We analyzed the organic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024.

In this article, we’re looking at bootstrapped SaaS companies that gained the greatest amount of referring domains in the past year.

Bootstrapped businesses generally don’t have huge budgets to spend on marketing, so any strategy these small-but-mighty companies use to improve their organic growth is something that you can take inspiration from, too.

  • We used the Ahrefs API to pull a list of live referring domains for each company in September 2023 and September 2024.
  • Companies were ranked by referring domain growth as a percentage of their initial referring domains. We’ve set a minimum starting threshold of 1,000 referring domains.
  • We’ve reported on referring domains instead of backlinks, because 1,000 referring domains are much, much harder to get than 1,000 backlinks.

Rank Company Referring Domains 2023 Referring Domains 2024 Referring Domain Growth Change Estimated Revenue
1 Elfsight 7,657 33,610 25,953 339% $8.0M
2 Short.io 5,709 18,573 12,864 225% $0.5M
3 Gymdesk 1,325 3,052 1,727 130% $5.5M
4 Helpjuice 4,015 8,672 4,657 116% $6.0M
5 AlsoAsked 1,602 3,343 1,741 109% $0.5M
6 Stripo 2,304 4,420 2,116 92% $5.5M
7 Clearscope 1,883 3,580 1,697 90% $5.5M
8 Surfer 5,815 10,899 5,084 87% $37.5M
9 Wordtune 2,877 5,347 2,470 86% $1.0M
10 Crowdin 4,818 8,919 4,101 85% $17.5M
11 Socialinsider 3,264 6,007 2,743 84% $0.8M
12 SpyFu 8,101 14,821 6,720 83% $2.0M
13 Pentest-Tools.com 1,543 2,779 1,236 80% $5.5M
14 Canny 4,411 7,675 3,264 74% $5.5M
15 Surfshark 13,898 24,056 10,158 73% $20.0M
16 Sitebulb 1,232 2,093 861 70% $0.5M
17 Seobility 3,496 5,900 2,404 69% $5.0M
18 SpyCloud 1,192 1,987 795 67% $14.0M
19 MxToolbox 10,718 17,736 7,018 65% $9.0M
20 Shiftbase 1,077 1,780 703 65% $17.5M
21 Signaturely 1,113 1,839 726 65% $0.5M
22 Lemlist 1,613 2,654 1,041 65% $6.0M
23 Sitechecker 5,938 9,732 3,794 64% $6.1M
24 SavvyCal 1,272 2,070 798 63% $5.5M
25 Statusbrew 2,750 4,470 1,720 63% $14.0M
26 Wisepops 1,291 2,086 795 62% $3.0M
27 Glassnode 5,041 8,123 3,082 61% $5.5M
28 DeviceAtlas 2,765 4,442 1,677 61% $19.0M
29 Float.com 1,021 1,638 617 60% $5.5M
30 RTINGS.com 8,601 13,779 5,178 60% $6.3M
31 Smallpdf 13,953 22,264 8,311 60% $17.5M
32 Clockify 6,109 9,733 3,624 59% $5.5M
33 Mailtrap 3,162 4,991 1,829 58% $5.5M
34 BambooHR 8,511 13,410 4,899 58% $237.8M
35 Setapp 13,178 20,696 7,518 57% $15.0M
36 WebCEO 2,495 3,891 1,396 56% $25.0M
37 Visme 10,354 16,135 5,781 56% $1.0M
38 UpLead 1,823 2,833 1,010 55% $17.5M
39 Slickplan 1,345 2,086 741 55% $1.0M
40 Jotform 45,485 69,553 24,068 53% $21.0M
41 Wiza 2,013 3,070 1,057 53% $5.5M
42 Ahrefs 52,536 80,036 27,500 52% $100.0M
43 Plausible Analytics 6,084 9,251 3,167 52% $5.5M
44 Creately 7,816 11,844 4,028 52% $12.0M
45 Homerun 2,040 3,068 1,028 50% $38.4M
46 Yardi 1,928 2,880 952 49% $5500.0M
47 Infinite Campus 1,029 1,534 505 49% $56.0M
48 Filemail 3,829 5,694 1,865 49% $1.0M
49 LiveAgent 4,740 7,034 2,294 48% $5.0M
50 Semaphore 2,727 4,025 1,298 48% $4.0M

Want to work out how virtually any company builds its best backlinks? Here’s how I do it in Ahrefs.

I usually start with the Overview report in Site Explorer to get a quick overview of the website’s referring domain growth. Here’s the chart for our #1 company, Elfsight: 

Impressive! Next, I use the Anchors report to quickly understand the types of links being built: are they all brand mentions, or links to blog content, or free tools?

In Elfsight’s case, the vast majority of their referring domains (well over 60%) have anchor text containing the word widget:

Looking at some of these links, it’s clear that the company offers free website widgets that also include a link back to Elfsight:

For some websites, anchor text won’t be so revealing. Here’s the Referring Domains report for a SaaS company I excluded from this article. At first glance, they seem to be doing well, with over 100,00 new backlinks acquired in the past year:

But digging into the most common anchor text, it becomes apparent that these are almost all spammy links (advertising Korean business massages).

You can exclude spammy links like these using our Best links filter. By default, the “Best links” filter will only show links that are:

  • Dofollow,
  • In the page content,
  • On a referring domain with a DR of at least 30,
  • With estimated organic traffic to the page of at least 500/m.

If you have different criteria for defining a “best” link, you can customize the filter yourself:

With the filter applied, if we run the Anchors report again, we can filter out all of those spam links, and get a clearer picture of the good quality links this website has acquired. Far, far fewer:

Lastly, I like to visit the Best by links report to see the individual pages that have acquired the best links.

Here’s an example from another one of our top 50 websites, Clearscope. Aside from common “utility” pages like their homepage, pricing page, and sign-in page, their most linked-to pages are all thought leadership blog posts—opinions, predictions, and research studies:

Not every company can build links by offering tons of free tools or widgets, but thought leadership content is a link-building strategy that’s much easier for other companies to emulate.

Final thoughts

We’ll share more of these data analyses in the coming weeks. Want us to include your company in the next analysis? Fill out this short Google Form.



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By Ryan Bullet

I am interested in SEO and IT, launching new projects and administering a webmasters forum.

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