We analyzed the organic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the most effective SEO strategies in 2024.
In this article, we focus on the bootstrapped SaaS companies that received the most referring domains over the past year.
Bootstrapping businesses typically don’t have large budgets for marketing, so any strategy these small but mighty companies use to boost their organic growth is you You can also get inspiration from them.
- We used the Ahrefs API to extract a list of immediately referring domains for each company in September 2023 and September 2024.
- Companies are ranked based on referring domain growth as a percentage of their initial referring domains. We set a minimum starting threshold of 1,000 referring domains.
- We report referring domains rather than backlinks because 1,000 referring domains is too many, a lot of Getting 1,000 backlinks is even harder.
| rank | company | Reference domain 2023 | Reference domain 2024 | Citing domain growth | Change | Estimated revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Elf sight | 7,657 | 33,610 | 25,953 | 339% | $8 million |
| 2 | shortio | 5,709 | 18,573 | 12,864 | 225% | $500,000 |
| 3 | fitness table | 1,325 | 3,052 people | 1,727 | 130% | $5.5 million |
| 4 | help juice | 4,015 | 8,672 | 4,657 | 116% | $6 million |
| 5 | Also asked | 1,602 people | 3,343 | 1,741 | 109% | $500,000 |
| 6 | sribo | 2,304 | 4,420 | 2,116 | 92% | $5.5 million |
| 7 | transparent mirror | 1,883 | 3,580 people | 1,697 | 90% | $5.5 million |
| 8 | surfer | 5,815 | 10,899 | 5,084 | 87% | $37.5 million |
| 9 | Tone | 2,877 | 5,347 | 2,470 | 86% | 1 million US dollars |
| 10 | Crodin | 4,818 | 8,919 | 4,101 | 85% | $17.5 million |
| 11 | social insider | 3,264 | 6,007 | 2,743 | 84% | $800,000 |
| 12 | Spy Fu | 8,101 | 14,821 | 6,720 | 83% | US$2 million |
| 13 | Pentest-Tools.com | 1,543 | 2,779 | 1,236 | 80% | $5.5 million |
| 14 | shrewd | 4,411 | 7,675 | 3,264 | 74% | $5.5 million |
| 15 | surf shark | 13,898 | 24,056 | 10,158 | 73% | US$20 million |
| 16 | site light bulb | 1,232 people | 2,093 | Chapter 861 | 70% | $500,000 |
| No. 17 | Selectivity | 3,496 | 5,900 people | 2,404 | 69% | $5 million |
| 18 | spy cloud | 1,192 people | 1,987 | Chapter 795 | 67% | $14 million |
| 19 | MX Toolbox | 10,718 | 17,736 | 7,018 | 65% | $9 million |
| 20 | Shift base | 1,077 | 1,780 | 703 | 65% | $17.5 million |
| twenty one | Signature | 1,113 | 1,839 | Chapter 726 | 65% | $500,000 |
| twenty two | Lemlist | 1,613 | 2,654 | 1,041 | 65% | $6 million |
| twenty three | site checker | 5,938 | 9,732 | 3,794 | 64% | $6.1 million |
| twenty four | shrewd cal | 1,272 | 2,070 | 798 | 63% | $5.5 million |
| 25 | state brewing | 2,750 | 4,470 | 1,720 | 63% | $14 million |
| 26 | Wise Pops | 1,291 | 2,086 | Chapter 795 | 62% | $3 million |
| 27 | glass node | 5,041 | 8,123 | 3,082 | 61% | $5.5 million |
| 28 | Equipment Atlas | 2,765 | 4,442 | 1,677 | 61% | $19 million |
| 29 | Float.com | 1,021 | 1,638 | 617 | 60% | $5.5 million |
| 30 | RTINGS.com | 8,601 | 13,779 | 5,178 | 60% | $6.3 million |
| 31 | small pdf | 13,953 | 22,264 | 8,311 | 60% | $17.5 million |
| 32 | clocking | 6,109 | 9,733 | 3,624 | 59% | $5.5 million |
| 33 | Mail trap | 3,162 | 4,991 | 1,829 | 58% | $5.5 million |
| 34 | bamboo human resources | 8,511 | 13,410 | 4,899 | 58% | $237.8 million |
| 35 | Settings application | 13,178 | 20,696 | 7,518 | 57% | $15 million |
| 36 | Internet CEO | 2,495 | 3,891 | 1,396 | 56% | $25 million |
| 37 | Wisme | 10,354 | 16,135 | 5,781 | 56% | 1 million US dollars |
| 38 | Upward | 1,823 | 2,833 | 1,010 | 55% | $17.5 million |
| 39 | smooth planning | 1,345 | 2,086 | Chapter 741 | 55% | 1 million US dollars |
| 40 | choate form | 45,485 | 69,553 | 24,068 | 53% | $21 million |
| 41 | vizar | 2,013 | 3,070 | 1,057 people | 53% | $5.5 million |
| 42 | arefs | 52,536 | 80,036 | 27,500 | 52% | US$100 million |
| 43 | reasonable analysis | 6,084 | 9,251 | 3,167 | 52% | $5.5 million |
| 44 | place of creation | 7,816 | 11,844 | 4,028 | 52% | $12 million |
| 45 | home run | 2,040 people | 3,068 | 1,028 | 50% | $38.4 million |
| 46 | Yadi | 1,928 | 2,880 | Chapter 952 | 49% | $5.5 billion |
| 47 | infinite campus | 1,029 | 1,534 | 505 | 49% | $56 million |
| 48 | file mail | 3,829 | 5,694 | 1,865 | 49% | 1 million US dollars |
| 49 | real time agent | 4,740 | 7,034 | 2,294 | 48% | $5 million |
| 50 | signal | 2,727 | 4,025 | 1,298 | 48% | $4 million |
Want to learn how almost any company builds the best backlinks? Here’s how I do it in Ahrefs.
I usually start with Overview check in website browser Quickly understand the growth of your website’s referring domains. Here’s a chart from our #1 company, Elfsight:
Touching! Next, I use anchor Report to quickly understand the types of links being created: are they brand mentions, links to blog content, or free tools?
In the case of Elfsight, the vast majority of referring domains (well over 60%) have anchor text containing the term widget:
Looking at some of these links, it’s clear that the company offers a free website widget that also contains links back to Elfsight:
For some websites, anchor text won’t be that revealing. This is referencing domain I’ve excluded one SaaS company’s report from this article. At first glance, they seem to be doing a great job, gaining over 100,00 new backlinks last year:
But digging into the most common anchor text, it’s clear that these are almost all spammy links (Korean massage commercials).
You can exclude this type of link spam using our best link filter. By default, the Best Links filter will only show the following links:
- Dovero,
- In the page content,
- On referring domains with a DR of at least 30,
- The estimated natural traffic of the page is at least 500/m.
If you have different criteria for what defines a “best” link, you can customize your own filter:
After applying the filter, if we run anchor By reporting again, we can filter out all these spammy links and get a clearer picture of the quality links the site is getting. Much less, much less:
Finally, I enjoy visiting best link Report to see which individual pages have received the best links.
Below is an example from Clearscope, one of our top 50 websites. In addition to the usual “useful” pages like home page, pricing page, and landing page, the pages they most often link to are thought leadership blog posts—opinions, predictions, and research:
Not every company can build links by offering tons of free tools or widgets, but think leadership content is link building strategy This makes it easier for other companies to follow suit.
final thoughts
We will share more of this data analysis in the coming weeks. Want us to include your company in our next analysis? Fill out this short Google form.
