We analyzed the natural development of 1,600 SaaS firms to find the search engine optimization 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 previously 12 months.
Bootstrapped companies usually don’t have large 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 drag a listing of reside referring domains for every firm in September 2023 and September 2024.
- Corporations had 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 a substitute of backlinks, as a result of 1,000 referring domains are a lot, a lot more durable to get than 1,000 backlinks.
| Rank | Firm | Referring Domains 2023 | Referring Domains 2024 | Referring Area Development | Change | Estimated Income |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Elfsight | 7,657 | 33,610 | 25,953 | 339% | $8.0M |
| 2 | Short.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-Tools.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 | Plausible 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 normally begin with the Overview report in Website 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 kinds 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 (effectively 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 effectively, with over 100,00 new backlinks acquired previously 12 months:
However digging into the most typical anchor textual content, it turns into obvious that these are virtually 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.
If in case you have completely different standards for outlining a “greatest” hyperlink, you’ll be able to customise the filter your self:
With the filter utilized, if we run the Anchors report once more, we are able to 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 one of the best hyperlinks.
Right here’s an instance from one other one in every of our prime 50 web sites, Clearscope. Other than 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 strategy 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 short Google Form.