Are your backlinks driving growth?
For many SaaS marketers, backlinks are a black box. You invest resources, but the impact on trial sign-ups and revenue remains frustratingly unclear.
Without a clear strategy, your efforts can attract low-quality or toxic links. These can actively harm your rankings and waste your marketing budget.
Consider that Amra & Elma found 94% of online content receives no backlinks at all. This makes a targeted audit crucial for SaaS visibility and success.
A systematic backlink audit is the key to turning this around. It helps you focus your efforts on links that directly support customer acquisition.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to conduct a backlink audit for your SaaS, using a seven-step framework designed for SaaS marketing managers.
You’ll learn to reclaim lost links, align efforts with growth metrics, and build a stronger, more effective backlink profile for your company.
Let’s get started.
Quick Takeaways:
- ✅ Map your SaaS backlink profile by exporting referring domains and key metrics using analysis tools.
- ✅ Identify and prioritize toxic links from spammy directories, irrelevant sites, or PBNs, disavowing them.
- ✅ Evaluate content-aligned links using the SEQR framework to ensure quality, relevance, and Google’s standards.
- ✅ Reclaim lost link equity by finding broken inbound links to your SaaS site and requesting updates.
- ✅ Sync your link building with the SaaS customer acquisition cycle to attract qualified converting traffic.
1. Map Your Current Backlink Profile for SaaS
What does your backlink profile look like?
Without this visibility, you can’t diagnose why organic traffic is stalling or identify hidden growth opportunities.
You could have valuable links you aren’t leveraging, or worse, toxic links from spammy sites that are actively hurting your SaaS rankings and your domain authority.
A uSERP study shows sites can generate over 10,500 monthly visits from just a few quality backlinks. This highlights the traffic potential you could be missing.
Ignoring this means you’re leaving growth on the table. It’s time to get a clear picture.
So, let’s start by creating a complete inventory.
Your first move is to pull a comprehensive list of all domains linking to your SaaS website using a backlink analysis tool.
This export gives you a baseline dataset for the entire audit. You’ll see every referring domain and the specific pages they link to.
When conducting a backlink audit for your SaaS, you’ll want to export key metrics like Domain Authority and spam scores. This data forms your initial map.
This is your single source of truth.
This foundational map provides the context needed to identify toxic links and find new opportunities, which we’ll discuss next.
Ready to transform this map into actionable growth? Let’s discuss how our agency can help you identify and leverage opportunities, and remove toxic links. Book a Boterns discovery call today!
2. Identify Toxic Links & Prioritize Removals
Are toxic backlinks hurting your SaaS?
These spammy links invite Google penalties, dragging down your hard-earned SEO progress and poisoning your domain authority.
Without a clear process, you risk serious ranking drops that cripple lead generation. Your entire marketing funnel is at stake from these bad links.
Moz Community audits show ~50% of backlinks are toxic or suspicious. This highlights a widespread and often overlooked threat.
You need a system to clean your link profile and protect your search visibility before it is too late.
This is where proactive removal comes in.
Identifying and prioritizing these toxic links is a critical step in your audit. It directly protects your rankings and clears the path for healthy growth.
Focus on links from spammy directories, irrelevant international sites, and private blog networks. These are clear red flags for all modern search engines.
Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to flag suspicious domains. When conducting a backlink audit for your SaaS, you must prioritize removing links with high spam scores.
This is a non-negotiable hygiene step.
By disavowing these links, you send a clear signal to Google about your quality commitment, safeguarding your long-term SEO investment and brand reputation.
3. Audit Content-Aligned Links for SEQR Assessment
Are your backlinks actually helping?
Many links come from content that lacks relevance or authority, offering zero value to your SaaS brand’s credibility in search results.
This creates a false sense of security. You think your profile is strong, but many links are just digital noise that won’t help you rank.
MiroMind confirms that links remain critical for evaluating content, so the source’s quality is a direct reflection on you.
Failing to assess this wastes your efforts. It’s time for a smarter approach to link quality.
Let’s introduce the SEQR assessment.
The SEQR framework helps you evaluate if a linking page meets Google’s quality standards for search, experience, quality, and relevance for your topic.
This moves beyond just domain authority. You’re checking if the linking content tru_ly aligns with your SaaS solution and offers value to its readers.
When conducting a backlink audit for your SaaS, evaluate each link against these factors. Does the content solve a problem? Is it well-written and trustworthy?
This ensures your backlinks build true authority.
By focusing on SEQR, you ensure that every acquired link genuinely strengthens your brand’s reputation and supports your long-term organic growth strategy.
4. Reclaim Lost Opportunities Through Broken Link Analysis
Lost backlinks are lost opportunities.
Links you earned can break, creating 404s and silently eroding your site’s authority and referral traffic.
This is a subtle yet damaging issue. Without a proactive check, you unknowingly leak link equity that you worked so hard to acquire, impacting your overall SEO performance.
This decay harms your rankings for important keywords, making it harder to attract qualified traffic and convert visitors into free trials.
