14 Relevant Backlinks Moved a SaaS from Page 2 to Page 1

The page was already good.

It targeted the right keyword, matched search intent, explained the product clearly, and had been properly optimized. Yet for weeks, it stayed stuck on the second page of Google.

Not position 70. Not position 40.

It was close enough to Page 1 to be frustrating.

The page kept moving between roughly positions 20-30, but it could not break into the Top 10 consistently.

For a SaaS business, that difference matters. A commercial page sitting at position 15 can be almost invisible compared with the same page sitting at position 7.

Our job was not to rebuild the website or throw hundreds of backlinks at it.

We needed to understand what was holding one important page back and give Google enough additional evidence to reconsider where it deserved to rank.

The campaign ended with 14 new relevant backlinks.

The page moved from Page 2 into the Top 10.

This is how we approached it.

The situation

The client was an email marketing company competing for a commercially valuable search term.

We are keeping the company and keyword anonymous, but the page itself was an important part of their acquisition funnel.

It was not a general informational article.

It was a page that could directly put the product in front of people already searching for a solution.

That made the ranking problem more important.

The website already had:

• A technically healthy foundation
• Relevant content around the topic
• An established domain
• A properly optimized target page
• Some existing referring domains
• Competitors that were clearly beatable

So we did not start by assuming the answer was simply "build more links."

We first wanted to know,

We started with the SERP, not an outreach list

Before finding websites for backlinks, we studied the pages already ranking above the client.

This part is easy to skip.

You can open a backlink tool, export thousands of referring domains, send outreach emails, and technically call it link building.

That does not mean those links will solve the ranking problem.

We compared the target page against the pages occupying the first page for the primary keyword and closely related terms.

We looked at:

• Referring domains pointing directly to each competing page
• Overall authority of the competing domains
• Topical relevance of those links
• Anchor-text patterns
• Internal links supporting each ranking page
• Content depth and search intent alignment
• Whether competitors were receiving links to the homepage or directly to the ranking URL
• Which referring domains appeared repeatedly across successful competitors

A pattern appeared fairly quickly.

The client was not dramatically weaker than the competition at the domain level.

The problem was more specific.

The competing URLs had stronger page-level link support.

Several competitors ranking on Page 1 had relevant editorial links pointing directly toward the pages competing for the keyword.

The client's target page had very little comparable external authority.

That changed the campaign.

We were not trying to increase a domain metric for the sake of reporting a higher number.

We were trying to strengthen one commercially important URL.

The objective

We set one primary goal:

Move the target SaaS page into the Top 10 without relying on high-volume, low-quality link acquisition.

There were secondary benefits we expected, such as stronger organic visibility and additional referring domains, but those were not how we judged the campaign.

If we built 50 links and the important page stayed at position 16, the campaign would not have been successful.

The ranking page was the KPI.

The strategy

Once we knew what the page was missing, we built the campaign around five decisions.

1. We prioritized relevance before authority metrics

We were deliberately selective with prospects.

A website did not qualify simply because a third-party SEO tool showed a high DR or DA.

We looked at whether the site actually made sense for the SaaS company.

A good prospect typically needed to satisfy several of these conditions:

• Genuine organic visibility.
• Relevance in terms of content and audience.
• Indexed and active pages.
• Real editorial structure.
• Natural outbound linking no obvious link farm footprint.

A DR 70 website with no relationship to the client's market could be less useful to us than a DR 40 publication closely connected to the topic.

That distinction shaped the entire prospect list.

2. We focused on contextual links

The objective was not to place the client's URL in footers, author bios, random directories, or pages created purely to sell backlinks.

We wanted the links to sit inside content where the reader could reasonably benefit from visiting the client's page. That meant finding existing discussions around subjects connected to:

Email warmup softwares

and asking a simple question:

When the answer was “Yes”, the placement usually felt natural.

When the only justification for a placement was "because we need a backlink," we rejected it.

This made outreach slower, but it also prevented us from filling the campaign with links that looked impressive in a spreadsheet and contributed very little strategically.

3. We did not force the same anchor text

The client wanted to rank for email warmup, but repeatedly using that exact phrase as backlink anchor text would have been unnecessary and unnatural.

We built an anchor profile around the way websites normally reference products and resources.

