Core
For a gap under 40 domains, or a first quarter you want to judge before committing.
$1,550/month
- 5 editorial placements a month
- DR 30–70, page traffic 500+
- Gap list and rejection log
- Monthly record, 12-month warranty
SaaS link building agency
SaaS link building that starts with your gap list
We pool the referring domains of the four URLs outranking your category page, subtract the ones you already have, and hand you the difference in week one. Then we spend the next three to twelve months closing it.
- Billed on live links
- 12-month replacement
- 30 days' notice
Referring domains — /customer-analyticsweek 1
Competitor A96
Competitor B84
Competitor C71
Competitor D63
You19
65domains between you and the page above — named, scored and sent in week one
0
checks a domain must survive before we spend a dollar on it
0
of prospected domains rejected — you get the log, with reasons
0
of placements still live at twelve months, measured by weekly recrawl
0
business day to a written reply — no discovery-call gauntlet
The arithmetic
How big is your link gap, and does your budget close it?
This is the calculation we run before quoting anyone. It takes ten minutes and it decides whether link building is even the right instrument for you. Move the sliders.
- The gap
- 65 domains
- At that budget
- 9 links a month
- Time to close
- 8 months
- Total spend
- $22,800
Comfortably inside a normal programme. This is what a retainer is for.
Send me the actual gap listThe real list is free and yours to keep, whether or not you hire us. We name the publications; you decide what to do with them.
Case studies
What closing a gap actually looked like
Anonymised at the client's request — the numbers are not. Each one names the gap we started with and what it cost to close.
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Vertical SaaS · Series A
62 → 8Gap of 62 domains on the category page, closed to 8 in eleven months at $2,850 a month. Head term moved from position 14 to 3.
$31,350 · 104 placements · 11 months
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Developer tool · Seed
4.1×Budget too small for the gap, so we built one benchmark report instead. It earned 71 referring domains in fourteen months without further outreach spend.
$18,600 · one asset · 14 months
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HR platform · Series B
+38%Non-brand organic sessions up 38% in two quarters, driven almost entirely by round-up and comparison placements rather than the blog.
$4,100/mo · 89 placements · 7 months
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Fintech infrastructure
19Nineteen partner and integration directories claimed in the first six weeks, at close to zero acquisition cost. We do this before selling anyone a retainer.
Week 1–6 · included in every engagement
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Analytics · Series A
0We declined the engagement. Their referring domains already matched the competitors — the page was the constraint, not the links. They fixed the page instead.
Roughly a quarter of enquiries end this way
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Security SaaS · Series C
147A profile inherited from a previous vendor: 147 placements on sites with no measurable readership. Remediated over two quarters, then rebuilt.
2 quarters remediation · 3 quarters rebuild
What a placement has to be
Three things, all of them checkable before we spend your money
- It has readers. Verified organic sessions on the specific page, not the domain. A site with 80,000 monthly visitors can publish you on a page that gets eleven.
- It is topically yours. The publication already covers your category. Relevance is not a tiebreaker in B2B — the audience might be forty thousand people worldwide, and it matters entirely whether the right two thousand read it.
- It survives. Load-bearing, in the body, in an article that would be worse without the sentence. We recrawl weekly and replace anything that dies inside twelve months.
How an engagement runs
Four phases. The first one produces no links at all.
- 01CountWe pool the referring domains of the URLs beating you, subtract yours, and hand you the list. Free, and yours either way.
- 02ClaimPartner directories, integration listings, round-ups that already mention you incorrectly. Weeks one to six, close to zero acquisition cost.
- 03AcquireEditorial placement against the specification, month after month, with the rejection log published alongside the wins.
- 04HoldWeekly recrawl, replacement inside twelve months, and a standing brief to tell you when to stop.
Pricing
Three retainers, published, with the arithmetic shown
Billed on links that are live and indexed. A month that underdelivers carries the shortfall forward; it is never quietly invoiced.
