Majestic is a great source for doing all types of SEO research. Everything from competitor analysis, uncovering spam backlinks, inspecting anchor text and so much more. Another great use for Majestic is finding valuable linking opportunities.
There are a couple reasons why Majestic’s index is such a powerful tool for finding linking opportunities. One is the fact that Majestic’s index is huge! When analyzing a competitor’s backlinks, Majestic is going to give you a much more clear picture of their backlink profile than Moz for example. Majestic claims on their homepage that they are “the planet’s largest link index database”. Although, I’m assuming that doesn’t include Google’s index?
A bigger index means you get a much more clear picture of a website’s entire backlink profile. That’s going to come into play when I talk about a particular strategy later. But in a nutshell, you need to see where your competition is linking from to see what is valuable to Google.
The second reason that Majestic is so valuable when analyzing links is that their Trust Flow metric is incredibly accurate as a method of determining the power of a link.
90 Digital did a great article about the fact that the trust flow of a website is highly correlated to the amount of organic traffic the website gets. They state that “when you improve the Trust Flow of your website, you are likely to increase your traffic exponentially.”
Web sites that are likely to rank are also likely to pass more power through a link. That means that if TF is a great predictor of a website’s ability to rank it’s also a great predictor of a website’s ability to pass power. Of course, SEO is all about speculating on results based on the data we have available. Accurate data and strong indicators allow us to make much more accurate predictions about the outcome of our work.
So we know that Majestic has the biggest index of links on top of the most accurate single indicator of link power. So what? How do we use that to get our clients on the first page? Doing SEO is kind of like playing poker with Google. But we have the advantage because we can see Google’s hand. Using Majestic is like looking at Google’s hand.
Let’s use an example:
Let’s say that our client Joe Plumber wants to rank on the first page for the term “Seattle Plumbers”. The first thing we’re going to do is take a look at the serp for that search term and see who pops up. We might see that our client isn’t there. In fact, he’s nowhere to be found for pages! If we determine his page is well optimized for that keyword, then we can assume we are dealing with a power problem. Our client’s site just doesn’t have enough power coming in to compete for the first page.
At that point, we would need to determine the power of the website’s currently ranking on the first page. Beacon Plumbing is ranking number one in organic for that SERP. Inputting Beacon Plumbing into Majestic gives us a bunch of data. The most important thing to realize about this data is that Google is literally telling us that this is what they want to see to have a number one ranking for this particular SERP. We are looking at their poker hand! We can see the kind of anchors they want. We can see the number of referring domains they want. And for the purpose of this article, we can see the type of links they want.
Using this data, we can create a linking model for our client that we know going to create results! We can even duplicate the most powerful links Majestic shows us by potentially reaching out and engaging those same websites to receive similar links. Whatever link building budget we may have to engage with these sites through sponsorship or other means we can be sure will generate a return on investment.
Beacon Plumbing gives our client a great linking model that has already achieved great results for one company. In fact just analyzing that one site we have a list 231 referring domains we can engage with. But we can take this even a step further with another Majestic tool. It’s called Clique Hunter.
Clique Hunter can give us an even greater level of clarity when determining what links generating first page rankings. It does this by finding commonalities in backlink profiles between multiple websites. By analyzing the backlink profile of the top ranked website we can get a pretty excellent idea of what Google finds valuable. If we can determine that multiple sites on the first page share the same link we can assume with greater accuracy that that link is very valuable to our link building efforts.
By analyzing in Clique Hunter, the top 5 ranked plumbers in Seattle I was able to uncover 137 referring domains that one or more of these websites share links from. If I take the time to analyze this data I can generate a model that I can say with great certainty would generate first page rankings for my client. After that, it’s just a matter of duplicating the links for my client or creating similar links.
There are so many great ways of building power to a website, but why not start with what is proving to be already generating rankings for our target SERP? Why guess that a bunch of citations is going to generate results? Why assume that more content is going to generate results? Google is literally showing us their hand when you use a tool like Majestic and that makes a great place to start when modeling a link building campaign.