Shaurya Jain: Everything About Link-Building in SaaS #184

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Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akeel Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about everything about link building when it comes to SaaS. Today we have our guest, Shourya Jain, joining us. Shourya is the founder of Samurai Marketers, a link building agency for brands in the SaaS industry. He loves to help B2B brands implement their organic marketing and link building strategies. Among Samurai Marketer's clients, you will find some famous brands like Zoom, Udemy, and Waybook, and many others. So when he's not working on SaaS companies, you can find him reading a lot on business or personal development books. So welcome, Shaurya. Super excited to have you on the SaaSagic Show today and learn more.

Hey man, it's great to be talking to you. Thanks for having me on your podcast. Just a little background. I am Shaurya Jain. I've been in the link building space for about 4 years now. Pivoted to link building just for SaaS businesses about 2 years ago. Have worked with some really great clients, HubSpot and a couple of others that I can't name. But yeah, it's been a cool journey. Hoping to serve some value to the listeners and viewers.

Yeah, love to hear it. Kind of share your knowledge, share your background you've gained from these last few years. But before we get kind of into the nitty-gritty and the meat of the show, just kind of high level for a SaaS audience maybe considering, okay, should I be even considering link building? Right? So I know there's a lot of focus on technical SEO, there's a lot of focus on content. And then there's always, should we be focusing on link building? Because it can get expensive, it's a lot of work, it's a lot of effort, a lot of outreach, it's a lot of content you have to create.

Yeah.

How important is it in 2022 to still have link building as part of your overall SEO strategy? And why is it important, you think?

Yeah, so anyone who is even a bit familiar with SEO, they might have heard about Moz and Ahrefs. So they have these reports that come out every year. They measure which factors are the most important. So if you Pick up any report from the last year, probably this year. Backlinks always are the number one ranking factor for Google. So you still have to focus on backlinks. They are the number one ranking factor. But yes, they only— the prerequisite is you've got to have content on your website that's optimized for SEO. You are going after the right keywords. So you got to have your SEO strategy dialed in as far as the on-page SEO is concerned before you start building links.

Okay. So it is super important. Sounds like it is number one, but you first have to figure it, you have to prioritize, get your on-page dialed in, and then now—

Yeah, you got to have content produced first, then like first get some keywords that you want to go after in SaaS. It's always good to like start with the bottom of the funnel keywords. And so probably have some pages built around some bottom of the funnel keywords, and then you can start building links so that you can start ranking and acquire warm leads, which are more likely to convert.

Got it. And I get about 10 emails a day from different agencies pitching me or saying, hey, sir, I can get you on Entrepreneur. I can get you on all these high-quality backlinks. I can get you guest posts on all these websites that they have relationships with. But there's always the idea of what's considered a high-quality backlink. And secondly, should I be paying for them? Because a lot of them are saying, yeah, you have to pay $100, $200, $500 depending on the domain authority or the traffic or how quality of these websites are. But then I've also seen a lot of these sites that there's a mirage of high DR and a lot of traffic, but they're probably some kind of PBN and probably does more damage than good. So maybe just if you could speak about what is really a high-quality backlink.

Yeah, that's a good question, Akeel. So let's first talk about if we should be paying. whom should we be paying? So if you're paying webmasters for links, so that's probably not a good idea because what will happen is if they are accepting money from you to acquire— to give you a link, they are probably also going to be okay accepting money from a casino website, porn website, all kinds of shady websites.

Mm-hmm.

And then you're going to end up in a bad neighborhood. And if you have enough of these links in the bad neighborhood, Google will eventually catch you and penalize you. So it's not always bad to pay, but in 99% of the times, it's bad to pay the webmasters any kind of money. Where you should be investing your money? Hiring agencies that can help you execute digital PR campaigns, or acquire links for you organically where there's no exchange of money involved between you and the webmasters. Webmasters are giving you the link because the content is good, because they want to link to you, not because they got paid.

Got it. And then how do you differentiate? So you hire an agency and they say, we've got you these 10 backlinks, we paid you for it. And then how do I know? You showed me all these links. How do I know if it's a good link or not? I mean, other than what am I looking at to believe that it is?

