This is the least interesting article on this site and the one most likely to make you money this month. It describes a tactic with no creativity, no pitching skill and no risk, which is precisely why it remains available.
What is sitting there
Six categories of link that most B2B companies have earned and never collected.
| Source | Typical count | Why they say yes |
|---|---|---|
| Integration partners | 5–30 | Their directory exists to show breadth; you are content |
| Technology and reseller partners | 3–15 | Contractual or commercial relationship already exists |
| Trade associations you belong to | 1–5 | Member listings are the point of membership |
| Conferences you have spoken at or sponsored | 2–10 | Speaker and sponsor pages persist for years |
| Customers with case studies about you | 2–12 | They wrote it; they simply did not link |
| Certification and standards bodies | 1–4 | Registries of certified vendors |
Cost per acquired link, measured in staff time at ordinary rates: usually under $50. Compare with a market average of roughly $500 for a bought editorial placement.
Why nobody does it
Three reasons, none of them good.
It is not anybody's job. Partnerships owns the relationship, marketing owns the links, and the intersection belongs to neither.
It feels too small. One directory listing is unexciting. Thirty of them is a quarter's worth of a link building retainer.
It is assumed to be done. "We're surely in their directory" is one of the most reliably wrong sentences in B2B marketing. Go and check.
The procedure
Step 1 — Build the list
Sources, in order of yield:
- Your own integrations page — every partner listed there has a directory.
- Your CRM, filtered for partner and reseller accounts.
- Finance records: association memberships, conference sponsorships, certification fees. Anything you paid for probably came with a listing.
- Customer case studies on your site — check whether the customer published a version too.
- Your competitors' referring domains, filtered for directories. If a partner lists them, they will list you.
Step 2 — Check the current state
For each, one of three outcomes:
- Not listed. Ask to be added.
- Listed without a link. Most common by some distance. Ask for the link.
- Listed with outdated information. Ask for a correction, and mention the link while you are there.
That middle row is worth pausing on. Directory entries frequently carry a logo and a description and no hyperlink, because whoever built the page did not think about it. A one-line email fixes it.
The email
Subject: our listing on [their directory page]
Hi [name] — we're listed in your [integrations / partners / members] directory at [URL], but the entry doesn't link through to us. Could you point it at [your URL]?
Also happy to send an updated description if the current one is out of date — ours changed a fair bit last year.
Two sentences. No pitch, no explanation of why links matter, no mention of SEO. You are asking a partner to fix an incomplete entry, which is exactly what you are doing.
Step 3 — Route it through the right person
If your partnerships manager sends it, it is a partner request and gets actioned. If marketing sends it cold to a generic inbox, it looks like link building and may be ignored.
This single routing decision changes the response rate more than anything in the wording.
What to expect
| Stage | Figure |
|---|---|
| Opportunities identified | 20–50 for a typical mid-market B2B company |
| Response rate via partnerships | 50–70% |
| Response rate cold from marketing | 15–25% |
| Response-to-link conversion | 60–80% |
| Elapsed time | 1–4 weeks per listing |
| Total effort | Roughly two weeks of one person's part-time attention |
What these links are and are not
Worth being accurate, because overselling this tactic is how it gets dismissed.
They are not editorial links. A directory listing carries less weight than a contextual mention in a trade publication, and it will not close a competitive gap on its own.
They are relevant, durable and free. An integration directory on a partner's domain is topically adjacent, unlikely to be pruned, and costs nothing. Attrition on these is very low compared with bought placements.
Some are no-follow. Many partner directories no-follow by policy. The referral traffic and the partnership visibility are unaffected, and a healthy profile contains no-follow links anyway.
The correct framing: this will not win you the category term. It will get you twenty to fifty domains for the cost of two weeks of email, which recalibrates your gap before you spend anything on acquisition — and occasionally reveals that the gap was smaller than the proposal assumed.
Keeping it running
The one-off sweep is the bulk of the value. Three habits keep it from decaying:
- Add it to the partnership onboarding checklist. Every new integration should trigger a directory listing request as standard.
- Sweep annually. Partners redesign sites and lose links; associations restructure member pages.
- Ask customers who publish case studies whether they will link. Most will and nobody asks.
Where to start
Open your own integrations page. Count the partners. Check how many of those partners list you back with a working link.
In our audits the answer is usually under a third — and that number is the tactic, sitting there, requiring nothing but somebody deciding to own it.