SaaS Link Building

Link Building for Martech SaaS

Martech is the hardest vertical to win links in, because your buyers are the competition. The people you are trying to reach are marketers, the same people who write the listicles, run the SEO, build the link campaigns and judge content for a living. They are immune to the tactics that work elsewhere, and the SERP for any martech term is a bloodbath of well-optimised round-ups. That makes genuine differentiation, original data and real community help the only things that cut through. Earned authority beats paid reach here precisely because the audience can see through everything else.

I am Matt, founder of SaaS link building agency EMGI. Martech link building is a discipline played on hard mode. There are more solutions than any buyer can evaluate (the martech landscape now tracks over 14,000 of them), every category term is fiercely contested, and the audience has the highest content literacy of any vertical. This is the full picture: where marketing buyers actually decide, what earns authority across every surface, and how we run it.

The martech decision happens across a dozen surfaces at once

Here is something concrete. We pulled the live Google results for “best marketing software” through DataForSEO, the exact query a marketer runs, and counted what is actually on the page. It is not ten blue links. At the top sits an AI Overview that breaks tools into categories and cites HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Brevo, Klaviyo, Semrush and a dozen more. At position three, a Reddit thread from r/DigitalMarketing. Then a “Discussions and forums” block, a Perspectives block stuffed with LinkedIn thought-leadership articles and YouTube reviews, and the listicles: Venture Harbour, Salesforce, Zapier, GetApp, The CRO Club.

That is one query, and the buyer’s impression of who to trust is formed across at least six different surfaces before they reach a single vendor website. What stands out in martech specifically is the density of LinkedIn thought-leadership and the saturation of the listicles: every result is professionally optimised, because marketers built them. If your platform is absent from the AI Overview’s sources, the Reddit threads, the LinkedIn articles and the round-ups, you are invisible at the exact moment of decision, no matter how good the product is. This is why we treat it as Search Everywhere Optimisation, not SEO. The job is to be present and credible on every surface that SERP is made of.

The category leaders, and what they actually do to win

You are competing against some of the best content and SEO operations on earth, because that is literally what they sell. It is worth understanding not just who they are, but the specific authority play each one runs, because that is what you are up against in the AI answers and the listicles.

• HubSpot set the standard for the entire industry. Its blog, free tools and research reports are the textbook example of content-led authority; HubSpot is cited so widely that it appears in nearly every “best marketing software” answer by default. That is the bar.
• Semrush and Ahrefs own the SEO-tool conversation with enormous content libraries, original data studies and free tools that earn citations across the whole marketing web.
• ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo and Brevo own automation and email, growing through deep category content, strong G2 positioning and genuine presence in the communities where their buyers gather.
• Salesforce and Adobe (Marketo) hold the enterprise conversation with analyst relationships and research arms that generate constant citations.

The common thread is uncomfortable for challengers: the leaders win with original data and free tools at a scale most companies cannot match, and they have been compounding that authority for a decade. You do not beat them with another “top 20 marketing tools” post, they already own that page. You beat them by owning a narrower category with genuinely original data and by being authentically useful in the specific communities where your slice of marketer actually gathers.

What actually earns links and citations in martech

• Original benchmark data. The biggest link magnet in the category by a distance. Email-benchmark reports, conversion-rate studies, channel-performance data. The kind of asset the whole marketing web cites for a year and AI engines quote directly. This is how Klaviyo, HubSpot and Semrush earn links at scale.
• Free tools and calculators. A genuinely useful free tool (a subject-line tester, an ROI or CAC calculator, a deliverability checker) earns links and shares from a community that loves free tools, and gives every mention something concrete to point at.
• Contrarian, evidence-backed POV. Marketers reward sharp, data-supported opinions that challenge the consensus, and they share them widely on LinkedIn. This is unusually effective here.
• G2 and review-grid presence. Martech buyers live on G2, Capterra and GetApp. Grid placement and fresh reviews are a direct citation and trust play.

Search Everywhere: the full signal stack we would build

Link building is one input. What actually gets a martech brand cited across that whole SERP is a stack of signals, built deliberately and reinforcing each other. Authority and community are where we start, but they are not the whole job. Here is the complete stack we run.