Don’t leave this value on the table. You can reclaim these lost assets through a targeted broken link analysis.
This is where broken link building comes in.
The process involves finding websites linking to dead pages on your site and politely asking them to update the URL to a live, relevant page.
It’s a win-win scenario. You reclaim lost SEO value, and the linking site fixes a broken link, improving its own user experience.
When conducting a backlink audit for your SaaS, use a tool like Ahrefs to find your broken inbound links. Then, email the webmaster and suggest a relevant replacement page.
The response rates are surprisingly high.
This tactic instantly restores link equity, improves user experience, and strengthens your backlink profile with minimal effort compared to new link acquisition.
5. Align Link Building With SaaS Customer Acquisition Cycles
Your link building feels disconnected from sales.
Generic outreach often fails because it ignores where customers are in their buying journey, wasting your valuable marketing budget.
This approach attracts unqualified traffic from irrelevant sites. You get vanity metrics without growth, which is a tough sell to your leadership team.
Since 10–25% cold outreach success is the average for link-building, a generic strategy falls short. You need a better way.
Your efforts aren’t supporting customer acquisition. Let’s sync your link strategy with the sales cycle to fix this misalignment.
Focus on intent, not just volume.
Aligning link building with your acquisition cycle means targeting sites that attract prospects at different stages, from awareness to decision.
For example, you can pursue review sites for bottom-of-funnel users. This drives qualified referral traffic that is more likely to convert into free trials.
A key part of conducting a backlink audit for your SaaS is mapping link prospects to these stages. Top-of-funnel links come from educational content, while bottom-of-funnel links come from “best of” lists.
This turns link building into a sales tool.
This strategic shift ensures every new backlink you acquire actively contributes to your growth metrics, not just your domain authority score.
Tired of vanity metrics? Ready to turn your backlink strategy into a powerful sales tool? Book your discovery call to see how we can align your efforts for real growth.
6. Create SaaS-Specific Linkable Assets That Drive Referrals
A clean profile is not a growth engine.
Your audit reveals gaps, but you must proactively build new links to drive referral traffic and authority.
Relying only on link cleanup is reactive. This approach leaves valuable referral traffic opportunities untapped and does little to build your domain’s long-term strength.
This defensive posture prevents building an engine that attracts high-value backlinks from relevant industry publications.
To capitalize on your audit, you must create assets that other sites in your ecosystem want to link to.
Start creating valuable, linkable assets.
I’m talking about resources so useful that other websites and publications in your niche will naturally want to reference them in their own content.
Think beyond just standard blog posts. Your primary goal is to create SaaS-specific content that solves a real problem for your ideal customers.
While conducting a backlink audit for your SaaS, you should look for content gaps to fill with original assets. You can build powerful referral streams with:
- Free, niche-specific calculators or tools
- Proprietary industry research and reports
- In-depth, data-backed case studies
These assets become evergreen link magnets.
This proactive approach turns your audit into a powerful strategy for acquiring high-quality backlinks that drive targeted referral traffic and boost your trial conversions.
7. Tie Backlink Improvements to Growth Metrics Like Trial Conversions
A backlink audit’s true value is growth.
If you can’t connect SEO to business outcomes, it’s impossible to justify your budget or prove your team’s real value.
This disconnect means you are missing a massive growth lever and can’t prove the impact of your hard work improving search visibility.
Securing high-quality links is great, but if they don’t drive traffic that converts, the effort is ultimately misguided.
You must reframe the audit from a technical task into a core driver of measurable SaaS growth.
Let’s connect your links to actual revenue.
Frame your audit around growth. Track how new and existing links influence not just traffic, but also free trial conversions and user sign-ups.
Use campaign tracking on your outreach links to see which sources deliver high-quality, converting traffic. This gives you clear attribution.
When conducting a backlink audit for your SaaS, go beyond domain authority. Instead, analyze if a link’s referral traffic has a high trial sign-up rate.
This shifts your focus from vanity metrics.
By doing this, you directly prove your SEO’s ROI, making it much easier to secure more budget for future link-building campaigns.
Conclusion
Your backlink audit can be a growth engine.
Without the right process, it’s just a technical checklist. It feels disconnected from the trial sign-ups and revenue you need to deliver.
MiroMind’s 2025 research shows Ahrefs is the preferred backlink analysis tool for SEO professionals. Having access to accurate and fresh data is non-negotiable for turning insights into a winning strategy.
But the right tools are only part of it.
The seven steps in this guide provide that clear framework. They help turn audit data into a real strategy supporting customer acquisition.
By mastering how to conduct a backlink audit for your SaaS, you move beyond simple cleanup. You can start proactively building links that drive trial conversions.
Don’t wait for your rankings to slip. Choose one step from this guide, like reclaiming lost links, and take action this week.
Turn your SEO efforts into measurable growth.
Ready to transform your backlink audit from a checklist into a growth engine driving trial conversions? Book your discovery call with me to unlock measurable SEO growth for your SaaS.
