can be a real game-changer for your business, helping you grow your online presence and attract the right audience. By asking the question: What is an SEO agency? Understanding what an agency does, what to look for, and what to avoid, you’re in a strong position to make a confident, informed choice.

FAQs

How long does it take to see results from SEO?

It can typically take between 3-6 months to start seeing noticeable results; however, this will vary depending on your industry, competition, and the current state of your website.

Is SEO better handled in-house or outsourced to an agency?

If you have the skilled staff, time, and resources, then you may prefer to stick with your in-house team. However, if you want specialised knowledge, advanced tools, and scalability, consider reaching out to an SEO firm.

Can an SEO agency guarantee rankings?

No. A reputable agency will never guarantee specific rankings. This is due to factors that are outside their control. Businesses should always be wary of agencies that make sensational claims about their results.

How much does an SEO agency cost?

Costs can vary widely, and they depend on factors like your goals, industry and the services you need. Often, SEO agencies offer monthly packages which will vary between providers.

Do small businesses need SEO agencies?

Yes. Especially if they don’t have an in-house digital marketing team. Even if your budget is limited, SEO agencies can always help to improve your online visibility.

How do I measure success with my SEO agency?

Your SEO agency should regularly share and discuss key metrics that measure success. These include organic traffic, keyword rankings, leads, and conversions.

Can an SEO agency help me recover from a Google penalty?

Yes. An experienced SEO agency can identify the cause of a penalty and help your site recover over time.

Can an SEO agency help with AI Overviews and AI-driven search?

Yes. SEO agencies can adapt your strategy for AI-generated results by optimising your content to be more aligned with how large language models process information. This helps improve your chances of appearing in AI Overviews and other AI-powered search results.

Posted 1 month ago

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Gareth Hoyle

If you need to build links for your SaaS business but are unsure where to begin, then this post is for you.

We’ve compiled a list of 20 powerful SaaS link-building strategies, ranging from low-effort tactics to more complex, hyper-effective techniques. If that wasn’t enough, we’ve also provided some additional tips to help you avoid the most common mistakes and ensure you can effectively measure your link-building success. But before we get to that, let’s start with a quick definition of what SaaS link-building actually is.

What is SaaS link-building?

SaaS link-building is an SEO strategy that involves acquiring links from other B2B SaaS websites to your site. The goal is to earn relevant, high-quality backlinks from authoritative domains to boost your website’s authority and search engine rankings.

And it works. Research undertaken by Backlinko.com found that pages with backlinks rank higher than pages without — and the #1 results in Google have almost four times the number of backlinks than positions 2-10.

This confirms what we already know — that Google still uses backlinks as a key ranking factor in its algorithm.

To use this to your advantage, you need a solid SaaS link-building and outreach strategy.

20 Ways to Build Links to Your SaaS Brand

A solid link-building strategy doesn’t use one tactic — it uses several. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a guide to the 20 best SaaS link-building strategies designed to help you secure high-quality links and turbocharge your organic performance.

1. Guest posting

Done well, guest posting is one of the most effective link-building techniques around and perfect for SaaS businesses looking to improve their ranking performance. In a nutshell, guest posting involves writing and publishing content on third-party websites.

The first hurdle in this process is to get responses from a target list of publishers. This is not always easy, as popular SaaS brands are often inundated with offers to guest post. This is why it is always prudent to build an extensive list of prospective publishers rather than just emailing one or two.

Once you get a positive response from a publisher willing to accept a guest post, you can then embed a link to your own website within the post itself. Note that some publishers will only allow a link in an author bio whilst others may stipulate that you can only include links to non-commercial or blog pages.

You can see an example guest post below. Call centre software company Dialpad has written an article which has been published on the blog of Spocket.co, a dropshipping software business. Guest posting benefits both parties in this instance: the publisher (Spocket) gets free and relevant content for their blog that can drive additional traffic, with the contributor (Dialpad) securing a high-quality link from an authoritative site.