• Editorial backlinks and brand mentions. The foundation. Earned placements and contextual mentions in the marketing trade media and on relevant high-authority sites, which is what moves both rankings and AI citations. In martech this bar is high, because the audience knows a thin guest post when they see one.
• Directories and review platforms. For marketing buyers these are central: G2, Capterra, GetApp, TrustRadius. The AI answers lean on these heavily. We maintain our own researched directory list, the specific platforms that actually move citations in martech (not the generic 500-directory spam lists), and we get you listed, reviewed and kept current on the ones that count.
• Reddit and community. r/DigitalMarketing, r/marketing and the rest, covered in full below. This is where peer trust is formed and where the AI engines source a lot of their “what do marketers actually use” signal.
• YouTube. Marketers watch tool reviews and “best email platform” comparisons before they trial. A presence here (your own channel, plus earned placements in reviewer videos) feeds both YouTube search and the main SERP.
• LinkedIn thought leadership, the biggest lever in this vertical. Martech runs on LinkedIn. Our SERP pull was full of LinkedIn Pulse articles ranking for the head term. Consistent founder and expert thought-leadership, especially contrarian data-backed takes, builds the author authority that earns citations and warms the buyer before they ever search. No vertical rewards LinkedIn more.
• Paid amplification of that thought leadership. This is the accelerant most agencies skip, and the one martech marketers respect because they understand it. We run targeted LinkedIn ads to put your best original data and thought-leadership in front of the exact marketing-buyer ICP. Not lead-gen ads, amplification, so the work gets seen, shared and cited faster than organic reach alone allows.

And because martech marketers know every play, a word on breadth: we do not bet the campaign on Reddit. Comments get removed, subreddits are strict, and one channel is a single point of failure. The brand-visibility work runs wide:

• Guest posts and earned editorial in the marketing publications, still the backbone of off-site authority.
• Long-form on Medium and Substack, where a sharp, data-backed argument earns links and gets shared.
• YouTube and Quora, the tool-review videos and question threads that rank beside Reddit and feed the AI answer.
• G2, Capterra, GetApp and TrustRadius, where review depth compounds with content authority.
• A clean Wikipedia and reference presence to anchor the brand entity for the models.

Built together, these signals compound. An original email-benchmark report gets earned media (links), goes on the review platforms and your site, gets a LinkedIn thought-leadership write-up, gets amplified with paid to the ICP, gets discussed on Reddit, and gets a YouTube breakdown. One asset, every surface. That is what being cited in the AI answer actually requires.

How we run Reddit for martech (and how we actually answer)

Reddit does two jobs at once: it reaches buyers the moment they ask peers for a recommendation, and it feeds the AI answers, since the models lean on Reddit threads heavily when they build a shortlist (your “best marketing software” SERP has a Reddit thread at position three and a whole discussions block). The communities we would target:

What “contribute a genuine answer” actually means

This is the part most agencies get wrong, and the part that gets brands banned when they do. Marketing communities are the toughest crowd of all, because they run these exact plays for a living. A genuine answer is not a disguised advert. It is a real, useful reply from an established account that has history in the community, that answers the actual question first, names two or three options honestly (including competitors), is candid about trade-offs, and only mentions the client where it genuinely fits. The link, if there is one at all, is secondary to the help.

The wrong way (gets removed and downvoted instantly): “Use [Brand], it’s the best all-in-one marketing platform, automation, email and CRM in one! [link]”

The way we do it, on a thread asking “best marketing automation tool for a small B2B SaaS, moving off Mailchimp”: “Coming off Mailchimp for B2B SaaS, the honest shortlist most people here land on is HubSpot, ActiveCampaign and Brevo, and the deciding factor is usually budget versus CRM depth. HubSpot is the most complete but gets expensive fast as your contact list grows. ActiveCampaign is the sweet spot for serious automation without HubSpot pricing. Brevo if budget is tight and you mostly need email plus basic automation. We built [Brand] for the specific case where you want product-led triggers wired into the emails, but genuinely, map your actual workflows first, the migration is the painful part and the tool that wins is the one whose automation builder matches how you think, so trial two and rebuild one real workflow in each before you commit.” That answer helps whether or not anyone clicks anything, names competitors, is honest about the trade-off, and earns the client a credible mention. That is the only kind of Reddit presence that survives and gets cited.

The process behind it, in four steps: listen and map the live demand and the threads that already rank or get AI-cited; build credibility on real, aged accounts that contribute long before they ever mention a product; contribute genuine answers like the one above; then track AI pickup, watching which threads start showing up as citations and doubling down there.

