Nine services, and the conditions under which we would tell you not to buy each one.

Take the four URLs currently outranking your money page. Pull every referring domain each holds. Pool them, remove duplicates, subtract your own. What remains is the gap — a finite, named list of publications that link to your competitors and not to you.

In most SaaS categories the number lands between forty and a hundred and twenty domains. That figure determines monthly volume, programme length and cost, in that order. Any proposal that names a link count before running this subtraction has derived it from the agency's capacity rather than your situation.

We deliver it in month one as a ranked spreadsheet and you keep it, whether or not you continue.

Input

Target URL, primary category term, read-only Search Console

Lead time

7–10 working days

Output

Ranked list: likelihood, effort and acquisition route per domain

Refreshed

Quarterly — competitors keep acquiring

Skip it if

Never. Nothing else should start before this exists.

Manual outreach to a named editor at a publication with a genuine readership in your category. One pitch, one angle, written to their beat rather than ours. Our writers produce the draft, your nominated approver signs it off, and the link sits inside the argument of the piece.

Every candidate is scored before a single email is sent. Roughly two thirds fail, and each rejection is logged with a reason code that appears in your monthly report — including in the months when that makes us look slow.

Output

6–20 verified contextual placements per month

Lead time

21–40 days from pitch to live URL

Minimum standard

≥1,000 verified organic sessions; topical overlap scored before outreach

Market reference

Guest placements average $220–$609 across the industry in 2026

Skip it if

You need movement inside eight weeks — nothing here publishes that fast

Somewhere in your product telemetry is a number your industry argues about without evidence. We find it, verify it, publish it with a stated methodology, and take it to the journalists and analysts covering your space.

Where usable internal data does not exist we design a panel survey instead — typically three hundred or more qualified respondents, which is roughly where trade press begins treating a finding as citable rather than promotional.

The economics differ from outreach in a way worth planning around: higher cost up front, then continued accrual for eight to fourteen months with no further spend.

Output

One story per quarter on Zenith and Apex

Lead time

5–7 weeks from data access to launch

Includes

Analysis or survey design, report page, press kit, pitch list, coverage log

Half-life

Earned links continue accruing 8–14 months post-launch

Skip it if

You have neither usable product data nor budget for a panel

Your buyer does not search your brand. They search the category, then "best tools for", then "alternatives to" whoever they trialled first. Those pages belong to publishers, and appearing in them — accurately, and high on the page — is a placement problem with its own workstream.

Half the work is inclusion. The other half is correcting listings that describe your product as it was two years ago, with wrong pricing and missing integrations. That second half is unglamorous and frequently the fastest measurable win available.

We usually sequence this first, because it produces something real in month two while everything else is still warming up.

Audit scope

60–200 round-ups mapped per category

Actions

Inclusion outreach, listing correction, position improvement, new round-up seeding

Market reference

Paid inclusion typically $350–$750 per round-up

Disclosure

Every paid placement labelled as such in your sheet

Skip it if

Your product genuinely is not competitive in the category yet

Benchmarks, calculators, free micro-tools, glossaries. The difference between an asset that earns links and one that does not is almost never execution quality — it is whether anything comparable in your category already gets cited.

So we start from evidence: find what your category already links to, count the citations and their sources, and build the version that is missing. Where nothing comparable earns links, we say so and move the budget elsewhere.

The asset stays on your domain and keeps earning after an engagement ends. At smaller budgets it is frequently the single strongest lever available.

Output

One asset per quarter on Apex

Lead time

3–10 weeks depending on complexity

Includes

Concept modelling, build, copy, on-page structure, launch outreach

Ownership

Yours, permanently

Skip it if

Three competitors already own and rank for the same asset

Journalists working to deadline need a quotable specialist. We put your people in front of those requests, brief them properly and handle the follow-up. Sometimes the result is a link; frequently it is an unlinked mention with your company named as the source.

We count the unlinked ones anyway. Answer engines lean disproportionately on a shortlist of publications they treat as reliable, and being named there raises the probability that a model mentions your product when someone asks it to compare the category. That effect is real and passes no PageRank.

Output

Typically 2–6 placements per month once established

Lead time

Days, when it lands at all

Requires

A named internal expert able to respond within four hours

Also produces

Unlinked mentions and analyst awareness, logged separately

Skip it if

Every external statement needs multi-day legal review

When a site arrives carrying years of previous agency work, we classify what is already there before adding to it. Every referring domain categorised, footprints clustered by host, template and outbound pattern, anchor distribution mapped against where it should be.

The output is a removal list, a disavow file and a rebalancing plan. On roughly one engagement in five the honest recommendation for the first quarter is to acquire nothing and clean up instead.

That is an uncomfortable invoice. We send it, because acquisition stacked on a damaged profile buys a defended position rather than an improved one.

Deliverable

Full classification, footprint clusters, removal list, disavow file, anchor plan

Duration

2–4 weeks for the audit; one quarter where remediation is needed

Included in

Every programme, run before acquisition begins

Standalone

Available as a one-off audit, no retainer

Skip it if

Your profile is genuinely clean — we will tell you if it is

Before the first pitch leaves, we model what your anchor distribution should look like at month twelve — branded and naked-URL anchors carrying the majority, partial-match filling the middle, exact-match kept deliberately scarce. Then we report against that model every month.

The alternative is twelve individually reasonable decisions that add up to a profile reading like a keyword list. Nobody chooses that; plenty of companies arrive at it.

Monitoring runs alongside. Every delivered URL is recrawled weekly for twelve months, and anything removed, no-followed or de-indexed is replaced without an invoice.

Modelling

Twelve-month distribution agreed in writing at kickoff

Monitoring

Weekly automated recrawl of every placement

Alert window

Breakage flagged within 7 days

Warranty

Free replacement for 12 months from publication

Skip it if

Never — it is included in every programme

Acquired links arrive somewhere. Where that authority travels afterwards is a structural question most SaaS sites have never deliberately answered — and it is the cheapest lever in this entire list, because it requires no outreach at all.

We map which of your pages hold accumulated authority, which pages need it, and what is currently between them. Typically the finding is that a well-linked blog archive is passing almost nothing to the commercial pages the whole programme is meant to move.

Included in every programme because it makes everything else work harder. It is also the one service here you could run yourself in a fortnight.

Deliverable

Authority flow map, orphan report, prioritised internal link plan

Lead time

2 weeks

Typical finding

Commercial pages under-linked from earned-authority content

Implementation

Your team, or ours — usually faster with yours

Skip it if

You have done it in the last twelve months