Most SaaS CMOs get handed a budget and immediately start splitting it the same way they did three years ago: freelance writers, an SEO tool subscription, maybe a link building consultancy. It's comfortable. It's familiar. It's also the reason their pipeline isn't growing.
The search ecosystem has fundamentally changed — AI engines now mediate a growing share of discovery, Reddit citations outweigh most editorial backlinks, and "publish and pray" content strategies have the shelf life of milk left on a countertop.
Based on what we’ve seen across years of SaaS partnerships at Empact Partners, here’s how a $100K annual SEO budget should actually be allocated — and why most of what worked in 2021 is now an expensive way to stand still.
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Your Website Comes First ($30-40K)
Before you spend a dollar on distribution, your website needs to deserve the traffic. This sounds obvious. It is obvious. And yet, the number of SaaS companies spending $80K on content and link building while their website converts at 0.3% is genuinely staggering.
If your website is slow, confusing, poorly structured, or reads like it was written by a committee that couldn't agree on a font — fix it first. Not because Google will penalize you (though it might), but because every dollar you spend driving traffic to a mediocre website is a dollar partially wasted.
What "fix your website" actually means
We're not talking about a full rebrand. We're talking about the things that directly impact whether search traffic — traditional or AI — converts into pipeline.
When we partnered with flair, the website was their first investment priority. The result: 1,600% organic traffic growth over three years, built on a foundation of product tutorials and use-case-specific landing pages that both Google and AI engines could cite.
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The content investment within your website
The biggest chunk of your website budget should go to writers. Not just writers who write well — writers who work with your customers, your product team, and your subject matter experts to create content that genuinely doesn't exist anywhere else.
Content your product team reviews and says "yes, that's actually how it works." Content your customers read and forward to their colleagues.
Generic "Top 10 Best [Category] Tools" articles are dead weight. AI engines have already seen a thousand versions of that page. They're not going to cite yours. Invest instead in product-driven content: tutorials that show your product solving a specific problem, case studies that document real results, comparison pages where you're honest about your strengths and limitations.
This content does double duty: it converts organic traffic into pipeline, and it gives AI engines specific, citable passages that make your brand worth recommending.
Building Mentions ($30-40K)
This is where modern budgets diverge most dramatically from 2021 budgets. Traditional link building — guest posts, HARO, broken link outreach — still has its place. But the highest-ROI off-site investment now is mention building: getting your brand discussed contextually across the web.
And no, mentions are not the same as backlinks.
A mention is your brand being discussed, recommended, or referenced in context — whether or not there's a hyperlink attached. AI engines don't need hyperlinks to recognize authority. They understand context. When a G2 review says "we switched from Asana to Monday.com and our project completion rate went up 40%," that's a mention AI engines can use — even without a clickable link.
We use the term Existing Article Outreach — EAO — for the mention building work we do with our partners. The idea is straightforward: instead of creating new content from scratch, find existing high-authority articles that already rank and are already cited by AI engines, then get your brand mentioned in those articles. The economics are dramatically better than traditional link building.
We use proprietary AI systems and outreach platforms to run these campaigns at scale. Identify articles where your brand belongs, craft personalized outreach that offers genuine value to the author, build the mention. We wrote about this in detail in our piece on Existing Article Outreach.
Where mentions come from
- Existing comparison and listicle articles that already rank for relevant queries
- Review sites and directories (G2, Capterra, Product Hunt)
- Industry publications and newsletters
- Podcast appearances and webinar features
- Expert roundups and contributor pieces
- Community discussions and forum threads
The key is contextual relevance. A mention of your CRM in a blog post about "best restaurants in Tokyo" is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. A mention of your CRM in a well-trafficked article about "how to manage a sales team remotely" is gold — especially if that article is one of the sources AI engines pull from when answering that exact question.
With KDAN Mobile, a 5+ year partnership, this approach drove a 200% organic traffic increase. With Feathery, the combination of website content and strategic mention building produced 300% organic growth in just 16 months.
Reddit and UGC ($15-20K)
Reddit is the single most cited source in AI search results. Close to 20% of all citations on Google AI Mode and ChatGPT come from Reddit. If you're allocating zero budget to Reddit, you're ignoring the largest citation source for AI engines on the internet.
But here's the thing about Reddit: you can't buy your way in.
Reddit's community will absolutely destroy any brand that shows up with corporate messaging and promotional intent. (*Ask us how we know.*) The investment here isn't in ads or sponsored content. It's in people — community managers who genuinely understand the subreddits your audience lives in and can participate authentically.
We helped KKday build genuine Reddit presence that generated over 3 million post views and 4,000+ upvotes. That's not the result of buying anything — it's the result of showing up consistently with content the community actually wanted. Read our full breakdown of how Empact Partners cracked Reddit marketing.
The Fundamentals Haven't Gone Anywhere
None of this means you should abandon the basics. Internal linking still matters. Site speed still matters. Meta descriptions still matter. Schema markup matters more than ever in the age of AI search.
These aren't separate budget items — they're maintenance. Like oil changes for your car. Skipping them doesn't save money. It just creates more expensive problems later.
What's different now is the ratio. Five years ago, a smart CMO might allocate 70% of budget to content production and 30% to distribution. Today, we'd flip that closer to 40% content, 35% mentions and distribution, 25% community and UGC.
The content itself is table stakes. What differentiates is how broadly your brand exists across the web.
The $100K Budget, Summarized
| Investment Area | Allocation | What You Get |
|---|---|---|
| Website + Content | $30-40K | Product-led content, technical SEO, conversion optimization, citable passages for AI engines |
| Mention Building (EAO) | $30-40K | Third-party mentions, DR40+ backlinks, AI search citations from authoritative sources |
| Reddit + UGC | $15-20K | Community presence, authentic user discussions, the #1 citation source for AI engines |
| Measurement | $5-10K | AI search tracking (Qvery), traditional SEO tools, analytics infrastructure |
The exact splits depend on your starting position. If your website is already strong, shift more toward mentions and UGC. If nobody's talking about you anywhere, the content investment needs to come first — you need something worth mentioning before you can build a mention footprint.
Full disclosure: this is the part where we tell you Empact Partners can help with all of this. We're biased. But we’re also the consultancy that’s been doing this for SaaS companies since 2020, built our own AI search tracking agent, and has a dedicated Reddit marketing team. We've seen what works.
If you want help figuring out how your $100K — or $50K, or $500K — should be allocated, let's have that conversation.
