Unlocking SEO Insights with Majestic

Ross says: Hi, I'm Ross Tavendale, and I'm the managing director at Type A Media.

Ross, why do you use Majestic?

"I use it for a lot of reasons, mostly because the data that you get from Majestic is perhaps the best in the industry, and it's also the cleanest in the industry. So the way in which you're able to ingest it through their API or through like even something as simple as a Google Sheets plugin . It's really well structured, and it just allows you to integrate it with all of your workflow in all of your processes, and it's very low headache. And if you're an agency person out there, you know the number one problem in an agency is the constant roller coasters and headache. So I really love something that can easily integrate into my workflow."

So when you say data is best in the industry, what data specifically are you referring to, and how do you measure it its value?

"So the obvious thing to say there would be talking about their index is just larger, but that's kind of stopped being a problem nowadays. The real thing is the quality and the depth of information. So if we were to look at, for example, backlinks , that's what everyone kind of associates the brand with. It's far, far more than just backlink data, all of the additional things that they're able to pull in inference from how everything is interconnected, is really why, I think Majestic is the kind of they have a Fresh Index and a Historic Index, and they're very, very good at giving you more relevant information. And I think that's just because they've been around for so long, and also they power a bunch of other industry tools that not a lot of people know about. So I just like going straight to source."

So as an agency, what do you want to achieve by using Majestic?

"So really, as an agency, the thing that we want to achieve is we want to be able to get at the data that we care about, so that we can make good decisions for our clients, and we can also build things that help us, like, reduce the kind of operational drag in our company. So obviously, backlinks is a really big thing, and the aggregate view of backlinks is even bigger.

So when it comes to making, like, important decisions for clients around their strategy, so a big part of what we do is digital PR as well. So actually, like being able to use it to look and see what competitors are doing at a glance, very, very important, and also the way in which they aggregate information and some of their kind of proprietary metrics, like Trust Flow and Citation Flow, those are very important to us in the kind of things that we make in the agency."

Okay, so you've mentioned a couple of metrics there, and also why you actually use it and how you go about using it by looking at how your competitors are doing as well. So how do you go about selecting your competitors? I mean, I assume that's not within Majestic, but it would be interesting to just get a touch on that, a flavor of that. And then, when you're analyzing your competitors, what do you specifically look at and what actions do you take to try to improve your performance against them?

"Yeah. So when we're dealing with clients, what we usually find is you've got SERP competitors and actual competitors, and those are different domains. So the client will come to you and say, here are the five people that we're competing against, but then you will look at keyword crossover and their SERPs. And that's not always the case. So the way in which we would usually find SERP competitors is just through normal kind of keyword research processes. We use third party APIs to do that and build our own kind of process to see where all of the overlap is in terms of how we'd find that kind of direct competitors. But you just have a questionnaire for the client and they produce and what they believe to be their competitors. Can you repeat the last part of the question, please?"

Yeah, sure. It's just in terms of deciding how to go about using the information that you obtain in Majestic So specifically, what metrics do you look at when you're looking at your competitors? And how do you action that, how do you take the findings within Majestic and use that to actually improve your own performance as a brand online?

"Well, let me give you like a perfect scenario for this. So Majestic is a really big thing for our sales process, so once we found SERP competitors and their actual direct competitors. What we're able to do is take all of their competitor data at scale, so literally, download every single backlink they've got with Topical Trust Flow and Citation Flow. So not a lot of people know about this, but they actually cluster groups of links together and give them a topic. So a lot of people would maybe use some other third party, like Top Level Domain type metric to understand how well a site is doing, but that's not really that useful, because it doesn't tell me anything about the topics that they're doing well for offline.

So when we're doing our sales process, we actually pull in the top 50 competitors that are in that particular niche, and then, because Majestic's got this amazing API, we can actually ping it out, and it'll bring in all the top level Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics, and we can plot it on a kind of dot graph, and we can compare the two, so we can very quickly reverse engineer someone's backlink strategy. So if they're a very high Trust Flow, very low Citation Flow domain, we can see that, huh, they've maybe got a couple of press mentions, but they're not super popular. What usually happens is we see really high Citation Flow, terrible Trust Flow. Oh, they've maybe done some blogger outreach. There may be mentioning some forums or something like that, but no mainstream press at all. But then seeing that over the entire industry is really powerful, because you can really quickly see, oh, here's how difficult this is going to actually be.

Then you can layer on top of it, Topical Trust Flow. So not only will it tell us the types of links we to be getting and the places need to be going, but it's also going to tell us the topic. So when it comes to actually developing a digital PR strategy in order to get them these links and to help them beat their competitors, it's all there, and it's all backed with data, and it's literally you can reverse engineer an entire industry really quickly."

Do you have any other favorite feature that you haven't mentioned?

"Yeah, so I mean, kind of old school. So they have something called the Clique Hunter , which kind of looks at the neighborhood that links are in and how they can overlap with one another. That's a very telling story. So we're able to look at that and see that pretty quickly. They also have a bunch of visualizations that are really slept on, and not a lot of people talk about one of the other things that I particularly like is the position of the link on the page.

