How are you building backlinks for your startup while keeping your SEO budget in check?

As an indie hacker, you’re usually handling product, marketing, customer support, and SEO yourself. Spending hours searching for websites that accept guest posts can feel like a full-time job.

For a bootstrapped SaaS or startup, I think the goal shouldn’t be “get as many backlinks as possible.” It should be finding a smaller number of relevant websites that can actually help with visibility and referral traffic.

Before reaching out to a site, I usually check:

Is the website relevant to my niche?

Does it have genuine organic traffic?

Is the content genuinely useful and regularly updated?

Are there real examples of published guest posts?

Does the site have a genuine audience?

Is the placement worth the cost and effort?

I’ve also been exploring Guest Post Discovery to make the research process easier and find potential guest posting opportunities in specific niches.

For founders and indie hackers working on SEO themselves:

What’s been your most effective way of getting quality backlinks for your product?
Guest posts, partnerships, digital PR, communities, or something else?