The steel and glass frame of a building seen from below

B2B SaaS link building agency

We audit first.
The retainer is what the audit recommends.

Roughly a third of the B2B SaaS companies that come to us do not have a link problem. They have a page problem, a category problem, or a patience problem. A paid audit finds out which — before anyone signs a twelve-month retainer against the wrong constraint.

Book the audit — $2,400 Diagnose it yourself
34%

of audits end in "do not buy links yet"

11days

from kick-off to the written audit

9mo

median B2B SaaS sales cycle we plan against

100%

of the audit fee credited if you retain us

Two minutes, six questions

Is link building actually your constraint?

The same six questions that open every audit we run. Nothing is sent anywhere — the answer is worked out in your browser and disappears when you close the tab.

Question 1 of 6

Question

A self-assessment is not an audit. It uses your estimates; the audit uses your Search Console, your competitors' live profiles and a crawl of the page you want to move.

What the audit does

Four passes, eleven days, one written answer

Delivered as a document you own, with the working shown. If the answer is that you should not be buying links, it says so in the first paragraph and explains what to spend on instead.

  1. A grid of windows on a building facade

    Pass 01

    The gap, measured per URL rather than per domain

    Domain-level comparisons flatter everybody. We take the page you actually need to rank, the four URLs above it, and count referring domains at page level. Half the engagements we decline die here: the domain gap looks enormous, the page gap is four.

    Output — a per-URL gap table and the number of domains that would close it.

  2. An empty meeting room with tall windows

    Pass 02

    Whether the page can hold the position if it gets there

    A page that answers a different question than the query will not stay at position three no matter how many links point at it. We read it against the four that outrank it and mark what is missing: the comparison table, the pricing honesty, the objection nobody answers.

    Output — a marked-up copy of your page and the rewrite it needs first.

  3. A spiral staircase seen from above

    Pass 03

    Whether the publications your buyers read will take you

    B2B SaaS categories are small. We build the real target list — the trade press, the operator newsletters, the practitioner blogs your buying committee actually opens — and check each for reachability, not just for a metric. Sometimes the list is thirty deep and the honest answer is that a retainer will exhaust it in five months.

    Output — the target list, with reachability and an estimated ceiling.

  4. A long corridor of glass and steel

    Pass 04

    The arithmetic: months, budget, and whether they meet

    Gap divided by a sustainable acquisition rate gives months. Months multiplied by rate gives budget. Then we add the sales cycle, because a link earned in March does not become revenue in April on a nine-month cycle. If that number lands past twenty months, we say so.

    Output — a month-by-month plan, or a written reason not to start.

Two engagements, written out

What the work looks like when it is going well — and when it is not

Compliance software · Series B · 14 months

The gap was real, and it took longer than they wanted to hear

Their category page sat at position eleven behind four incumbents averaging seventy-one referring domains to its nineteen. The audit put the honest figure at fourteen months of sustained acquisition, not the two quarters the board had budgeted for. They took the longer plan. The page reached position four in month eleven and position two in month fourteen.

What the audit got wrong: we expected the trade press to be the productive channel. It was the practitioner newsletters, which produced less authority per placement and considerably more demo requests. The plan was rewritten in month five.

$2,650/month · 118 placements · 63 candidates rejected

Developer tooling · seed · audit only

We took the audit fee and told them not to hire us

Nine referring domains against a median of twelve in their category — the gap was three. Their problem was that the page ranking for their head term was a blog post from 2022 with no product on it. No amount of link acquisition fixes a page that answers the wrong question.

The audit recommended a rewrite, an internal-link change and nothing else. They did both in a fortnight. The head term moved five positions with no new links at all. They came back eight months later, when the gap was real, and that engagement is running now.

$2,400 audit · no retainer sold · retained fourteen months later

Last quarter

Three briefs we turned down, and why

Published because an agency that has never refused a brief is telling you something about its standard, whether it means to or not.

01

"Guaranteed DR 60+ placements"

A written guarantee of domain rating is a guarantee about inventory the agency controls. We cannot promise a number that belongs to somebody else's editorial decision, so we said no to the brief rather than to the standard.

02

A $900 monthly budget against a ninety-domain gap

Three placements a month closes ninety domains in two and a half years. The company would have spent $27,000 to arrive after the category consolidated. We sent the arithmetic instead of a proposal.

