50 Best Backlink Builders with Bootstrap in 2024

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

In this article, we’ll take a look at the SaaS bootstrap companies that gained the most referring domains last year.

Start-up companies generally don’t have huge marketing budgets, so any strategy these tiny but mighty companies exploit to improve their organic growth is something that You you can also draw inspiration.

• We used the Ahrefs API to retrieve the list of energetic referring domains for each company in September 2023 and September 2024.
• Companies were ranked based on their referring domain growth as a percentage of their initial referring domains. We set a minimum starting threshold of 1,000 referring domains.
• We reported referring domains instead of backlinks because 1000 referring domains is a lot, A lot harder to get than 1000 backlinks.

Degree	Business	Referral domains 2023	Referral domains 2024	Referral domain growth	Change	Estimated income
1	Elven sight	7657	33610	25953	339%	$8.0 million
2	short.io	5709	18573	12864	225%	0.5 million dollars
3	Gym	1325	3052	1727	130%	$5.5 million
4	Helpful juice	4015	8672	4657	116%	$6.0 million
5	Also asked	1602	3343	1741	109%	0.5 million dollars
6	Comics	2304	4420	2116	92%	$5.5 million
7	Clearscope	1883	3580	1697	90%	$5.5 million
8	Surfer	5815	10899	5084	87%	$37.5 million
9	Wordtune	2877	5347	2470	86%	$1.0 million
10	Crowd	4818	8919	4101	85%	$17.5 million
11	Social insiders	3264	6007	2743	84%	0.8 million dollars
12	SpyFu	8101	14821	6720	83%	$2.0 million
13	Pentest-Tools.com	1543	2779	1236	80%	$5.5 million
14	Clever	4411	7675	3264	74%	$5.5 million
15	Surfshark	13898	24056	10158	73%	$20.0 million
16	Site bulb	1232	2093	861	70%	0.5 million dollars
17	Seobality	3496	5900	2404	69%	$5.0 million
18	SpyCloud	1192	1987	795	67%	$14.0 million
19	MxToolbox	10718	17736	7018	65%	$9.0 million
20	Shift base	1077	1780	703	65%	$17.5 million
21	Signature	1113	1839	726	65%	0.5 million dollars
22	Lemlist	1613	2654	1041	65%	$6.0 million
23	Site Controller	5938	9732	3794	64%	$6.1 million
24	SavvyCal	1272	2070	798	63%	$5.5 million
25	Stanbrew	2750	4470	1720	63%	$14.0 million
26	Smart pops	1291	2086	795	62%	$3.0 million
27	Glass knot	5041	8123	3082	61%	$5.5 million
28	Device atlas	2765	4442	1677	61%	$19.0 million
29	Float.com	1021	1638	617	60%	$5.5 million
30	RTINGS.com	8601	13779	5178	60%	$6.3 million
31	Smallpdf	13953	22264	8311	60%	$17.5 million
32	Clock it	6109	9733	3624	59%	$5.5 million
33	Mail trap	3162	4991	1829	58%	$5.5 million
34	BambooHR	8511	13410	4899	58%	$237.8 million
35	Setapplication	13178	20,696	7518	57%	$15.0 million
36	WebCEO	2495	3891	1396	56%	$25.0 million
37	Visme	10354	16135	5781	56%	$1.0 million
38	UpLead	1823	2833	1010	55%	$17.5 million
39	Slickplan	1345	2086	741	55%	$1.0 million
40	Jotform	45,485	69553	24068	53%	$21.0 million
41	Visa	2013	3070	1057	53%	$5.5 million
42	Ahrefs	52536	80,036	27,500	52%	$100.0 million
43	Trustworthy analytics	6084	9251	3167	52%	$5.5 million
44	Creatively	7816	11844	4028	52%	$12.0 million
45	Homerun	2040	3068	1028	50%	$38.4 million
46	Yardi	1928	2880	952	49%	$5,500.0 million
47	Infinite Campus	1029	1534	505	49%	$56.0 million
48	File mail	3829	5694	1865	49%	$1.0 million
49	LiveAgent	4740	7034	2294	48%	$5.0 million
50	Semaphore	2727	4025	1298	48%	$4.0 million

Want to see how virtually every company builds their best backlinks? Here’s how I do it in Ahrefs.

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

Impressive! Then I exploit Anchors report to quickly understand the types of links you are creating: are they brand mentions, links to blog content, or free tools?

In Elfsight’s case, the immense 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 web widgets that also link back to Elfsight:

For some sites, anchor text won’t be as revealing. Here Referring domains report for a SaaS company that I excluded from this article. At first glance they seem to be doing well, with over 100,000 fresh backlinks acquired last year:

However, digging deeper into the most popular anchor texts, it turns out that almost all of them are spam links (advertising Korean business massages).

You can exclude spammy links by using our The best links filter. By default, the “Top Links” filter will only show links that are:

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

If you have other criteria for defining the “best” link, you can adjust the filter yourself:

After applying the filter, if we run Anchors report again, we will be able to filter out all spam links and get a clearer picture of the good quality links this site has acquired. Much, much less:

Finally, I enjoy visiting Preferably through links report to see the individual pages that received the best links.

Here’s an example from another of our top 50 websites, Clearscope. In addition to the typical “tool” pages like the home page, pricing page, and login page, all of their most linked pages are thought leadership blog posts – opinions, forecasts, and research:

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

Final thoughts

We’ll be sharing more data analysis in the coming weeks. Would you like us to include your company in our next analysis? Complete this short Google form.