Guest posting can generate a steady stream of high-quality backlinks; however, it can be quite labour-intensive as you have to be able to convince each publisher that you have a compelling idea for a new piece of content, whilst also being able to demonstrate you have the requisite copywriting skills to create it. And before all of this even takes place, you need to first find the right person to contact at each organisation, which is not always an easy task when it’s a big company. Typically, you need to be able to get the email of the person in charge of the company blog or who runs the online marketing activity. Tools such as Hunter, Apollo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are useful for fulfilling this task.

Here are some quickfire tips to help succeed with guest posting:

Write for websites within or similar to your niche (but avoid competitors).
Create relevant, high-quality content that delivers value to the domain’s audience — for example, an article on a topic that they haven’t already covered on their blog.
Insert links naturally; e.g. don’t stuff your article with exact-match anchor texts or include links that aren’t contextual.
Showcase your previous writing examples so the prospective publisher can see that you can create a top-notch piece of content for them.

2. Link inserts

A link insert (or link insertion) involves placing a link on another website in an existing piece of content. Unlike with guest posting, there is no need to provide new content for the publisher, merely to request that you’d like them to add a link from one of their pages to your site. Of course, your suggestion for where they place a link needs to be contextual to their page or article or it won’t make sense. So for example, let’s say you come across an article discussing how to improve remote team collaboration. If you feel like your roundup guide on the “The best communications software for remote teams” would add extra value to the article, you could reach out to the publisher to suggest that they insert a backlink to the relevant page on your site.

This is what SocialPilot has done. They saw an opportunity to link to their site in an article on video marketing strategies published by Powr.io.

The great benefit of using link inserts as a tactic to improve your rankings is that they are quicker to deliver than guest post links. However, that does not mean they are easy to acquire as you first need to find relevant sites and pages to request a link and secondly, need to convince each publisher that the link would add value to their existing content.

Once you have found a bunch of sites that you think you’d like to get links from, you can then run a site command in Google search to see if your target keywords have been featured on any pages on their site. If they have, and you feel one of your existing pages would be a good fit, you can get in touch with the publisher and make the suggestion.

3. Unlinked brand mentions

Unlinked brand mentions are opportunities to get links from websites that have mentioned your site but who have not included a link. You can potentially turn each brand mention into a link by reaching out and politely requesting a link back to your site. Whilst it is not guaranteed that they will include a link or even respond to your request, you should be able to turn some of your existing unlinked brand mentions into links by contacting multiple publishers. It’s essentially a numbers game in that respect.

You can search for unlinked mentions using tools like SEMrush, and Ahrefs, as well as using Google search commands like this (using Tesla.com to illustrate), which will surface mentions of your brand but exclude your domain from the results. You can then check each result to see if there is a hyperlink to your site or not.

Below is an example of an unlinked mention: the website builder platform Wix has mentioned SaaS companies Monday.com and Asana but has not linked to either site. As part of their link-building strategy, the teams at Monday.com and Asana could ask Wix to add a link to the brand mentions of their business.

4. Broken link-building

Broken link building is the process of finding dead pages (404 errors), reaching out to publishers that have linked to that page, and pitching a page on your site as an alternative. Dead pages create a poor user experience, so publishers should, in theory, be grateful to you for alerting them about the link to the dead page on their site and be open to the idea of replacing the said link with a link to a URL on your site instead.

The first task is to find a list of dead links, which can be done by following the instructions in the handy guide to broken link building. Using this technique, we found a dead page on Hubspot.com about quotes from Apple founder Steve Jobs, shown below. A quick check on Ahrefs as we can see this page has 70 referring domains – which are all potential outreach targets which could be emailed if you were to produce a replacement piece of content on your own site. One thing which can assist you in this task is finding out what the original content looked like. This can be done using the Wayback Machine, which indexes the web and stores copies for future reference – you can see the archived page here

Below is a list of some of the sites that are linking to this dead page. By recreating similar content, you could potentially land links on these sites well.

5. Resource link-building

Put simply, resource pages are curated lists of individual links to external websites. They’re designed to group lots of valuable resources in one place, such as a list of the best SaaS products or useful software guides.

