Submitting to 200+ SaaS directories, wish me luck!
I realized my new project has to rely on SEO in the long-term, so backlinks are essential. I've got hundreds of dirs on the list, submitted to a half-dozen high-priority ones today.
Some people report real traffic and even signups from such dirs. I don't expect that. Even with high quality paid ones I only expect at most a small short-term bump in cold traffic, but that's fine, the only point in this exercise is to get dofollow links. Will see how it actually goes, happy to be proven wrong.
Tips:
- do NOT trust paid auto-submission services, garbage link is worse than none
- prepare many title/description variants, don't copy the same one everywhere
- don't go too fast, spread submission over days and weeks
- prioritize by niche + metrics like domain rank, don't waste time on irrelevant or dead dirs
- expect to pay - top 50% of dirs expect a 10/20$ payment for a dofollow link (at least in saas/ai-tools dirs), that's cheaper than any other means of getting a comparable link, pay extra for top-tier DR and/or higher expectations of organic traffic
- do not waste time on free submissions requiring you to place a backlink to the dir
The thread I linked above has a list of ~100 dirs - a good start, but I went a bit further.
The nature of the product I'm building is such that I have large volumes of web pages. A vector classifier plus an LLM evaluation of the candidates, and boom - 4500+ categorized places to get a backlink from. Attached DR/traffic data from dataforseo and a simple UI - looks pretty useful.
"Saas" keyword gives 284 rows, will focus there. Since 4500 is much higher number than I needed, decided it's worth sharing, use here - it's open and free, no bs. The list is by no means complete nor data 100% accurate - but a pretty good sample to get some baseline links in any niche.
Hope it helps! Will report on the traffic metrics as it goes.