How This Ranking Is Built

Seven criteria, published in full with their weights. The ranking is designed to be argued with on its criteria rather than on its conclusions, which means the criteria have to be visible. Everything on this page is generated from the same files the ranking is computed from, so it cannot drift out of date with the scores.

SCORING v3.0.0 · DATA READ 2026-09-01

The position, stated plainly

These weights are an editorial position, and they are deliberately not neutral. A $10,000/month enterprise retainer shop is a real business with real results, and it is still the wrong recommendation for most SaaS companies searching this term. So published pricing, a low barrier to entry and demonstrable SaaS-specific work are weighted above raw domain authority. Disagree with the weights and you should disagree with the ranking; that is the point of publishing them.

The question the ranking answers: Which of these agencies is genuinely built for SaaS, as opposed to a general SEO shop with a SaaS page?

The seven criteria

1. 25%

   SaaS specialisation

   Whether the agency is built for SaaS rather than serving it as one vertical among many.

   • 40 pts A service page dedicated to SaaS link building or SaaS SEO, confirmed by fetching the page. A URL that turns out to be a blog guide scores zero.
   • 40 pts Share of the named clients printed on the agency's own site that are SaaS or B2B technology companies, times 40. Every classification is published in taxonomy.json.
   • 20 pts SaaS or B2B-tech case studies presented on the agency's own site: 20 for two or more, 10 for one, 0 for none.

   Unknown Never unknown. An agency with no SaaS page, no named SaaS clients and no SaaS case studies scores zero, which is a finding, not missing data.

2. 20%

   Pricing transparency

   Whether a buyer can find out what this costs without a sales call.

   • 100 Publishes specific rates: tier prices or per-link prices printed on the agency's own site.
   • 60 Publishes a range or a 'from' figure only.
   • 0 No pricing published anywhere on the site.

   Unknown Never unknown. Absence of published pricing is the datum.

3. 15%

   Link quality floor

   Whether the agency commits in public to a minimum authority for the links it places.

   • 100 A DR or DA floor stated and bound to specific tiers or deliverables.
   • 70 A DR or DA floor stated, but not bound to what you actually receive.
   • 0 No published floor.

   We can read what an agency publishes. We cannot audit whether it is enforced. Every figure here is 'as published', and the site says so.

   Unknown Never unknown. Absence of a published floor is the datum.

4. 15%

   Own authority

   The agency's own Ahrefs Domain Rating and organic traffic, normalised. An SEO agency's own search presence is evidence, though not proof.

   • 50 pts Ahrefs DR, used directly as a 0-100 value, halved into the component.
   • 50 pts Monthly organic traffic, log-normalised across the active set so one outlier cannot dominate.

   Unknown Unknown only if Ahrefs returns no data, in which case the criterion is dropped and the remaining weights are renormalised.

5. 10%

   Minimum commitment

   How much a SaaS buyer has to commit before finding out whether this works. Lower scores higher.

   • 100 States no minimum, or month-to-month.
   • 80 Entry point under $1,000/month, or a per-link price with no retainer.
   • 60 Entry point $1,000-$2,999/month, or a 3-month term.
   • 35 Entry point $3,000-$4,999/month, or a 6-month term.
   • 10 Entry point $5,000/month or above.

   Unknown Unknown where nothing about a minimum or an entry price is published. The criterion is dropped for that agency and the remaining weights are renormalised, rather than guessing.

6. 10%

   Service depth

   Breadth of the services the agency lists, capped so that a long menu is not automatically a virtue.

   min(count of listed services, 12) / 12 * 100.

   Unknown Unknown only if the services list could not be read.

7. 5%

   Longevity

   Years since founding, where the agency states a founding year.

   min(years since founded, 15) / 15 * 100.

   Unknown Unknown where no founding year is published. The criterion is dropped and the remaining weights are renormalised. Most agencies do not publish this, so it carries only 5% by design.

Renormalisation

Where a criterion is genuinely unknown for an agency, it is dropped and the remaining weights are scaled back up to 100. Each agency's profile lists the criteria actually used, so a score computed from five criteria is never silently compared as if it came from seven.

• 7 agencies score on 85% of the weight
• 2 agencies score on 90% of the weight
• 14 agencies score on 95% of the weight
• 6 agencies score on 100% of the weight

The classification you can argue with

SaaS specialisation carries the most weight, and 40 of its 100 points come from the share of an agency's named clients that are software companies. That is a judgement, so it is published company by company rather than asserted as a percentage. 336 named clients across 24 agencies, 176 classified as SaaS or B2B tech.

The rule: A named client counts as SaaS / B2B tech when its core product is software that is licensed or subscribed to - SaaS, PaaS, developer tools, B2B platforms, security and data software. It does not count when the core product is something else and software is only the interface or the channel: banks and lenders, exchanges, insurers, marketplaces, retailers, hosting and domain resellers, media and publishers, agencies, clinics and staffing firms. Consumer software still counts as software.

Where an agency names fewer than five clients, the client-share component is halved. A one-of-two share is not evidence of specialisation.

Agencies that name no clients

Stan Ventures

Sells confidentially to agencies under NDA and names no end clients. Recorded as a deliberate choice, not as an absence of clients - but it does mean there is no public SaaS evidence to score.

LinksThatRank

Testimonials name individuals and their niche, not client companies.

Fatjoe

Sells white-label to agency accounts and names no end clients by design.

Stellar SEO

No client companies named on the homepage or on the SaaS URL.

Digital Olympus

The homepage as fetched on 2026-09-01 names no clients at all.

Fixed positions

Two positions are fixed. Both pinned agencies display their real computed score next to everyone else's, and both are marked FIXED wherever the ranking is sorted, so no sort silently misrepresents the order.

• #2
  SerpsGrowth

  Computed score 80.4, which is 2 nd on score alone. Held at position 2 and marked FIXED everywhere it appears.

• #4
  Inbound Blogging

  Computed score 77.2, which is 3 rd on score alone. Held at position 4 and marked FIXED everywhere it appears.

This site is published by an independent team working in SaaS SEO. Two of the agencies listed are operated by people connected to the publisher. Rankings are calculated from the criteria and weights published on this page.

Sources, and what this cannot tell you

Refreshed when the underlying data moves enough to change the order — Ahrefs metrics monthly, agency pages quarterly or when one of them visibly changes its pricing. Every page carries the date its data was read.

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