Securing a link on a high-authority resource page can significantly boost traffic, as according to research from SEMrush, listicle-type posts receive 80% more organic traffic than any other type of article. (https://www.semrush.com/blog/anatomy-of-top-performing-articles/#headlines)

Start by searching for resource pages that are relevant to your brand, product, or content. You can do this yourself by using advanced search operators in Google search. Or instead, you could use link research tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic, or SEMrush to see which resource pages are linking to your competitors.

Once you find a potential linking opportunity, reach out and ask the website owner if they can add your site.

Below is an example resource page which is curated list of cold email software providers.

6. Link exchanges

Agreeing to link to another website if they link to yours in return is known as a link exchange or “reciprocal linking”.

You’ve probably heard that Google may penalise a website for an excessive volume of link exchanges. And it’s true — excessive link exchanges are categorised as link schemes, which you want no part of for the sake of your website’s reputation and long-term SEO health.

But, reciprocal link exchanges can still be used to gain backlinks provided the strategy is ethical and proportionate. For example, agreeing to swap links with a website that’s within your niche — and where the two pieces of content are of unquestionable value to each of your target audiences — can be done in order to gain high-quality backlinks. This comes back to the earlier point about undertaking more than one link-building tactic, as just doing link exchanges en masse with no other activity is inherently risky.

7. Journalist requests

Reaching out to journalists and reporters can land you links from high-authority, top-tier news sites — and there are even dedicated platforms for it.

ResponseSource, Qwoted and JournoFinder are just three examples of platforms where journalists request information from credible industry sources to include in their news stories. Responding to a request with your expertise can earn you a backlink on a news piece, thought-leadership article, or roundup post. If you’re on a budget and don’t want to pay for dedicated software, you can try using X.com (formerly known as Twitter) using the hashtags #journorequest and #prrequest. Below you can see requests from journalists who specifically want to speak to people working in the SaaS industry.

8. Expert commentary

Reaching out to the media to showcase your expertise on relevant industry topics is known as expert commentary and is another excellent way to land high-quality backlinks for your SaaS brand.

You can either invest in specialist software to uncover requests for expert comments or alternatively, you can reach out to some of the most popular industry publications in your niche and offer your knowledge and expertise for any upcoming articles they maybe writing.

Below is an example of an expert comment by our MD Gareth Hoyle, offering expert advice on how to run a successful sales pitch.

9. Competitor backlink analysis

Competitor backlink analysis involves delving into the backlink profiles of your competitors to uncover potential link opportunities for you to target.

The aim is to find websites that are linking to your competitor’s pages but aren’t linked to yours. By creating content that offers more value than your competitors — and using outreach strategies to build relationships — you can potentially secure links on the same websites to increase your own website authority.

To perform competitive backlink analysis, you need the right tools. Ahrefs and Majestic are two of the best around, as they’re easy to use and deliver comprehensive competitive backlink profiles complete with useful metrics.

Below you see we have used the BackLink Gap tool in SEMrush to see which sites are linking to some of the main competitors of hunter.io (an emailing finding software). By exporting this list, the team at hunter.io can investigate these sites and then potentially reach out to see if they can also be included on the pages that link to their competitors.

10. Roundups

We already mentioned asking other websites to add your website to their resource pages. But why not also create your own?

For example, you could write a roundup of the best SaaS marketing tools for small businesses. Or, you could craft an expert roundup that consolidates advice from SaaS industry leaders.

This is what ClickUp has done in the example below:

These types of posts often attract high levels of organic traffic as they provide users with a means of comparing different types of software before they buy. Plus, if you let the sites you mentioned in your roundup post know that you’ve linked to them, you might even secure a reciprocal backlink.

11. Testimonials

You’re probably using a bunch of SaaS tools in your tech stack already so why not write testimonials for your favourite tools? Of course, you first need to know if each individual software provider actually hosts reviews on their site as many prefer to use third-party review sites such as Trustpilot. The quickest way to find out is to query software + “reviews” (replacing the word software with the name of the actual software you use) see what comes up.