So what makes a high-quality link? The most important thing according to me is relevance. Relevance works on 2 levels. First is domain-level relevance, and second is article-level relevance. Let's say you have got a software about CRO. So then getting a link from a blog that talks only about conversion rate optimization, like cxl.com, they mainly talked about conversion rate optimization. That's going to be great for you. Next is article-level relevance. It's a bit less important because you can get article-level relevance on any site. A fashion blog can— like, if you pay a fashion blog to post your article about CRO, they probably will. If you pay a digital marketing blog about and ask them to publish an article about CRO, they probably will. Google can see the mismatch in the various topics they have published so far. So it's a bit less important. So if, if I always go after domain-level relevance, but if you can stack on top of it article-level relevance, that's even better. Secondly, SEO metrics from SEO tools, they are also helpful in Determining if a link is good or not. So they are not always accurate because they are just an estimation from a third party about SEO, but they still give you a pretty good idea. So my go-to tool is Ahrefs and their metric is Domain Rating. So Like if all things being the same, I would go with a site which has higher DR than a lower DR.

Got it. Okay. So yeah, Ahrefs, that's the tool. I mean, I'm just looking right now. That's what we use as well. Like our website Horizon Capital, we have a domain DR of 31. So I'm guessing that's the number you want to look at. So anything above a higher amount, that means generally higher quality is what you're saying, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. And then I know we chatted a little bit about this at the beginning about comparing link building versus other strategies as part of the whole kind of SEO channel. So like we talked about content, we talked about getting that dialed in, getting your technical side dialed in, and then you focus on link building. But then if I have this option, it's like, okay, should I publish, let's say, 10 articles this month and invest my dollars and energy into that part of the SEO strategy? Or should I go and get, you know, 20 backlinks? How would you compare those 2? Like, just from your mind, where would you put your— how would you assess that?

I guess it's not a question of either this or that. It's like this and that. You got to invest in both. Of course, content would come first, but like, let's say you have got a keyword that you know will bring in a lot of money for you. And it's competitive. Like, the other companies have also a page targeting the same keyword. And a lot of brands exist in the space. So what can you do? You got to build links to that page.

Mm-hmm.

That's the only thing that will take it to page 1. Until other factors kick in, like the user experience, the bounce rate, everything related to the user experience. But to be able to make it to page 1, you have to use links.

Okay. So it's just part of the overall equation. It's 1+ 1= 2. You have to have the 1 to be able to rank.

Yes. Link building is like Rocket fuel and content is like the rocket. You have no use of the rocket fuel without the rocket.

That's right. Yeah, you're sitting on fuel but without the rocket. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, makes sense. Okay, so I want to hear some examples, right? I know you've worked with several campaigns. You mentioned some companies and several SaaS companies you work with, and I'm assuming you're generating good results for them.

What do you—

can you share some things that you've seen before and after What kind of things have you seen? And then what are some wrong ways to approach link building that maybe some founders should avoid and that you've seen go wrong or maybe you've had to fix or you've looked at and you said, oh my God, why have they done that? Or what did they do?

Okay, so we worked with an appointment booking software recently. So we were able to get links for them on sites like monday.com. Zapier, Hunter. So all these other cool SaaS companies. And we basically got them like 30 links over a space— over a span of 3 months. The result was that they went from about 100 signups a month to 250 signups a month for the trials, trial signups. So we basically focus on getting links to the bottom of the funnel pages. So bottom of the funnel pages are like X versus Y, where people are evaluating options. So like a newcomer, what they can do is they can go after SavvyCal versus Calendly. People are searching for SavvyCal versus Calendly. Mm-hmm. They can do is SavvyCal versus Calendly versus their own company name. So they can hijack that traffic and probably funnel some traffic to their own brand. Other bottom of the funnel keywords include reviews for other brands, pricing for other brands. People search for Zapier pricing. So you could, if you are a competitor, like you are Integromat, you could create a page around pricing for Zapier. You'll get some targeted traffic which you can retarget with Facebook Pixel or something like that.

Okay.

