We analyzed the natural development of 1,600 SaaS firms to find the search engine marketing methods that work greatest in 2024.
On this article, we’re taking a look at bootstrapped SaaS firms that gained the best quantity of referring domains up to now yr.
Bootstrapped companies typically don’t have big budgets to spend on advertising and marketing, so any technique these small-but-mighty firms use to enhance their natural development is one thing that you can take inspiration from, too.
- We used the Ahrefs API to tug an inventory of stay referring domains for every firm in September 2023 and September 2024.
- Corporations have been ranked by referring area development as a proportion of their preliminary referring domains. We’ve set a minimal beginning threshold of 1,000 referring domains.
- We’ve reported on referring domains as an alternative of backlinks, as a result of 1,000 referring domains are a lot, a lot tougher to get than 1,000 backlinks.
Rank | Firm | Referring Domains 2023 | Referring Domains 2024 | Referring Area Progress | Change | Estimated Income |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Elfsight | 7,657 | 33,610 | 25,953 | 339% | $8.0M |
2 | Brief.io | 5,709 | 18,573 | 12,864 | 225% | $0.5M |
3 | Gymdesk | 1,325 | 3,052 | 1,727 | 130% | $5.5M |
4 | Helpjuice | 4,015 | 8,672 | 4,657 | 116% | $6.0M |
5 | AlsoAsked | 1,602 | 3,343 | 1,741 | 109% | $0.5M |
6 | Stripo | 2,304 | 4,420 | 2,116 | 92% | $5.5M |
7 | Clearscope | 1,883 | 3,580 | 1,697 | 90% | $5.5M |
8 | Surfer | 5,815 | 10,899 | 5,084 | 87% | $37.5M |
9 | Wordtune | 2,877 | 5,347 | 2,470 | 86% | $1.0M |
10 | Crowdin | 4,818 | 8,919 | 4,101 | 85% | $17.5M |
11 | Socialinsider | 3,264 | 6,007 | 2,743 | 84% | $0.8M |
12 | SpyFu | 8,101 | 14,821 | 6,720 | 83% | $2.0M |
13 | Pentest-Instruments.com | 1,543 | 2,779 | 1,236 | 80% | $5.5M |
14 | Canny | 4,411 | 7,675 | 3,264 | 74% | $5.5M |
15 | Surfshark | 13,898 | 24,056 | 10,158 | 73% | $20.0M |
16 | Sitebulb | 1,232 | 2,093 | 861 | 70% | $0.5M |
17 | Seobility | 3,496 | 5,900 | 2,404 | 69% | $5.0M |
18 | SpyCloud | 1,192 | 1,987 | 795 | 67% | $14.0M |
19 | MxToolbox | 10,718 | 17,736 | 7,018 | 65% | $9.0M |
20 | Shiftbase | 1,077 | 1,780 | 703 | 65% | $17.5M |
21 | Signaturely | 1,113 | 1,839 | 726 | 65% | $0.5M |
22 | Lemlist | 1,613 | 2,654 | 1,041 | 65% | $6.0M |
23 | Sitechecker | 5,938 | 9,732 | 3,794 | 64% | $6.1M |
24 | SavvyCal | 1,272 | 2,070 | 798 | 63% | $5.5M |
25 | Statusbrew | 2,750 | 4,470 | 1,720 | 63% | $14.0M |
26 | Wisepops | 1,291 | 2,086 | 795 | 62% | $3.0M |
27 | Glassnode | 5,041 | 8,123 | 3,082 | 61% | $5.5M |
28 | DeviceAtlas | 2,765 | 4,442 | 1,677 | 61% | $19.0M |
29 | Float.com | 1,021 | 1,638 | 617 | 60% | $5.5M |
30 | RTINGS.com | 8,601 | 13,779 | 5,178 | 60% | $6.3M |
31 | Smallpdf | 13,953 | 22,264 | 8,311 | 60% | $17.5M |
32 | Clockify | 6,109 | 9,733 | 3,624 | 59% | $5.5M |
33 | Mailtrap | 3,162 | 4,991 | 1,829 | 58% | $5.5M |
34 | BambooHR | 8,511 | 13,410 | 4,899 | 58% | $237.8M |
35 | Setapp | 13,178 | 20,696 | 7,518 | 57% | $15.0M |
36 | WebCEO | 2,495 | 3,891 | 1,396 | 56% | $25.0M |
37 | Visme | 10,354 | 16,135 | 5,781 | 56% | $1.0M |
38 | UpLead | 1,823 | 2,833 | 1,010 | 55% | $17.5M |
39 | Slickplan | 1,345 | 2,086 | 741 | 55% | $1.0M |
40 | Jotform | 45,485 | 69,553 | 24,068 | 53% | $21.0M |