The listicles and sources we would target, pulled with DataForSEO

We do not guess at this. For every commercial term in your category we pull the live SERP through DataForSEO and read off exactly which sources the AI Overview cites and which listicles rank, then we target those specific pages. Here is what that query returned for “best marketing software”, the real sources deciding the answer right now:

That is the difference between a real plan and a generic one: we target the exact sources your buyers’ search results are built from, refreshed with live data, not a static list from two years ago.

How pages actually get chosen: the semantic layer

One thing worth understanding, because it changes the strategy. Google and the AI engines no longer match pages to queries on exact keywords. They work semantically: they build an understanding of what a page (and a brand) is genuinely about, and surface it for the cluster of questions and answers it belongs to. So you do not “rank for a keyword” so much as become the recognised entity for a topic.

Practically, that means getting your martech brand genuinely associated with specific subtopics, present in real content and discussion about them, not just stuffing a term onto a page. For a martech SaaS, the subtopics worth being the cited authority on might include: marketing automation workflows, email deliverability and sender reputation, lead scoring and multi-touch attribution, CRM and marketing alignment, multichannel orchestration (email, SMS, push), and e-commerce lifecycle marketing (Shopify, Klaviyo-style). We map the subtopics your product genuinely deserves to own, then build the content, mentions and answers that make you the semantic match for them across Google and the AI engines.

The category data is brutal, which is exactly the opening

Marketing software is the hardest category we have measured, and that is good news for anyone willing to do the work. In our study of 150 SaaS brands, Marketing Automation had the widest invisibility gap of any category: 53% of the brands ranking in Google’s top 10 got zero mentions from ChatGPT for the same keywords. Meanwhile 80% of category keywords already trigger an AI Overview. The buyers are asking the AI, and more than half the apparent winners on Google are absent from the answer.

Two findings make the opening concrete. First, “alternative” and comparison queries generate around nine brand citations per ChatGPT response, four and a half times more than Google shows, which is why displacement plays matter so much in martech. Second, citation does not track traffic: Customer.io ties HubSpot for the most ChatGPT citations in the entire study despite roughly 125 times less organic traffic. Authority and presence, not raw volume, decide who the AI names. The data is in our studies on the citation gap, directory compounding and Reddit citations.

Original research and free tools (and why they multiply everything else)

The single highest-leverage asset in martech is original data, because the whole industry runs on benchmarks and the audience respects nothing more. We would help you scope and produce assets like an annual email or conversion benchmark report, a channel-performance study, or a state-of-the-stack survey, the kind of thing the marketing press and every competitor cite on publication. Free tools do similar work: a subject-line tester, an ROI or CAC calculator, or a deliverability checker earns links from a tool-loving audience and gives every Reddit, LinkedIn and YouTube mention something genuinely useful to point at.

These assets also become internal-linking hubs that strengthen your whole site. Our own research works the same way: the SaaS AI Citation Gap Report and the Reddit Citation Study and our directory-listings study are exactly this pattern, original data that earns citations and links every related page back to the hub. For a martech brand, every benchmark report and free tool should link to your core product and category pages, concentrating authority where it converts.

Frequently asked questions

What earns the most links for a martech company?

Original benchmark data and free tools. A credible annual email or conversion benchmark becomes a reference the whole marketing web cites for a year, while a genuinely useful free calculator or tester earns links from a tool-loving audience. Both feed AI citations continuously and beat guest posts at scale.

Why is link building harder in martech than other verticals?

Because the buyers are marketers who run these exact plays professionally. Every listicle is expertly optimised, the audience spots thin content and disguised promotion instantly, and the SERP is saturated. That raises the bar: only genuine differentiation, original data and authentic community help cut through.

Is Reddit really worth it for a marketing tool?

Yes, when it is done genuinely. The “best marketing software” SERP has a Reddit thread at position three plus a discussions block, and marketers actively ask peers which tools to trust. Those threads both rank and feed the AI answers. The catch is that marketing communities are the toughest crowd of all, so it only works as authentic, helpful participation.

How is Search Everywhere different from normal SEO?

Normal SEO optimises your website for Google rankings. Search Everywhere builds your authority across every surface a buyer’s decision is actually made on: Google and AI answers, but also directories and review sites, Reddit and communities, YouTube, and LinkedIn (which matters more in martech than anywhere), amplified with paid where it accelerates. SEO is one channel inside it.

For the wider picture, start with our pillar on SaaS link building, and the related guides on how edtech brands get cited and the security SaaS approach. The method applied to a sales-and-marketing tool: our Prospeo case study.