So that was a big win for us recently. And some things that like the founder can and should avoid when it comes to link building is— so there are a lot of things, but I'll share the 3 kind of links they should avoid. First is buying links on Fiverr. So Fiverr gigs, they promise you hundreds of links for like $10. So let's say you are not from a marketing background, you are just like a— Like solo founder, you make the SaaS and then you read online that, hey, you need backlinks. You go on Fiverr, you see hundreds of backlinks just being sold for $10. You order it away. What's going to happen? You'll probably get penalized.

Okay.

So that's because all these links are auto-generated using softwares. And Google can easily, like, catch these. They can easily identify these auto-generated links. So you definitely don't want to acquire these kind of links when it comes to link building. Quality over quantity any day. Second is buying links on sites. That's the links. So we talked about this earlier. You don't want to be paying webmaster for links. That's against Google's terms of service. You can get away with it, but like if you are not SEO savvy, you will probably end up buying links on sites that are not up to the mark. that are on Google's radar already. So you better stay away from it. Third is like going for press release services. So these services, they tell you that they're going to get your brand covered on a lot of news outlets.

Yeah.

The problem with these services is that they only get you nofollow links. So nofollow links don't really carry much SEO value.

Mm-hmm.

And secondly, since the same text is being published on so many outlets, like they send the same press release to so many outlets, most of these pages don't even get indexed. Like, it's like putting your money down the drain. So yeah, these—

But do you think from like an exposure perspective, like, is it good just from visibility and getting people to, you know, read that and come back to what you're saying?

So these news outlets, first of all, they are not very well known. They are like very How do I say? So you know people just build sites just to be able to sell links on them. These are kind of those sites. And secondly, they're gonna publish it in a category where like they they will not feature it on the homepage. So you are not gonna get any exposure. They even they know why you are like doing this press release just for the links. So they're gonna publish it under some vague category.

Okay, so you're not really gonna get any exposure. Okay.

Yeah. If you need exposure, like, come to Akeel's podcast, I would say. Okay.

So you mentioned the one example where you helped, you know, I think from 100 demo requests to about 250. So one thing you measured in that kind of experiment was the demo request and qualified leads coming in to the SaaS product. What are some— and you also mentioned DR as a metric you guys look at to see the quality of the link. Are there any tests or metrics we should measure to understand, A, if a link is really worthwhile and has actually generated results? And then to your example of that case study you talked about, how long was that before you saw those results?

So there's no single metric I would say that you have to look at when judging if a link is worthwhile because there's so many factors. There's relevance, there's how authoritative the brand is. There is what kind of anchor you're going to be getting. So just go with something that's going to put you at the least risk in terms of getting a penalty from Google. Every digital— you're going to get a bump in rankings whether you use PBN links, shady Fiverr links, or a digital PR service like us. That's easy. Getting, like, seeing improvements is easy. What matters is how long do those improvements, like, stay there? How long do the increased rankings stay there? So it's really a very complicated question. You got to work with an SEO or link building strategist to be able to determine what kind of links you should be getting. And secondly, what was your question again?

What do you measure? What are you measuring afterwards to see what— oh yeah, we were talking about the case study you published. So you mentioned you got 100 to 250 leads. What was the timeframe which you started backlinking and seeing that increase? How long does it take?

Yeah, so it was over a span of 3 months.

Wow, that's super impressive. A huge spike over 150% in 3 months. Okay. And do you remember how many links you guys built overall in that time frame?

30 links.

30 links. Okay.

Wow.

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And what would you say is the difference? So I know you mentioned driving links back to review pages, the comparison pages, and then there's also the easier way, which people say, okay, just link back to your homepage or whether it's your product page, your features page, your pricing page, whatever the page is. What's the difference there? And then should we be using anchor text of the brand or should we try to use anchor text that similar of the keywords that we're trying to rank for or the exact keyword?

Yeah, that's a good question, man. So any day, getting links to a blog post is easier than getting links to product page or service page. So anyone starting out in link building, I would say try to produce top-of-the-funnel content and do outreach, manual outreach, and try to get links to those because they are easier to get links to. People want to cite helpful resources, not product pages in their articles. So, but ranking your product pages is important too. So what people do is they, after they get a lot of links to their content pages, they internally link to their product pages. So this passes on the link juice to their product pages.

