We analyzed the natural progress of 1,600 SaaS firms to find the web optimization methods that work finest in 2024.
On this article, we’re bootstrapped SaaS firms that gained the best quantity of referring domains up to now 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 progress is one thing that you can take inspiration from, too.
- We used the Ahrefs API to tug an inventory of dwell referring domains for every firm in September 2023 and September 2024.
- Firms have been ranked by referring area progress as a share 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 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 |
Wish to work out how just about any firm builds its finest 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 progress. Right here’s the chart for our #1 firm, Elfsight:
Spectacular! Subsequent, I exploit the Anchors report back to rapidly perceive the varieties 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:
Taking a look at a few of these hyperlinks, it’s clear that the corporate affords free web site widgets that additionally embody a hyperlink again to Elfsight:
For some web sites, anchor textual content received’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 up to now 12 months:
However digging into the commonest anchor textual content, it turns into obvious that these are nearly all spammy hyperlinks (promoting Korean enterprise massages).
You possibly can exclude spammy hyperlinks like these utilizing our Greatest hyperlinks filter. By default, the “Greatest 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 “finest” hyperlink, you possibly can 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 Greatest 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 all our prime 50 web sites, Clearscope. Apart from widespread “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.
Ultimate ideas
We’ll share extra of those information analyses within the coming weeks. Need us to incorporate your organization within the subsequent evaluation? Fill out this brief Google Kind.
