We analyzed the integrated maturation of 1,600 SaaS companies to observe the SEO strategies that enactment champion in 2024.

In this article, we’re looking astatine bootstrapped SaaS companies that gained the top magnitude of referring domains successful the past year.

Bootstrapped businesses mostly don’t person immense budgets to walk connected marketing, truthful immoderate strategy these small-but-mighty companies usage to amended their integrated maturation is thing that you tin instrumentality inspiration from, too.

• We utilized the Ahrefs API to propulsion a database of unrecorded referring domains for each institution successful September 2023 and September 2024.
• Companies were ranked by referring domain maturation arsenic a percent of their archetypal referring domains. We’ve acceptable a minimum starting threshold of 1,000 referring domains.
• We’ve reported connected referring domains alternatively of backlinks, due to the fact that 1,000 referring domains are much, much harder to get than 1,000 backlinks.

Want to enactment retired however virtually immoderate institution builds its champion backlinks? Here’s however I bash it successful Ahrefs.

I usually commencement with the Overview report successful Site Explorer to get a speedy overview of the website’s referring domain growth. Here’s the illustration for our #1 company, Elfsight: 

Impressive! Next, I usage the Anchors study to rapidly recognize the types of links being built: are they each marque mentions, oregon links to blog content, oregon free tools?

In Elfsight’s case, the immense bulk of their referring domains (well implicit 60%) person anchor substance containing the connection widget:

Looking astatine immoderate of these links, it’s wide that the institution offers escaped website widgets that besides see a nexus backmost to Elfsight:

For immoderate websites, anchor substance won’t beryllium truthful revealing. Here’s the Referring Domains report for a SaaS institution I excluded from this article. At archetypal glance, they look to beryllium doing well, with implicit 100,00 caller backlinks acquired successful the past year:

But digging into the astir communal anchor text, it becomes evident that these are astir each spammy links (advertising Korean concern massages).

You tin exclude spammy links similar these utilizing our Best links filter. By default, the “Best links” filter volition lone amusement links that are:

• Dofollow,
• In the leafage content,
• On a referring domain with a DR of astatine least 30,
• With estimated integrated postulation to the leafage of astatine slightest 500/m.

If you person antithetic criteria for defining a “best” link, you tin customize the filter yourself:

With the filter applied, if we tally the Anchors study again, we tin filter retired each of those spam links, and get a clearer representation of the bully prime links this website has acquired. Far, far fewer:

Lastly, I similar to sojourn the Best by links report to spot the idiosyncratic pages that person acquired the best links.

Here’s an illustration from different 1 of our apical 50 websites, Clearscope. Aside from communal “utility” pages similar their homepage, pricing page, and sign-in page, their astir linked-to pages are each thought enactment blog posts—opinions, predictions, and probe studies:

Not each institution tin physique links by offering tons of escaped tools oregon widgets, but thought enactment contented is simply a link-building strategy that’s overmuch easier for different companies to emulate.

Final thoughts

We’ll stock much of these information analyses successful the coming weeks. Want america to see your institution successful the adjacent analysis? Fill retired this abbreviated Google Form.