Okay.

So that's one strategy. Like, or you can work with an agency and get links to the product pages directly. Like we do this, but like even for us, it's a bit difficult. It takes a lot more effort than getting links to content pages. But yes, that's like more direct kind of way to be able to rank higher. And thirdly, you asked me about anchor texts. So anchor texts are very tricky. What's— like, if you read any study by these SEO tools like Ahrefs or Moz, what they have found is most of the links to a page are like branded anchor, which means the brand is being mentioned as the anchor. Then the second most prevalent anchor is like something unrelated, completely unrelated. Click here, go here, that kind of stuff. Then it's like partial match. So like your page is about User feedback. So the anchor can be get feedback from people or something that mentions just a word or two from your target keyword. And the exact match, that's like just one or two percent of the total link profile. So you got to be very careful. When it comes to choosing the anchors. We in fact have a proprietary software that does this analysis with 2 of your higher rankings, higher ranking competitors. It determines what kind of anchors they are getting, what kind of anchors you have. So it then builds a ratio and tells you you should get more of these. anchors and less of these. So yeah.

Nice. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Because I would think that the easiest thing would just be ideally to get the exact match. And I think Google will say, yeah, this is perfectly relevant. But yeah, I think from what I understand, you want to mix it up, right? You don't want to be— because then it looks kind of too obvious.

Yeah.

Okay, thanks, Shourya. Last question before we get into the kind of personal rapid-fire question. So SaaS founders listening in or marketers, they're looking to start the link building campaign. All they've been doing is technical. So they've been creating content. Now they're ready to add that fuel to the rocket. What are some tips you can share with them if they have to get started with little or maybe no budget and they want to do it themselves?

Yeah, so you've got little to no budget. Here are 2 things that I would suggest you doing. First is reaching out to B2B bloggers and just offering them your subscription to your software for free. and ask them that, hey, if they could probably write a review about it or just like give you a link, that's all. So there's no exchange of money involved. Uh, they get value, you get value out of the, uh, thing.

Uh, yeah.

And secondly, uh, what you could do is, so I, uh, a few months ago I studied like 12 lead generation tools. I studied their backend profiles actually. So what I found was a tactic that works great is like creating a free tool.

Hmm.

So let's say you are Hunter.io, you help people find emails. So what you could do is just create a free Chrome extension with like 50 credit limit. People just love free stuff. They're going to share it like crazy. So if you can introduce a free tier in your SaaS or create a free tool that's related to your SaaS, it's going to be a big link magnet for you.

Okay. Okay. I love that idea. Yeah. Create a few tools and let that kind of be the— if you can do it through a development, through product, and you can do it yourself. Yeah. Love it.

Cool. I love it.

Ready to move towards the second part of the interview? The rapid-fire questions?

Sure thing.

Yeah, yeah, let's do it. All right. So I want to start off with the name of your brand, samurai marketers dot com. I guess your story started with where you took a trip out to Japan. You loved it, and that influenced the name of your company's branding. Can you tell us quickly about how that came to be and why you love Japan?

Yeah. So basically. One day, like when I was in 10th grade, uh, I was bunking my, uh, bunking a class. Uh, a teacher caught us and she was like, hey, do you wanna start studying Japanese? Because she like got no students. No one was interested in her subject. So, okay, we said like, what's in it for us? She said that you wanna be able to travel to Japan for free. So we said, yeah, sign us up. So that's how I got involved with like Japan and learning Japanese.

Okay.

And then we started learning Japanese and we were able to like visit Japan. It was great, man. The culture is very much like India where like they respect their elders a lot and They are pretty conservative in many things. So yeah, that was pretty fascinating for us. And then how it influenced the name, like, I'm not very creative, so I just connected it to like—

Of course you loved.

Fascinated. fascinated me in my childhood because I've got no passions as an adult other than marketing.

That's okay. I mean, that was your fuel. I mean, that's your passion. And I mean, that's what inspired you. I mean, that's what it is, right? I mean, if that's what you love and that's something you enjoy, I mean, your brand should represent you. And if that's what you are, then that's cool.