Most engagements
Growth
For a 40–90 domain gap you want closed inside a year rather than three.
$2,850/month
- 10 editorial placements a month
- DR 40–85, page traffic 1,000+
- Everything in Core, plus
- Round-up and comparison placement
- Quarterly anchor-profile review
Category
For a contested head term, where the gap is 90+ and competitors are still acquiring.
$4,100/month
- 15 editorial placements a month
- DR 40–90, page traffic 1,000+
- Everything in Growth, plus
- One linkable asset a quarter
- Named strategist, fortnightly call
Blended unit cost runs $273–$310 a placement depending on tier. If a quote elsewhere comes in far below that, the difference is where the inventory comes from, not efficiency. Ask.
In their words
What clients say when the call is not being recorded
“The rejection log was the thing. I had never seen an agency show me what they turned down, and it was the only reason I believed the ones they shipped.”
“They told us not to buy links for the first six weeks. That conversation cost them about nine thousand dollars and bought them a three-year client.”
“I forwarded the monthly record to our board without editing it. That has never been true of an SEO report before.”
Questions
The ones that decide whether to hire anyone
Including the two that usually end the conversation.
What does a SaaS link building agency actually do?
It earns editorial links from publications your buyers already read, so your category and comparison pages can outrank competitors. For SaaS that means round-ups, alternatives pages, integration directories and vertical trade press — not general business blogs. The work is prospecting, scoring, pitching, writing and verification; the link is the receipt at the end of it.
How much should SaaS link building cost?
Our retainers run $1,550 to $4,100 a month for five to fifteen placements, which is a blended $273–$310 per link. Across the market, credible B2B SaaS placements sit roughly between $150 and $500. Below about $150 the delivery arithmetic stops closing — nobody can prospect, pitch, write and get a real editor to publish at that price — so the inventory is coming from somewhere else.
How long before it shows up in revenue?
Delivery is visible monthly. Search response — position bands, impressions, gap closure — appears between months three and eight. Commercial effect on a nine-month B2B sales cycle lands somewhere between months nine and eighteen. Anyone promising revenue movement in month two is describing a different business than yours.
Do you use guest posts, or niche edits?
Both, capped at roughly two thirds guest posts to one third insertions. Insertions are cheaper and register faster because the page is already indexed. The cap exists because a profile built mainly of edits reads exactly like one.
What happens when a link disappears?
We recrawl every placement weekly. Anything that dies inside twelve months is replaced at no charge. Roughly 4% of placements need replacing in the first year — attrition is predictable, which is why a contract with no clause covering it has quietly moved a known cost onto you.
Would you ever tell us not to buy links?
Roughly a quarter of enquiries get that answer. If your referring domains already match the competitors, the page is the constraint and links will not fix it. If your gap needs more than twenty months at your budget, buying placements is the wrong instrument and we will say so before quoting.
Latest from the blog
What the charting keeps teaching us
- SaaS link building strategies that still earn their cost Eight SaaS link building strategies ranked by return, with the company stage each suits, the conditions under which each stops working, and the two we no longer recommend. Read
- How to get high-quality backlinks What high quality resolves to when defined precisely: five measurable attributes, six routes that reliably produce links meeting them, and why the cheapest route is the one nobody runs. Read
- Linkable assets for SaaS: what actually gets cited Seven asset types ranked by observed citation rate, how to choose one from evidence rather than instinct, and the test that predicts whether an asset will earn links before you build it. Read
VIII
Start with the gap list
Tell us the page you need to move and the term it should own. We pool the referring domains of the four URLs currently beating it, subtract yours, and send back the real number — the gap, the publications inside it, and an honest read on how long closing it takes at your budget.
- A written reply within one business day. No discovery-call gauntlet.
- The list is free and yours to keep, whether or not you hire us.
- If the page will not convert the traffic, we will tell you to fix that first.
Replies 08:00–18:00 ET, Monday to Friday