Below you can see the testimonials page from IT Support provider aag-it.com. You can see they have published a testimonial from their client aeon-ifa.co.uk which includes a hyperlink to their site.

12. Partnerships

SaaS companies have the unique opportunity to secure partnerships through product integration with other SaaS brands (which provides lots of benefits beyond backlinks).

At the very least, integrating your SaaS product with another SaaS product could earn you a link on the website’s integration directory listing. But, you can go even further and secure additional backlinks by offering to guest post on their blog or suggesting link insertion opportunities.

Some brands may even write blog posts to introduce the integration, its benefits, and use cases to their audience.

Zapier and Trello are a prime example of this. Trello’s project management software integrates with Zapier and they’ve created content around this integration that benefits both sites.

Below you can see an article about the integration on the Zapier site:

And here you can see information on Trello’s site that links to Zapier and explains the integration:

13. Podcasts

Hosting your own podcast and/or being a guest on other brands’ podcasts can generate links as well as valuable referral traffic.

When you invite guests onto your own podcast, they may create promotional materials that link to your website to encourage engagement. And, when you appear as a guest on someone else’s podcast, they’ll often provide links to your website in a blog post to encourage their audience to get to know you better. So it’s a win-win.

Below is an example in the wild. Our MD Gareth was invited to speak on the OMG Center podcast.

You can see they kindly included a link to to our site within the show notes,

14. Interviews

Like podcasts, interviews can also generate links to your site, whether you’re the person conducting the interview or the person being interviewed. That said, interviews can be pretty hard to land. You can request to interview (or even offer to be interviewed by) other thought leaders within your niche by contacting them via email. This could include suppliers, associates, industry event organizers — anyone who you think would be open to being interviewed and who crucially, has the ability to get the interview published online.

In addition to reaching out to thought leaders in your niche, you could also try contacting news journalists. The best way to find opportunities like this is to subscribe to PR tools such as ResponseSource, Cision, and Prowly in order to receive relevant media alerts from journalists looking to interview people from within your niche. If you don’t have the budget for that, you can try using the hashtag #journorequest on X mentioned above to see if there are any relevant opportunities.

Below is an example of this technique in action. Our MD was interviewed by workplacewellbeing.pro who asked a series of questions about workplace stress.

At the end of the article, you can see the publisher has included a hyperlink to our website.

15. Product reviews

Getting other websites to review your software product is a relatively low-effort SaaS link-building tactic that can generate high-quality backlinks.

To do this, reach out to reputable bloggers and review sites in your niche and ask them to review your product. Offer a freebie as an incentive, such as free use of your SaaS product for a month in exchange for a product review.

Remember, the publisher should only include a no-follow link in order to comply with Google’s guidelines. That said, if their site is relevant to your brand and has an existing audience, then the value of being featured on their site far exceeds just the link itself as they could end up sending you valuable referral traffic.

It should be noted that gaining online reviews is particularly important for B2B SaaS companies. 94% of prospective B2B buyers consult online reviews before making a purchase. So, aim to get reviews from reputable bloggers and experts.

For example, Forbes magazine reviewed BambooHr, linking back to their site within the review.

16. Shareable Assets

Does your site provide templates that users can download and adapt? If so, you can use shareable links as a link-building technique!

Encourage your customers to share their completed projects on their platform, alongside a link to your site. This form of user-generated content can result in masses of backlinks, along with social proof and brand awareness.

You can see below the page itself has attracted a number of high quality external links.

17. SaaS directories

SaaS directories are often the go-to resource for prospective SaaS buyers, allowing them to discover, compare, evaluate, and review different software products.

When you submit your SaaS business to a directory they’ll usually provide a backlink to your site. Often the link will be a no-follow, but that does not matter as much as getting featured on a site that has a target audience relevant to your SaaS brand.

Remember to be judicious about which SaaS directories you submit your site to as some have better editorial standards than others. Some may list almost any site that requests inclusion, meaning all you’re doing is building lots of low-quality links. Some of the leading SaaS directories worth getting listed on include G2.com, Capterra, and Trustradius.

