A B2B SaaS product competing against much bigger budgets
28 placements averaging DR 50 or better, all inside the SaaS and B2B software space, over six months.
- Placements
- 28
- Average publisher DR
- 52
- Campaign length
- 6 months
- Sector
- B2B SaaS
Placements secured
Average publisher DR
Top three rankings
Organic traffic index
Referring domains
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Placements secured | 0 | 28 | new |
| Average publisher DR | 0 | 52 | new |
| Top three rankings | 0 | 14 | new |
| Organic traffic index | 100 | 289 | +189% |
| Referring domains | 61 | 89 | +46% |
Measured over 6 months. Percentages are calculated from the two columns beside them rather than written in, so they cannot drift apart from the figures.
Where they started
A capable product in a category where the incumbents outspend everyone. Their content was good and it ranked on page three, which is worth roughly nothing.
Every competitor had years of accumulated links. Out-publishing them was not going to close that on its own.
What we did
Guest posts and niche edits together. The niche edits went onto aged pages that already ranked, which was the faster half of the campaign and did most of the early work.
Every placement inside SaaS, B2B software or adjacent operational categories. Nothing general, on the view that topical relevance carries more weight than raw domain strength in a crowded category.
How it ended, and the caveat
Top three for a set of terms that had previously sat on page three, and a materially better cost per lead than their paid search was returning.
The mix mattered more than the volume here. Niche edits on already-ranking pages produced movement within weeks; the guest posts took longer and held better.
What the campaign actually was
Mix
Roughly two thirds guest posts, one third niche edits
Pace
Front-loaded with edits, guest posts steady across six months
What went wrong along the way
No campaign runs clean. These are the parts that cost time, and they are worth reading because they are the parts most likely to happen to you too.
- The first two months looked like failure. Niche edits moved a handful of positions and nothing else happened, which in a six-month campaign is most of the way to a difficult review meeting.
- Their best-performing content was on a subdomain, which meant some of the authority we built was not landing where the commercial pages needed it. That was an internal linking fix on their side, not a link building one, and it cost about three weeks.
- Two publishers we wanted were already carrying a direct competitor and declined on those grounds. That happens more in SaaS than anywhere else and it is worth checking early.
What to take from it
Edits first, posts underneath
The niche edits produced early movement that bought patience for the guest posts to mature. In a six-month engagement that sequencing is most of the difference between renewal and cancellation.
Check the internal linking first
External authority landing on pages that do not pass it onward is money spent for someone else's benefit. A twenty-minute check before the campaign would have saved three weeks.
SaaS inventory gets contested
Competitors buy from the same publishers. Confirm availability before you promise a client a specific site.
The other two
An eco-friendly manufacturer nobody could find
Good product, decent site, almost no authority. Eight months of placements on genuinely relevant publishers moved them from invisible to page one on the terms that actually sell.
Industrial and trucking equipmentA trucking equipment manufacturer with zero page-one rankings
A manufacturer with no page-one rankings whatsoever in a niche where the buyers are specific and the search volume is low but valuable.
Have a look at the list
Every site with its price, nothing to fill in first, and nothing to pay unless a link actually goes live. 365 days of cover on every placement.
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