41 | Wiza | 2,013 | 3,070 | 1,057 | 53% | $5.5M |
42 | Ahrefs | 52,536 | 80,036 | 27,500 | 52% | $100.0M |
43 | Believable Analytics | 6,084 | 9,251 | 3,167 | 52% | $5.5M |
44 | Creately | 7,816 | 11,844 | 4,028 | 52% | $12.0M |
45 | Homerun | 2,040 | 3,068 | 1,028 | 50% | $38.4M |
46 | Yardi | 1,928 | 2,880 | 952 | 49% | $5500.0M |
47 | Infinite Campus | 1,029 | 1,534 | 505 | 49% | $56.0M |
48 | Filemail | 3,829 | 5,694 | 1,865 | 49% | $1.0M |
49 | LiveAgent | 4,740 | 7,034 | 2,294 | 48% | $5.0M |
50 | Semaphore | 2,727 | 4,025 | 1,298 | 48% | $4.0M |
Need to work out how nearly any firm builds its greatest backlinks? Right here’s how I do it in Ahrefs.
I often begin with the Overview report in Web site Explorer to get a fast overview of the web site’s referring area development. Right here’s the chart for our #1 firm, Elfsight:
Spectacular! Subsequent, I take advantage of the Anchors report back to rapidly perceive the forms of hyperlinks being constructed: are all of them model mentions, or hyperlinks to weblog content material, or free instruments?
In Elfsight’s case, the overwhelming majority of their referring domains (nicely over 60%) have anchor textual content containing the phrase widget:
a few of these hyperlinks, it’s clear that the corporate provides free web site widgets that additionally embody a hyperlink again to Elfsight:
For some web sites, anchor textual content gained’t be so revealing. Right here’s the Referring Domains report for a SaaS firm I excluded from this text. At first look, they appear to be doing nicely, with over 100,00 new backlinks acquired up to now yr:
However digging into the commonest anchor textual content, it turns into obvious that these are nearly all spammy hyperlinks (promoting Korean enterprise massages).
You’ll be able to exclude spammy hyperlinks like these utilizing our Finest hyperlinks filter. By default, the “Finest hyperlinks” filter will solely present hyperlinks that are:
- Dofollow,
- Within the web page content material,
- On a referring area with a DR of at the very least 30,
- With estimated natural visitors to the web page of at the very least 500/m.
You probably have completely different standards for outlining a “greatest” hyperlink, you possibly can customise the filter your self:
With the filter utilized, if we run the Anchors report once more, we will filter out all of these spam hyperlinks, and get a clearer image of the great high quality hyperlinks this web site has acquired. Far, far fewer:
Lastly, I like to go to the Finest by hyperlinks report back to see the person pages which have acquired the very best hyperlinks.
Right here’s an instance from one other one among our prime 50 web sites, Clearscope. Except for frequent “utility” pages like their homepage, pricing web page, and sign-in web page, their most linked-to pages are all thought management weblog posts—opinions, predictions, and analysis research:
Not each firm can construct hyperlinks by providing tons of free instruments or widgets, however thought management content material is a link-building technique that’s a lot simpler for different firms to emulate.
Closing ideas
We’ll share extra of those knowledge analyses within the coming weeks. Need us to incorporate your organization within the subsequent evaluation? Fill out this brief Google Kind.