Engaging with marketing teams is important is today’s multi-faceted business world – but it’s not variable anchor text or IP addresses they’re interested in – it’s marketing insights that they’re after.
And they’ll probably be surprised by the powerful marketing insights into competitor strategy that Majestic can provide. Insights such as:
What motivates other sites to spread a competitor’s message?
What content marketing is working for competitors?
What market niches do competitors serve?
What business relationships do competitors build with others?
I dipped into Majestic to uncover a few examples that might inspire you to do the same sort of searches in your industry. (There’s also a short video at the end – “What you can learn from a link?”).
For example, I found out that:
Tahiti.com shares valuable worldwide travel resources with its site visitors
REI.com, the outdoor clothing company puts great store in educating people about power plugs
SouthWest Airlines takes a substantial interest in Museums, the Arts and Society
The Dogfish Brewery is proud to share family values with retailer, Woolrich.com.
I find these sort of discoveries great for brainstorming marketing ideas.
My starting point is scanning the backlinks in Site Explorer – I like to spend some time just browsing results, not looking for link prospects right away but looking for interesting or unusual stuff that catches my attention.
I’ll always look at two things in tandem – the page on which a link sits and the page to which it points. I want to figure why links are given and understand why the content they point to was created.
This diagram shows the approach:
What motivates other sites to spread a competitor’s message?
REI.com sell outdoor clothing so I wanted to know why they were relevant to “preparing to travel” and what they had to do with “world electricity”. So let’s have a look at the page on which the link sits:
The page is about preparing to travel to Tahiti and tells visitors they may need a converter for certain electrical devices. They link to a ‘World Electricity Guide’ published on this page:
Marketing insight: Tahiti.com featured REI’s guide because it answered a practical problem. It’s unlikely that REI actively sought this link – such links are a major bonus of creating valuable content.
What content marketing is working for competitors?
So REI.com think it’s worthwhile to publish this type of guide. A good question to ask is how many other domains point to this resource? Using the Majestic browser plugin, I can see without leaving the page that there are 382 backlinks from 86 referring domains:
Marketing insight: Customer-focused material can be great for promotion. REI’s guide was useful to their customers – who naturally do a lot of travelling. But the guide was also a powerful link magnet attracting links from over 80 external domains.
Let’s look at a couple of quick examples.
What market niches do competitors serve?
The ‘Topics’ tab on Site Explorer gives me a picture of the different types of sites that link to any domain – and that can often throw up surprises. In this case, I’ve looked at Southwest.com and can see that more than half of the first topics are Arts and Society related – not dominated by travel as I had expected:
Clicking on the ‘External Backlinks’ column, I can see the first 10 links for that particular category. Then I can visit the site and see the reason for the link – in this case it’s a museum sponsored by Southwest:
Marketing insight: Topical Trust Flow gives a unique picture of the type of sites that make up an audience. This often has surprises – not only in who is interested in your competitors, but who is interested in your client.
What business relationships do competitors build with others?
And finally, while browsing another outdoor clothing company, I came across the link from the craft brewery, Dogfish:
This link again is not what I expected to find. But looking at the page shows why the link was given:
Dogfish and Woolrich came together because they shared certain family values and saw an opportunity to collaborate on a special beer – and a pretty neat video!
Marketing insight: Business relationships are easily uncovered using Majestic because partnerships nearly always leave a footprint. Link analysis should be an important part of competitive market intelligence.
So link analysis can uncover material that is highly relevant to understanding markets and competitor’s marketing strategies. Next time you’re talking to a client’s marketing team, you might want to explore this approach.
And if you’ve gained any marketing insights from link analysis with your clients, please share them below.
This post is adapted from one on the examples in video 7 of our 12-part free online video course, “What you can learn from a link?”.
Here’s the full video:
And if you’d like to see more examples like this, you can sign up for our free video course, ‘Get Up to Speed with Majestic’.
4 Powerful marketing insights from link analysis
Engaging with marketing teams is important is today’s multi-faceted business world – but it’s not variable anchor text or IP addresses they’re interested in – it’s marketing insights that they’re after.
And they’ll probably be surprised by the powerful marketing insights into competitor strategy that Majestic can provide. Insights such as:
I dipped into Majestic to uncover a few examples that might inspire you to do the same sort of searches in your industry. (There’s also a short video at the end – “What you can learn from a link?”).
For example, I found out that:
I find these sort of discoveries great for brainstorming marketing ideas.
My starting point is scanning the backlinks in Site Explorer – I like to spend some time just browsing results, not looking for link prospects right away but looking for interesting or unusual stuff that catches my attention.
I’ll always look at two things in tandem – the page on which a link sits and the page to which it points. I want to figure why links are given and understand why the content they point to was created.
This diagram shows the approach:
What motivates other sites to spread a competitor’s message?
REI.com sell outdoor clothing so I wanted to know why they were relevant to “preparing to travel” and what they had to do with “world electricity”. So let’s have a look at the page on which the link sits:
The page is about preparing to travel to Tahiti and tells visitors they may need a converter for certain electrical devices. They link to a ‘World Electricity Guide’ published on this page:
Marketing insight: Tahiti.com featured REI’s guide because it answered a practical problem. It’s unlikely that REI actively sought this link – such links are a major bonus of creating valuable content.
What content marketing is working for competitors?
So REI.com think it’s worthwhile to publish this type of guide. A good question to ask is how many other domains point to this resource? Using the Majestic browser plugin, I can see without leaving the page that there are 382 backlinks from 86 referring domains:
Marketing insight: Customer-focused material can be great for promotion. REI’s guide was useful to their customers – who naturally do a lot of travelling. But the guide was also a powerful link magnet attracting links from over 80 external domains.
Let’s look at a couple of quick examples.
What market niches do competitors serve?
The ‘Topics’ tab on Site Explorer gives me a picture of the different types of sites that link to any domain – and that can often throw up surprises. In this case, I’ve looked at Southwest.com and can see that more than half of the first topics are Arts and Society related – not dominated by travel as I had expected:
Clicking on the ‘External Backlinks’ column, I can see the first 10 links for that particular category. Then I can visit the site and see the reason for the link – in this case it’s a museum sponsored by Southwest:
Marketing insight: Topical Trust Flow gives a unique picture of the type of sites that make up an audience. This often has surprises – not only in who is interested in your competitors, but who is interested in your client.
What business relationships do competitors build with others?
And finally, while browsing another outdoor clothing company, I came across the link from the craft brewery, Dogfish:
This link again is not what I expected to find. But looking at the page shows why the link was given:
Dogfish and Woolrich came together because they shared certain family values and saw an opportunity to collaborate on a special beer – and a pretty neat video!
Marketing insight: Business relationships are easily uncovered using Majestic because partnerships nearly always leave a footprint. Link analysis should be an important part of competitive market intelligence.
So link analysis can uncover material that is highly relevant to understanding markets and competitor’s marketing strategies. Next time you’re talking to a client’s marketing team, you might want to explore this approach.
And if you’ve gained any marketing insights from link analysis with your clients, please share them below.
This post is adapted from one on the examples in video 7 of our 12-part free online video course, “What you can learn from a link?”.
Here’s the full video:
And if you’d like to see more examples like this, you can sign up for our free video course, ‘Get Up to Speed with Majestic’.
Posted In: Commentary, Training