03

Links pointed at a page nobody could buy from

The target URL had no pricing, no comparison and no trial. Authority would have moved the ranking and nothing else. The recommendation was to fix the page and come back — which, six months on, they did.

A dark office at night with the city beyond

Why the audit comes first

The expensive mistake is not a bad link. It is twelve months aimed at the wrong constraint.

A retainer bought against an unmeasured gap is a bet. The audit turns it into arithmetic you can check, and hand to somebody else if you would rather they executed it.

Fees

One price you can see now. The rest is quoted against what we find.

We do not publish a three-tier retainer table, because the honest number depends on a gap we have not measured yet. What we can publish is the entry fee, the band retainers land in, and what changes the figure.

The audit

$2,400one-off

Eleven days. Four passes. A written document you keep whether or not you retain us, and which is yours to hand to another agency if you prefer their answer.

  • Per-URL gap table for your head term and three supporting pages
  • Marked-up read of the page you need to move
  • Target publication list with reachability, not just metrics
  • Month-by-month plan with the budget it implies

Credited in full against the first month if you retain us.

Retainers, after the audit

$1,750–$4,200per month

Where a given engagement lands inside that band is set by three things, all of which the audit measures:

  • The size of the gap. Forty domains and ninety domains are not the same job.
  • How reachable the list is. A category with three hundred credible publications costs less per placement than one with thirty.
  • Whether assets are needed. Some gaps close with outreach; some need something built that is worth linking to.

Billed on live, indexed links. Twelve-month replacement warranty. Thirty days' notice, no minimum term.

For reference: credible B2B SaaS placements run roughly $150 to $500 across the market. Our blended unit cost sits between $260 and $310. Anything materially under $150 a placement is inventory built to be sold rather than read.

Before you book

The questions that actually get asked

Answered at the length they deserve rather than the length that sells.

Why should a B2B SaaS company pay for an audit before a retainer?

Because the alternative is paying for twelve months of link acquisition to discover the constraint was somewhere else. About a third of our audits end with a recommendation not to buy links yet. That third would otherwise have spent $20,000 to $40,000 finding out slowly. The fee is credited if you do retain us, so the audit costs nothing in the case where link building was the right answer all along.

How many backlinks does a B2B SaaS page actually need?

The question only has an answer relative to a specific query. Take the page you want to rank, the four URLs currently above it, and compare referring domains at page level, not domain level. That difference is the number. In most B2B SaaS categories it lands between fifteen and ninety — small enough that a domain-level comparison would have told you something wildly wrong in either direction.

How long until it shows up in pipeline?

Three horizons, and conflating them is where most disappointment comes from. Placements appear monthly. Search response — positions, impressions — appears between months three and eight. Commercial effect on a nine-month B2B sales cycle arrives between months nine and eighteen. If a board expects revenue attribution in quarter one, the plan is already failing regardless of the work.

What does "reachable" mean on the target list?

That a real editor exists, publishes work by outside contributors, and has responded to someone within the last year. A publication can be perfect on every metric and completely closed. Metrics tell you what a placement would be worth; reachability tells you whether it is available. A list built only on the first number is a wish list.

Do you work with agencies or only direct?

Both. Roughly a fifth of our audits are commissioned by content or demand-gen agencies who want an independent read before they take on the link side themselves. The document is written so it can be handed to whoever executes, including a competitor of ours.

What happens to placements that disappear?

Recrawled weekly and replaced free for twelve months. Attrition runs around four percent in the first year in B2B SaaS. Any agency quoting zero either has not been running long enough to see it or is not checking.

Blog

The measurement notes

All 9 articles

Book the audit

Request a link-gap survey

Tell us the category term you need to own and the page that should own it. We will run the referring-domain subtraction against your top four competitors and send back the actual number — the delta, the publications, and an honest read on how long closing it would take.

  • Written reply within one business day. No discovery-call gauntlet.
  • The survey is free and yours to keep, whether or not you hire us.
  • If your budget is better spent on the page than on links to it, we will say so.

08:00–18:00 MT · Monday to Friday

Site office

999 W Main St
Boise, ID 83702
+1 (986) 800 9412

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