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Kristiyan Yankov runs a link-building agency that only takes SaaS clients. That is the whole pitch, and it is deliberate. He is the founder of Above Apex, and on this episode of The Unscripted SEO Interview he walks Jeremy Rivera through how an agency that was once bad at link building made it the only thing it does — and what still moves the needle now that everyone is arguing about whether links matter in an AI-search world.
Out of “generalist hell” and into one ICP
Kristiyan has been freelancing since high school. He helped a friend build one of the biggest SEO agencies on Fiverr — over a hundred thousand orders — then went looking for bigger, more mature projects with a partner. What they found instead was what he calls generalist hell: all kinds of clients, all kinds of projects, and link building as their worst vertical. So they attacked it. They read, they tested, they talked about it constantly, and about a year in, link building had become the thing they were genuinely good at.
Upwork was already feeding him tech and SaaS leads, so the direction was half-chosen for him. The decision landed when he heard Alex Hormozi say one avatar, one ICP, one service. That clicked. Specialize on one industry, offer one service, stop being a general SEO agency.
“You shouldn’t trust anyone. You should verify. You should verify, especially in our industry.” — Kristiyan Yankov
Why SaaS is a bigger playing field than local
The reason SaaS was worth niching into is simple: you have more room to work. Local SEO gives you a fairly limited set of link types. In SaaS there are roughly five to ten different strategies that can all work — brand mentions, link exchanges, listicle inclusions, podcasts and syndications — some far better than others, but all live options.
Jeremy pushed on the business-model side of it. A SaaS with any funding or maturity behind it is marketing-forward by default; there is runway, there is a commitment to break into the market. Compare that to a contractor putting in concrete walls, who has rotary clubs, real-world partnerships and big contracts, and treats the website as an afterthought — oh yeah, I guess we have to build a website at some point, and can somebody do some SEO for it? Kristiyan agreed entirely; that gap has been obvious to him since the beginning.
The real bottleneck is bandwidth, not belief
Ask him what the consistent achy joint is across campaigns and he does not say “clients don’t believe in links.” He says the work needs manpower and hours, and nobody has them.
“They need to build brand mentions. They need to control the narrative. They need to build links. They just don’t have the bandwidth.” — Kristiyan Yankov
Which segues straight into the sales conversation: we know we need to do it, we do not have the time to onboard someone and teach them, so we need a dedicated partner we do not have to micromanage or worry about for quality. That is where deals actually sync up.
Two pricing models, no lock-in
Above Apex runs a per-link model and a fixed model. Per-link is self-explanatory — you pay for the links and brand mentions delivered that month against specific criteria. Fixed is the conventional package: one price, a set number of deliverables. Everything is month-to-month, no lengthy contracts. Kristiyan says leaving the ball in the client’s court is exactly why lifetime value and retention are high.
The per-link model also solves a delivery problem SEOs will recognize. A very specific piece of software limits the opportunity set, so there is a lot of overhead for fewer placements than a CRM would get. And editors are people. When an expert quote gets accepted at somewhere like HubSpot, the answer might be we love it, we’re publishing in 30 to 40 days. You cannot promise a clean calendar month. You can set the expectation upfront, which is what makes it work.
How he actually evaluates a link opportunity
He is looking at five to ten metrics as a starting point, not domain rating in isolation — the industry’s favorite single number. The site first, then the page. Is it a genuine website that serves a purpose, or a PBN dressed up as one? Does it have relevant content? Is the link seamlessly integrated into the copy and the article itself, or bolted on?
“If I look at a link building opportunity and it makes sense to me it would be the same for Google because Google is definitely not more stupid than me. It’s quite the opposite. It’s actually smarter.” — Kristiyan Yankov
Jeremy raised the other end of the spectrum: clients who arrive with hyper-specific criteria — this exact phrase, these three variable keywords, never anchor exactly on those, page must be in-niche but not too off-topic, DR above this floor but do not optimize for DR. Above Apex has one of those, an ex-Google client who is well known in the industry. The internal reaction was that it was extremely unrealistic. Then they decided to treat it as a challenge and hit every single requirement, as a case study for their own team.