The final mix included variations such as:

• Brand name
• Product name
• Partial-match phrases
• Descriptive phrases
• Natural sentence anchors
• URL or brand-led references
• Limited keyword-relevant anchors where context justified them

The point was not to manufacture a perfect-looking anchor ratio.

It was to make each placement fit naturally into the article it appeared in.

4. We built links to the page that actually needed them

One of the easiest ways to dilute a link-building campaign is to send every new backlink to the homepage.

Homepage links have value, but that was not the main problem here. Our research showed that the ranking gap existed at the URL level so the campaign deliberately included links pointing toward the target money page itself.

We also avoided forcing every placement toward the commercial page. Where another supporting resource created a more natural editorial fit, we used that page and allowed internal linking to help pass relevance and authority through the site.

This gave us a healthier mix while keeping the target URL at the centre of the strategy.

5. We let the campaign develop naturally

All 14 links were not published in one week.

The campaign ran over 3 months.

Some links went live quickly. Others required discussions with editors, content changes, new articles, or simply waiting for a publisher's schedule.

We did not try to manufacture an artificial link velocity. The sequence looked more like a normal editorial campaign:

After each group of links became indexed, we watched how the page reacted. That gave us useful information before deciding what the next placements should look like.

What the 14 backlinks actually looked like

The number itself is not particularly impressive.

Fourteen is small compared with agencies advertising packages of 50, 100, or even several hundred links.

That was intentional.

We cared more about what those 14 links represented. This is what makes Linkull the best link building agency.

The final placements came from a mix of:

• SaaS-related websites
• Technology publications
• Relevant business publications
• Niche resources connected to the client's market
• Existing editorial pages with topical alignment

Each opportunity went through our backlink qualification process before outreach or placement.

We also reviewed the final page after publication.

That matters because a prospect can look good during outreach but the final placement may end up buried on a weak page, surrounded by unrelated links, tagged incorrectly, or published differently from what was agreed.

A backlink is not finished when someone says "Yes".

It is finished when the placement is live, indexed, correctly implemented, and worth keeping.

Then the page started moving

The first few links did not suddenly send the page to position one.

That is not how we expected the campaign to behave.

There were smaller movements first. The page moved upward, dropped slightly, recovered, and then began spending more time closer to Page 1.

As more of the relevant placements were indexed, the ranking trend became stronger.

The progression was approximately:

Starting position: 27

After 4 indexed links: 21

After 9 indexed links: 15

After 14 backlinks: 8

Most importantly, the page stopped behaving like a temporary Page 1 visitor and began maintaining a position inside the Top 10.

So, here is the overall summary.

The results

By the end of the campaign:

What we deliberately did not do

Sometimes the clearest way to explain a link-building strategy is to explain what was excluded.

We did not:

• Buy hundreds of low-cost backlinks
• Build links simply to increase DR
• Use the same commercial anchor repeatedly
• Send every backlink to the homepage
• Use PBNs
• Fill the profile with irrelevant guest posts
• Treat every website willing to sell a placement as a suitable prospect

Those shortcuts could have increased the number of completed links but they would not necessarily have increased the probability of achieving the result we were actually hired for.

The bigger lesson

This campaign reinforced something we see repeatedly in SaaS link building.

A website does not always need more backlinks. Sometimes it needs the right pages to receive the right links from the right websites.

There is a major difference between:

and:

For this campaign, the second approach required 14 links.

Another website might require 30.

Another might not need link building yet at all.

That is why we prefer to understand the ranking problem before deciding how many links a campaign should contain.

From Page 2 to Page 1

The client did not need a huge backlink package.

They needed a focused strategy around one page that was already close to winning.

Fourteen relevant backlinks helped give that page the additional authority it needed to compete inside the Top 10.

And that is ultimately how we think SaaS link building should work.

Not backlinks for the sake of backlinks.

Backlinks tied to a reason, a page, and a measurable outcome.

See our other link building case studies.

Want to know what is holding your important pages back?

If you have a SaaS page sitting somewhere between positions 10 and 30, building more links blindly may not be the first thing it needs.

We can look at the page, the competing URLs, and the backlink gap first.

Here are the 5 reasons to choose Linkull for link building of your business.