18. Compile Industry statistics

You’ve probably come across blog posts that compile industry statistics from across the web into a comprehensive article.

For example: “50 SaaS Statistics for 2025” or “30 Marketing Statistics for SaaS Companies”.

These types of posts can drive organic traffic and links as they are useful resources for all sorts of publishers, including news journalists. If a publisher finds a relevant statistic on your post, they’ll very often link to your page as the source.

Aim to maximise content value by compiling up-to-date data from reputable sources. This is what Vena Solutions did in their blog on 85 SaaS statistics, trends, and benchmarks, which has 97 referring backlinks.

19. Badges

Creating branded, link-embeddable badges for your customers to display on their website is an easy, innovative way to boost backlinks and brand authority.

Offer badges to your customers as rewards for their use of or loyalty to your product. You could also incentivise customers to display your badge by including a free upgrade or discount.

UpCity, for example, presents badges to service providers that deliver exceptional customer service. These are then displayed on the winners’ sites to build customer trust, but also provide a backlink to UpCity

20. Q&A sites

Traditionally, SaaS product users flock to Q&A sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers to find crowdsourced answers to their burning questions. You can boost your backlink profile — along with brand presence and referral traffic — by providing in-depth answers to their questions supported by relevant, natural links to your site.

Using Q&As in link-building strategies requires insight into your customers’ needs, challenges, and pain points. Aim to understand what types of questions they ask so that you can craft relevant content.

You can even step in and answer questions about your competitors, adding a link to your site. This is what HelpCrunch has done in the example below. However, always make sure you answer the question respectfully.

Common SaaS link-building mistakes to avoid

Link-building for SaaS businesses can get complex, especially given that Google periodically updates its ranking algorithm. This can mean that certain link-building tactics that work today might not work in the future. Of course, no one can predict with any certainty what these future changes will be. However, some mantras have remained constant throughout the history of SEO and link building:

Focusing on quantity over quality

While it’s tempting to accumulate as many backlinks as possible, putting quantity over quality will harm your search engine rankings in the end.

Websites with hundreds of low-quality links from irrelevant, spammy, low-domain authority sites are often deemed untrustworthy by Google.

You should aim to acquire high-quality backlinks from trusted sources as this will help you to rank higher. Achieving this will demonstrate to Google that your website has earned a natural link profile based upon genuine content value and audience interest.

In short, prioritise acquiring high-quality backlinks from reputable sources to build a sustainable link profile.

Relying on one single tactic for success

We’ve mentioned this already, but it’s worth reiterating. Relying solely upon a single link-building method can only get you so far and is sub-optimal to say the least. To unlock the true organic potential of your website, you need to diversify your link-building activity to encompass a wide range of different tactics.

Aim to pursue a handful of high-effort and low-effort strategies, such as guest posting, roundups, broken link-building, product reviews, and SaaS directory listing. This will strengthen your backlink profile and make it sustainable in the long term.

Placing links out of context

Irrelevant and/or out-of-context backlinks appear unnatural to site visitors and search engines alike, and will have virtually no positive impact on your organic performance. For example, if you were to get a link to your accounting software site from an article about buying make-up, both users and search engines would question why the link is there in the first place, given there is no natural semantic relevance between the two topics.

You can avoid similar scenarios by ensuring that you only build links contextually, e.g there is a logical reason why the link is there.

Ignoring internal links

Whilst you’re building external links from other publishers, it’s prudent to also think carefully about internal linking.

Internal links help search engines to crawl and then index your site, as well as helping them to understand which pages are the most important. Thus, you should ensure that all the key pages on your site are well linked to one another.

Here are some quick tips for internal linking:

Use descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text.
Identify pillar pages and create topic clusters.
Link to relevant pages using contextual links.

Not monitoring link performance

Monitoring your link profile is an important means of ensuring your links stay live and active. Over time, some of your backlinks will inevitably drop off or be removed by the host publisher. And whilst this is unavoidable, it’s prudent to stay on top of which links have become inactive so you can at least be aware of how many links dropped off and from which site (s).