A lot of people don't really think that's that big of a deal, because we're all chasing these kind of top level metrics. So there's, there's a lot there. I don't know if you could call the API a feature. I suppose you can. I could. I can't stress enough how good that is, because it's so clean and it's so structured that when you use APIs, usually there's usually a whole cleaning thing. And depending on how it's coming into you, it's really hard to warehouse it like it's a whole pain. But they don't have that.

And also, if you're thinking, Oh, well, my team aren't technical, they can't hit API requests and get it in, they'll get a Google Sheets plugin that does a lot of this for you. So you can literally pull, like, you know, 100,000 links onto a sheet, literally just by putting together a little query string on a Google Sheets thing. And you don't need to be technical. So I would actually say their Google Sheets plugin is actually one of those, like lesser known kind of killer features."

Are there any specific industries that you work on behalf of through your agency that are particularly relevant to using the data within Majestic other industries that you favor that Majestic is really useful for, or is it just the type of platform that's suitable for any type of website that you look at, look after through your agency?

"It's pretty general purpose, I would say, anything where perhaps not industry, but where scale is a real thing, or if you've built a bunch of tools, where you need link data to pull in to start understanding things a bit better. So like large e com, works incredibly well. The reason is because usually all of the link data, firstly, there's lots of it, but it's really hard to work out if the links you're getting to category pages on your e-commerce website are topically relevant to the category, because when you're doing outreach, you're getting things in the news and stuff like that. A lot of other tools will just say 'Oh, this is News'. Say, well, I know it's a news site, but the content isn't about news necessarily. And Majestic kind of gives you that kind of exposes that information to you.

If I was to zone in on a particular industry, B2B SaaS is the killer tool for that. Because if you think about most B2B SaaS, they're producing their product, and they're doing this great product marketing, putting all this great information in there. But the biggest differentiator for them getting traffic onto their website is usually press coverage and media coverage. And there's been a million B2B SaaS businesses that have come before you. So being able to reverse engineer those strategies, and there's like, almost like a playbook that you can see all these companies going through. So just being able to, like, nail that within the first like 90 days of working with someone, usually it would take, you know, the first three months is usually auditing and finding all this stuff out.

But when you get the right system set up with the Majestic data coming in, you can do it week one and just get to work so big e-com and scale the enterprise sites really will benefit from the data outside of that B2B SaaS."

Brilliant. So if an SEO consultant moves to a new agency, and for some reason the new agency isn't using Majestic and how should that SEO consultant go about talking to their manager, their line manager, talking to stakeholders within the agency to sell them on the fact that that agency really does need to be using Majestic?

"I think with everything you have to come up with a business case, and agencies are very price sensitive and money orientated, so your manager, or the person in charge of buying tools and software and integrations, they will have a budget, and they will, most agencies run to a 50% gross margin in 20 to 30% 20 to 30% net margin. So just keep that in mind when you're going to talk to them, because that might be one of the hooks you're going to use in order to get Majestic into your business.

So firstly, the unit cost of their API versus all competitors is by far the best value by a country mile. Secondly, this is maybe something that might ring true to a bunch of people who've been in industry for a while. Their business practices are very sound. And what I mean by that, I've been using them for 12 years now, which is a bit embarrassing, because that's quite a long time.

And the reason I say that is because every other SEO, SaaS tool that I've used always kind of want to rip your throat out with pricing. There's always price increases every single year, despite loads of loyalty. And if you ever need anything like, Oh, can I have another user seat or anything like that, the answer is always yes, but it's going to cost you an arm and a leg. Majestic are absolutely not like that. They're just very accommodating, like they kept me grandfathered in for ages, and I'm on the normal plan, no, but even that is like considerably better value than anyone else in the in the industry. And they're just really relaxed and very sound.

We've also never had a billing issue before, they're very proactive, and they reach out to me like, yeah, I've just had a very good business experience with them, which, in the world of venture backed, you know, business tools, you're usually just a number, and I can genuinely say that's not the case with Majestic at all. They've always been, you know, from when I was like completely unknown and not spending any money with them, to now, when we're spending a little bit more on our subscriptions, I've had this exact same treatment, which is refreshing."

Thanks so much for coming on. Ross, much appreciated. If you have any final thoughts, feel free to share them. Otherwise, please remind the listener where they can find you. What's, what's the website address that they need to go to to visit you?

"Yeah, absolutely. I would say my final thoughts are, we're obviously in this world where technology is rapidly changing and AI is obviously everywhere, and I'm sorry I had to bring it up, but it's it's such a big deal. So therefore, rolling your own software and having good, clean data sources is becoming more and more important, because it's never been easier to build your own little internal tools and things to solve problems.

So having a good data provider, especially for something as important as backlinks, I would really encourage you to think about Majestic when you're doing that. If you'd like any more from me, our web address is a.agency, which 301, redirects to typeamedia.net and if anyone's ever thinking of buying a TLD .agency, do not do it is a massive pain. So if you want to hear any more from me, I'm at rtavs on Twitter, or you can go to our company site, typeamedia.net."

Ross Tavendale is Managing Director at Type A Media and you can find him over at Type A Media.