Yeah, cool.

So I don't know if you do samurai practice or what it is, but what's one activity you enjoy outside of work that gets you into flow state?

I like to play badminton a bit and meditate, which is— I've heard samurais did do that meditation. So yeah, I'm half samurai, I guess.

I think they also played badminton too. So you're halfway there.

Yeah, they did play badminton with the chopped off head, I guess.

Exactly. Yeah. toss it around. Yeah. What's one piece of advice you wish you had known? And if you can go back in time, I'm not sure of your age, but maybe say, like, you would tell your 23-year-old self or 25-year-old self.

Yeah, so I'm just 26, so I'm no wiser than I was last year. But what I would tell my 15-year-old self would be, like, not to get too attached to any idea, any desire, anything. Uh, so basically I developed OCD, uh, and it's because you gotta keep thinking about one thing over and over again. If like, I know all, all the listeners are grown-ups, but like, don't be obsessed with anything. They, they say you got to be obsessed with success, you, you got to be obsessed with this to be able to get it. No, man, you don't need to be obsessed. It's going to just cause you pain in the long run if you're not able to get it.

Okay. Yeah, just take it easy. Yeah, you don't need to pressure yourself.

Yeah.

Okay. And, you know, what are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to continue to grow Samurai Marketers? Meaning maybe if you're not putting too much pressure on yourself, is there anything that keeps you up at night?

I would say it's just personal stuff that stops me from taking it to new heights. Nothing professionally. We have got clients coming in, we have the operations dialed in.

Okay.

It's just like sorting the internal conflicts. that keeps me from scaling this business.

Okay. And when it comes to learning about where you got to, you are today, right? I'm assuming there's a lot of players or books you may have read that kind of influenced your knowledge and your experience and your wisdom. Would you say, is there any, maybe 3 resources, whether they can be books, mentors, or people you follow in the space who you'd say have been most instrumental to your success?

So like, if I were to just name business books, those would be like everyone's favorite, 4-Hour Workweek. Uh, then what's that book about? Uh, Built to Sell.

Yeah. Built to Sell.

Great book.

Yeah.

That's a great book. And, uh, something that I just read, uh, Obviously Awesome. So it's around positioning and all. Yeah. So that's a great book. Uh, and like, if I were to talk about like on the personal side of things, it would be like The Power of Now. That's a great book. I would suggest everyone to read that, like being in the present moment.

Yeah.

That shit helps.

Yeah, that's a great book. I've read that more than, I'll say more than almost 15 years ago. I think maybe a good time to read it again and see how I look at it today. But yeah, I mean, I understand the value of it more now in terms of actually living it versus just reading it.

How old were you back then?

I think I read it when I was 18 and I'm 32 now.

So what's that?

I'm 32 now. So what is that? Yeah, 14 years ago. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. Like I've read some books as a teenager and they didn't hit that hard like they do now. So yeah, it's always good to revisit books.

Yeah. Yeah. My book, my book list right now around those topics is around a lot of Osho books. I don't know if you're familiar with Osho.

Osho.

Yeah.

I recently visited a workshop from one of his disciples.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I love his kind of message, how he explains it, I think just resonates with me today. So yeah, it's great. Cool. This has been great, Shariya. And I know, so guys listening in, you know, so Samurai Marketers are offering our listeners today a 10% discount on any of their services. If you're looking for link building, they're going to give you guys a discount. Just mention that you listen to this podcast, mention the SaaS District podcast, and reach out to Shariya directly and he'll give you 10% off. Just to wrap it up, where is the best place for SaaS enthusiasts listening in to get in touch with you and learn more about you and your company?

Yeah, so you can head over to samramarketers.com. I invite you to book a call with me. We're going to do some analysis if we can work together, if we are a good fit, what are some quick wins for you guys.

Okay.

Those are like, those, that kind of information is free for you. If you happen to be a SaaS District listener, just mention about it and we're going to offer you 10% discount on our digital PR service.

Okay. Okay. Awesome. I appreciate it. Really enjoyed having you on the show today.

Thanks, man. It was great talking to you.

All right. Cheers.

Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions, If you have any questions or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.