There are a number of link monitoring tools on the market. For a rundown of the top providers, check out this post

Conclusion

SaaS link-building strategies are dynamic and diverse. With so many options to choose from, you can create a tailored strategy that suits your business’s SaaS niche.

The most important thing to remember about link-building is quality over quantity. Use your chosen strategies to carefully curate high-quality links, focusing not on how many links you acquire, but how valuable these links are to the health of your backlink profile. This is how you’ll achieve sustainable SEO growth and authority.

FAQs

Should I use an agency for SaaS link-building?

You don’t have to use an agency, but it can help you achieve faster, more effective results if you do.

A digital agency with experience in SaaS link-building will have the ability to scale your link-building efforts and achieve bigger and better results than doing it by yourself. They will be well-versed in the aforementioned tactics and have preexisting knowledge of how to land high-authority SaaS links.

How long does SaaS link-building take?

This depends on the strategies you choose, but link-building for SaaS is usually a steady process. It can take weeks, or even months, to see the true impact, but it’s certainly worth it as the links you acquire from a truly successful campaign will stand the test of time and enhance not only your traffic and rankings but also your overall brand awareness.

How much does SaaS link-building cost?

There are lots of different factors that influence link-building costs: the strategies you use, the quality of the links, and whether you enlist an SEO agency or handle it in-house. If you do it all yourself with no paid-for tools, the cost is merely the time you invest. However, if you hire an agency expect to pay thousands of pounds per month rather than hundreds. This cost reflects the amount of time and expertise needed to acquire links from high-authority sites.

What is the best SaaS link-building strategy?

It really depends on who you ask. Guest posting has stood the test of time as an effective strategy, so it’s definitely a contender. However, expert roundups, journalist requests, broken link-building, and competitor analysis are among some of the best strategies for acquiring high-quality links. Your best bet is to try multiple SaaS link-building methods and focus on whichever strategies work best for you.

What Is an SEO Agency: Everything You Need to Know

Gareth Hoyle

Table of Contents

What Is an SEO Agency: Everything You Need to Know

What is an SEO agency?

What does an SEO agency do?

Keyword research & strategy

On-page SEO optimisation

Technical SEO

Content strategy & creation

Link building

Local SEO

SEO audits & competitor analysis

Analytics & reporting

Top benefits of working with an SEO agency

Expertise & experience

Scalable solutions

Access to premium tools

Time & resource efficiency

Adapting to AI overviews & LLM-driven search

What to look for in an SEO agency

Proven track record and case studies

Transparent processes and reporting

Realistic expectations

Alignment with your business goals

Have a discovery call

Red flags to avoid

Guaranteed results

Lack of transparency

Black-hat tactics

Final thoughts

FAQs

How long does it take to see results from SEO?

Is SEO better handled in-house or outsourced to an agency?

Can an SEO agency guarantee rankings?

How much does an SEO agency cost?

Do small businesses need SEO agencies?

How do I measure success with my SEO agency?

Can an SEO agency help me recover from a Google penalty?

Can an SEO agency help with AI Overviews and AI-driven search?

Gareth Hoyle

Related articles

What is SaaS link-building?

20 Ways to Build Links to Your SaaS Brand

1. Guest posting

2. Link inserts

3. Unlinked brand mentions

4. Broken link-building

5. Resource link-building

6. Link exchanges

7. Journalist requests

8. Expert commentary

9. Competitor backlink analysis

10. Roundups

11. Testimonials

12. Partnerships

13. Podcasts

14. Interviews

15. Product reviews

16. Shareable Assets

17. SaaS directories

18. Compile Industry statistics

19. Badges

20. Q&A sites

Common SaaS link-building mistakes to avoid

Focusing on quantity over quality

Relying on one single tactic for success

Placing links out of context

Ignoring internal links

Not monitoring link performance

Conclusion

FAQs

Should I use an agency for SaaS link-building?

How long does SaaS link-building take?

How much does SaaS link-building cost?

What is the best SaaS link-building strategy?

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