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How I plan to increase the domain rank of my SaaS applications' landing pages

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Recently, I purchased 4 domains with high profile 'quality' backlinks and I plan to use them to grow my SaaS products' domain rank. The products: Atribusi and Auto Page Indexer

SEO is easily the most powerful long term marketing channel for SaaS startups. And in order to rank high in search engines such as Google you need a lot of social proof i.e. backlinks! Now that I have 4 domains with a good deal of high quality do follow backlinks I plan to build out the content on each of the sites to match the linking material and to also link those new websites to my SaaS products organically by creating some related content for the linked page.

The strategy

  1. Benefits of SEO
  2. Researching the backlinks sources
  3. Qualifying the backlinks
  4. Post Qualification
  5. Indexing and ranking
  6. Summary

Benefits of SEO

  1. Relatively passive: While it does require consistency, most of the magic happens behind the scenes when Google discovers your content and surfaces it as well as when your content is picked up and linked to by other website owners.
  2. Indirect: SEO is generally indirect and doesn't require a lot of sales skills or even excellent writing skills, 😜. To do well in SEO you need to add enough value to your readers and check off as many boxes as possible for the search engines. Or you need a lot of 💵 to buy some relevant backlinks from websites in your niche.
  3. Long Term: When you continuously generate content that is relevant to your niche and you do it consistently, you will eventually start to rank for keywords that are relevant to your niche. And once you rank for your niche you can link all of your related websites together in order to increase the domain rank of your websites. This is the strategy I plan to use to increase the domain rank of my SaaS products.

Initially I plan to use AHREFS to list all of the backlinks for each of the domains. Then I'll use the following criteria to determine which backlinks to use:

  1. Is the link a do follow link?
  2. Can I create content that makes "sense" relative to the backlink on my new website?
  3. Is the link from a website that has a high domain rank?

If a backlink doesn't meet the above criteria then it probably doesn't make sense to create content for it or at least it should be put to the end of my priority queue.

This is Neil Patels definition of a high quality backlink:

"A quality backlink is a link that comes from a high domain authority website that is well-trusted by search engines and searchers alike.

In other words, not only do the robots trust the website, but actual people also trust the website." - source

Given the above definition and the fact that each of the 4 websites has hundreds of backlinks I will use AHREfs (again, I know) to determine the traffic size for each of the linking websites web pages so that I can focus on only on the ones most likely to drive somewhat relevant traffic.

Google does use a website's visitor's time on page and back button clicks to rank websites, for example, if you were to search Google with the keyword "covid cure" and half of the visitors immediately exit the top ranking page then most likely that page's rank will begin to drop as Google is collecting this data as a clear signal that it is not a high quality source for the given Keyword. Remember, Google's Chrome web browser has almost all of the web's market share and they're able to easily track all of this sort of telemetric data.

Post Qualification

Once I qualify the backlinks I'll create niche content respective to the link on a new page on my website and I'll do my best to create a natural segway for the rest of my website's content.

For example, one of the new domains is related to a shuttered startup in Africa so I'll create some content related to the problem they were trying to solve and I'll attempt to naturally segway the content to at least one of my SaaS products.

I'll also link to the new page from my other websites to increase the legitimacy of the new page because my websites have been around for a few years and have some SEO juice.

Indexing and Website Authority

After I publish the new pages I will immediately use Auto Page Indexer to index the pages via Google's Index API which usually takes less than 24 hours to rank a web page in Google Search as opposed to 4-20 weeks which is the typical time it takes for brand new websites to get indexed.

In the past I have run AHREF's Site Audit (Free!) immediately after making changes in order to score my websites' Domain Rank, find broken links, and errors etc.

SEO "experts" have recommended waiting until the pages rank on Google before utilizing any SEO tool as the audit might be incomplete but I haven't seen any evidence of this.

Summary

After pushing out the new content I will monitor the Domain Rank of my SaaS applications via AHREFs, the website traffic via Atribusi, and manual audits via VPN to multiple cities and countries then utilize Google Search with their "site:atribusi.com" operator

Also, I'll probably end up using the same Next.js blogging library that this website is built on to build out all of the new content websites since it is super easy to work with and supports all of MDX.

tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog