Anchor Text on SaaS Sites, From Learn More Buttons to Backlinks

Anchor text is the visible, clickable wording of a link, and on a SaaS site its job is to tell readers and search engines what the destination page covers before anyone clicks. Google's link guidance asks for descriptive wording, advises against generic phrases like "click here," and warns against stuffing links with keywords. That sounds simple until you look at a typical SaaS marketing site, where most links live in components that were designed for appearance.

Say you run a 25-person SaaS selling contract management software to in-house legal teams. Your homepage has six feature cards, each ending in "Learn more." Your blog links to the same product pages using whatever phrase the writer happened to have in mind. Three review sites link to you with your brand name. All of those are anchor text decisions, and only some of them are yours to make.

The markup comes before the wording

Good wording does nothing if the link can't be parsed. Google says it can reliably follow links that use an <a> element with an href attribute. Links built with a span, or with script events and no href, may not be parsed. Links added with JavaScript are fine when they produce the same markup.

Component libraries are where this goes wrong on SaaS sites. A card might be a div with an onClick handler that calls the router, which looks identical to a real link in the browser and offers nothing for a crawler to follow. The contract software company could have a whole row of feature pages reachable, as far as Googlebot is concerned, only through the sitemap. If your site runs on React or Next.js, use the framework's link component so the rendered HTML contains a real anchor, and check the rendered output instead of trusting how the page behaves when you click around.

Two more markup details matter. For a linked image, Google uses the image's alt text as the anchor, so a logo or screenshot link with an empty alt passes along no description at all. And Google notes that adjacent links need surrounding context, so a row of links jammed together with no text between them is harder to understand.

Fixing "Learn more" without wrecking the design

Generic labels are a reasonable design choice with a real cost: the link itself says nothing. Lift the link wording out of the card and read it alone, the way a screen reader user might when listing every link on a page, and six identical "Learn more" entries tell you nothing.

The usual fix is making the card's heading the link. "Clause library" as a linked heading describes the destination and keeps the page looking the same. If the design requires a button label, write it to carry the subject: "See the clause library" works in the same space. Where that really isn't possible, an aria-label helps assistive technology, but Google's guidance is about the visible text, so don't treat that attribute as a search fix.

Navigation deserves the same scrutiny. A menu item reading "Solutions" is fine as a parent label. The items under it should name the thing the page is about, in words your buyers use, such as "Contract redlining" instead of a clever product module name nobody searches for.

Internal anchors are the ones you control

Internal links are the only anchor text you fully own, and the place where this topic pays off most. Google's advice is to write link text that tells users and Google something about the linked page, and its starter guide repeats the point. For the contract company, a blog post about renewal tracking should link to the renewals feature with wording like "automatic contract renewal alerts" and not "our platform."

Variation should come naturally here. Writing the identical phrase on every link looks mechanical and reads badly, and sentences are rarely built that way anyway. Google's guidance warns about stuffing, and repeated exact-match wording across dozens of posts drifts toward that. Describe the destination honestly in the context of the sentence you are writing, and the wording will vary by itself.

Honesty matters more than cleverness. An anchor reading "pricing guide" that lands on a demo form teaches the reader to distrust your links. Before you publish, read each anchor and ask whether someone would be surprised by where it goes. For the wider system of which pages should link where, see our internal linking strategy for a SaaS blog.

Earned anchors are mostly out of your hands

External anchor text gets the most attention and deserves the least control. Most links you earn will use your brand name, your bare URL, or a phrase the writer picked, and that is what an ordinary link profile looks like. A review site linking to "Acme Contracts" is doing exactly what you want.

Controlling those anchors is where risk begins. Google's spam policies name optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts and press releases as a form of link spam under advertorials and native advertising. So asking a guest-post editor to link "best contract management software" to your homepage is exactly the pattern described, and an agency promising "exact-match anchors" is promising it at volume. Old anchor-ratio recipes, with prescribed shares of branded and exact-match links, aren't drawn from anything Google publishes and invite manufactured profiles.

Reasonable influence still exists. When someone asks how to describe you, suggest a plain sentence about what the product does. When someone has mentioned you without a link, asking for one is fine, and the brand name is the natural anchor. When you pitch a specific page to a relevant site, describe the page accurately and let the writer word it.

Reading your anchor profile

Search Console's Links report has a top linking text table showing the most common anchors from outside your property. Keep in mind that it is a sample and can include links that have since disappeared. A third-party backlink tool will give you a fuller list, with its own gaps.

Read that list for signals. Mostly brand terms and descriptive phrases is healthy. Anchors in a language you don't sell in, or commercial phrases you never asked for, may point to spam worth a closer look in a backlink audit, though most of that noise is not worth panicking over. A wave of near-identical commercial anchors that traces back to something you paid for is the finding to act on.

Anchors also reveal positioning. If the phrases people use for you describe a category you left long ago, that is a messaging problem no amount of link work fixes. Update how you describe yourself on your site and in the places you control, such as review profiles, and let the wording spread as people repeat it.

What changes for AI search

Google's AI features documentation lists strong internal linking among the standard practices that still apply and says no special optimization is needed, so clean anchors serve both results. Whether AI systems read anchor text as a distinct signal isn't documented, and it would be guesswork to claim so.

What is fair to say is that the sentence around a link is often more useful to a reader than the anchor alone, and assistants read sentences. A line stating that a tool "tracks contract renewal dates and alerts the owner" carries meaning however the link is marked up. Write the sentence so it holds up on its own, which is the same habit behind content that survives AI summaries.

To see how this fits into a repeatable publishing and linking process, look at the system we run for SaaS clients.