The two strategies he leans on for SaaS
Listicles and roundups. Getting a product into “best CRM for agencies” is a win across the board: relevance, a brand mention, and direct clicks, since 40%-plus of listicles carry traffic. Kristiyan says it has also proven out over the last six-plus months as one of the main factors for showing up in AI models and AI Overviews, and demand for it is, in his word, crazy.
Expert-quote outreach — run backwards. Jeremy described the classic version: your in-house subject-matter expert produces quotes, you find topically relevant published articles, you pitch. Kristiyan corrected him. Above Apex looks at what editors have coming up on their content calendar. If an editor is building a piece on marketing analytics and Above Apex represents a marketing-analytics client’s CMO, head of SEO and CEO, they offer commentary on the piece before it is written. If the editor likes it, it goes in. Done at volume across many clients every day, you learn what actually raises your hit rate. This is how they have landed links from the BBC — the kind of placement you otherwise only buy.
Anchor velocity, Penguin, and the leak
Jeremy relayed a concern from Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency about too many links with specific anchor text arriving too fast. Kristiyan partly agrees, with the usual caveat that it depends — on site size, on how saturated the industry is, and on the existing link profile. A CRM or project-management tool in a brutally competitive space has an enormous profile and does a lot of outreach already; a niche QMS tool does not, and should not move at the same velocity.
His larger read, drawn from the analysis that followed the Google data leak: spammy or low-quality links are disregarded, not punished. Google sets them aside rather than counting them against you. In his view you could point a hundred hidden-PBN links at a site today and it would do nothing, positive or negative — because if he can tell they are garbage, so can the algorithm.
Timeline, and what a brand-new site should actually do
For clients with strong SEO leadership and a site that is already positioned well, link building turbocharges the content and pages that already exist. He typically sees real indications in the 30-to-60-day range — often by the middle of the second month.
New sites are a different question, and he refuses to fake a number. The advice is long-term mindset and fundamentals. Concretely, for a bootstrapped SaaS: do expert-quote outreach leveraging your own founder expertise, even with a freelancer. Work on content, because you need traffic — and the reason you need traffic is that it unlocks link exchanges and partnerships. People still check whether your site has traffic, what its technical condition is, and whether the brand looks credible before they will swap with you.
The DIY play: three listicle buckets
Asked for one strategy a founder can run without an agency, he picked listicles and split the opportunity set into three buckets you can work through monthly:
- Exact solution. You are a CRM for agencies — find every “CRM for agencies” listicle.
- Broader industry. Growth-hacking tools, tools for growing a business, whatever category sits one level up.
- Alternatives and comparisons. You are a small player with a USP against the giants; these get rebuilt monthly.
Many will ask to be paid. Even at $300 to $500 you can start building a profile, and you are buying placement in the comparison layer of the funnel — exactly where buyers are researching solutions against each other.
On AI search: an extension, not a replacement
Jeremy asked whether the rise of LLMs has made link-building budgets easier to sell, since “you need to be cited elsewhere” is a simpler argument than explaining algorithms. Kristiyan has not seen a clean signal either way. He has clients who want to double down on the fundamentals that have worked for a decade. He has an enterprise HR company whose global SEO manager handed him a 300-opportunity list and asked only for brand mentions. And he has a head of SEO who told him, with total conviction, that link building is pointless — while running a site he says would make you cry.
“I’m looking at what people want and pivoting in that direction because I believe that the fundamentals are not going to disappear. So when the hype is over, I’ll still be able and my team to provide everything that we’ve provided up until now.” — Kristiyan Yankov
The one AI-era finding he has acted on: more than half of citations across platforms trace back to UGC platforms, so that is where his testing is pointed right now. Jeremy’s framing of the same idea — ChatGPT leaning on Bing, Perplexity on Brave, a lot of responses being a fancy wrapper for a Google search — is that the retrieval layer is still the thing SEOs have always optimized. If that is the core, the core keeps its value.
If you want the mechanics behind any of this, see the complete guide to link building and authority, or how these interviews themselves become podcast-powered link building. The local counterpart to SaaS outreach is link building through community cleanup events.
Connect with Kristiyan
Find Kristiyan at aboveapex.com and on LinkedIn, where he posts five or six days a week.
Listen to the full episode on Castos or watch on YouTube. For more conversations like this, explore the Unscripted SEO topical hubs or try the keyword-research tool at SEO Arcade.
