How to build backlinks without wasting six months

A link from one relevant site with real traffic is worth more than 50 from directories nobody visits. That’s the first thing to internalize, because most people start link building by chasing volume and end up with a profile that looks like spam. Here are the methods that still work in 2026, roughly in the order I’d try them.

Start with what you already have

Before you email a single stranger, look at unlinked mentions. Search your brand name and your founder’s name, and you’ll usually find a handful of articles, podcast pages and roundups that mention you without linking. A short email saying “thanks for the mention, would you mind linking to us?” converts at maybe 30 to 40 percent. Nothing else on this list comes close to that rate.

Then check your competitors’ backlinks in Ahrefs or Semrush. Filter for pages that link to two or more of them but not to you. Those sites already link out to companies like yours. They’re the warmest possible targets.

Publish something people actually cite

This is the slow method and also the one that compounds. Original data works best. Survey 300 customers, pull anonymized stats from your own product, or scrape a public dataset and turn it into a chart nobody else has. Journalists and bloggers need numbers to back up claims, and they’ll link to wherever the number lives.

A SaaS company I worked with published a one-page report on average churn by pricing tier. It took a week to produce. Two years later it’s still picking up 5 to 10 referring domains a month with zero outreach.

Free tools do the same job. A calculator, a template, a small generator. Boring to build, but people link to tools far more readily than to articles.

Guest posts, done selectively

Guest posting got a bad reputation because agencies industrialized it. Written at scale for sites that accept anything, it’s close to worthless. But a piece on a site your customers genuinely read, with one contextual link back to a relevant page, still moves the needle.

The filter: would you want the placement even if the link were nofollow? If no, skip it.

Digital PR and expert quotes

Services like Qwoted, Help a B2B Writer and Featured connect journalists with sources. You answer a few requests a week with a short, opinionated take, and occasionally one lands in a publication with a DR of 70 or 80. The hit rate is low, maybe one in fifteen, so treat it as a background task rather than a strategy.

Reactive PR is the more ambitious version. When something happens in your industry, publish a quick analysis within 24 hours and pitch it to the reporters covering the story. Speed matters more than polish here.

Broken link building

Find a dead page on a site in your niche (the Wayback Machine will show you what it was), build a replacement that’s at least as good, then email everyone who linked to the dead one. It’s tedious. Response rates sit around 5 to 10 percent. But the links you get are from people who already demonstrated they link to that kind of content, and they tend to stick.

What to skip

Paid link packages, PBNs, and anything sold by the hundred. They might work for a few months on a throwaway affiliate site. On a company domain you plan to keep for ten years, the downside is a manual penalty and a painful cleanup.

Link exchanges are a grey area. One or two with genuine partners are fine. A spreadsheet of fifty is a footprint.

How much is enough

For a new B2B site, 10 to 20 good referring domains in the first six months is a respectable pace. Past that, the marginal link matters less than fixing your internal linking and publishing pages worth ranking. Links amplify content. They don’t replace it.

Best 5 SEO Experts for B2B Saas

Most “top SEO” lists are padded with ecommerce people and affiliate marketers. Useful for them, useless for a 12-person SaaS trying to rank a comparison page against HubSpot. The five people below actually work on software companies, and their advice reflects that. Most of these experts deal with SEO and GEO or AEO or whatever the new LLM search is called these days.

Andrei Saioc

Andrei is a software engineer first, which is the main reason he’s on this list. He founded the Bucharest agency Sitemile in 2009, has shipped over a thousand websites and apps since, and only later got serious about SEO after watching paid ads on his own businesses get too expensive to justify. So his advice comes from a founder who had to make organic work or lose the traffic.

That shows in how he talks about SaaS SEO. He treats it as a product problem. Technical audits, site architecture, programmatic pages, and the go-to-market stuff that sits next to it (ASO, positioning, launch strategy).

If you’re a technical founder who wants to understand what your SEO person is actually doing, his writing at andreisaioc.me and his newsletter are a good starting point. He also does one-to-one consulting for early-stage SaaS teams, which is rarer than you’d think among people at his level.

David Quaid

David runs primaryposition out of New York and has been a fixture at BrightonSEO for years. He’s blunt. He’ll tell you most SaaS content strategies are just blog-volume plays dressed up as strategy, and he’s usually right.

His strength is diagnosis. Sites that plateaued at a few thousand visits a month, sites that lost 40% after a core update, sites where nobody can explain why the pricing page doesn’t rank. Quaid is the person you bring in when the dashboard is green and revenue still isn’t moving.

Charles Floate

Charles is the controversial one. He came up through affiliate SEO and has never been shy about testing things Google would rather he didn’t. That background makes some B2B marketers nervous, but it’s exactly why he’s useful: he knows what actually moves rankings versus what’s in the help docs.

For SaaS, his link-building and SERP-testing material is the draw. He’s also been early on AI search visibility, which matters now that a chunk of your buyers start in ChatGPT instead of Google. Read him with some judgement, though. Not everything translates to a brand you have to protect.

Kevin Indig

Kevin ran SEO at Shopify and G2 before going independent, so he’s seen what organic growth looks like at a scale most founders never will. His Growth Memo newsletter is the best regular analysis of how SaaS sites win and lose, backed by his own data rather than vibes. He’s particularly good on AI Overviews eating top-of-funnel clicks, a problem nobody in SaaS has solved yet.

Eli Schwartz

Eli wrote Product-Led SEO, the book that argued SEO for software companies should be built into the product rather than bolted on as a content team. Think Zapier’s integration pages or Canva’s template library. He’s advised companies like Coinbase, Mixpanel and Quora on exactly that.

Where he differs from everyone else here: he’ll tell you to stop writing blog posts. For a lot of SaaS companies, that’s the right call.

Who to pick

If you need a strategist for a 200-person company, Indig or Schwartz. If something is broken, Quaid. If you want aggressive tactics, Floate. And if you’re pre-Series A and need someone who can read your codebase and your keyword list in the same call, Andrei Saioc is the one I’d start with.