What link intelligence means for Global Entrepreneurship Week 2015
Global Entrepreneurship Week runs from 16-22 November. Majestic wanted to take an opportunity to explore the role link intelligence can play in supporting business growth and innovation.
Of course, link intelligence is important in SEO, but there are many other ways that insights from Majestic’s database can be helpful to business. These include:
1. See how well-established you and your competitors are in your online marketplace
2. Discover the most influential media in your market
3. Find the top 10 niches within your market
4. Discover the most popular content in your market
5. Identify the strategies your most successful competitors employ
6. Uncover business relationships within your market
7. Track new initiatives automatically.
You’ll find these entrepreneurial insights useful if you’re in business yourself or have clients who are:
established entrepreneurs
start-ups
traditional businesses expanding online.
Majestic has published a short whitepaper in PDF format that you can download and share with your clients. But for now, let’s look at each in turn:
1. See how well-established you and your competitors are in your online marketplace
The more quality sites that link to you, the more established you are in your marketplace. So the number of ‘referring domains’ gives you a quick and simple way to rank your competitors – and see how you compare against them.
In this screenshot, we’ve used the Bulk Backlinks Tool to rank nine leading outdoor clothing sites in descending order of referring domains:
Figure 1: Nine outdoor clothing companies ranked in the Bulk Backlinks tool.
As you can see there’s a huge difference between REI.com with over 37,000 referring domains and Altrec.com with just over 4,400.
This data indicates the size of the task you face in establishing yourself in the market. Can you realistically hope to displace REI.com from top spot? Or should your initial strategy focus on displacing Altrec.com?
2. Discover the most influential media in your market
Circulation figures, particularly for niche media are notoriously difficult to verify so how do you decide to spend your marketing budget effectively?
Add in the plethora of blogs and social media influencers for which there is little reliable data and it can be hard to justify your allocation of budget.
However, link data gives an objective and accurate measure of how influential any media really is in the marketplace. You no longer have to fly blind.
Here’s an example for the food industry. Suppose you came across a list of 100 food blogs, you can immediately see which are the most influential using the Bulk Backlinks Tool:
Figure 2: A list of 100 top blogs in food industry ranked by referring domains.
This allows you to focus your budgets on sites where you can expect maximum return.
3. Find the top 10 niches within your market
Niche marketing is more important than ever and the Bulk Backlinks tool gives you an immediate view of the top 10 ‘topics’ or niches in your market, together with a metric for how influential each of your competitors are in each of the top niches.
You have an immediate view of how strong each competitor is in each niche:
Figure 3: ‘Topical Trust Topics’ shows the top 10 niches in your market and gives the strength of each competitor in each niche.
In the Site Explorer tool, you can dig deep into these niches to look for specific opportunities using the ‘topics’ tab and filter features, as we show here using Ryanair.com as an example:
Figure 4: The ‘Topics’ in Site Explorer shows the variety of niches that link to Ryanair.com.
4. Identify the strategies your most successful competitors employ
Majestic lets you seen the exact page on which any link sits and the exact page to which the link leads – together with a wealth of information on the nature of the link:
Figure 5: The anatomy of a link
So by clinking on the URL in Figure 5, you see the link to REI.com in situation. In this case, it’s an article on GearPatrol.com entitled, ‘Two Ways to Build a Campfire’:
Figure 6: By clicking on the link, you see the page on which the link sits and can deduce how it got there…
In this case, an instructor from REI’s Outdoor School was quoted.
And you can also see the page to which the link on GearPatrol.com points:
Figure 7: The Classes, Outings and Events REI.com provide bring them many links.
Now we can see that one of REI’s strategies is to provide extensive and attractive training course and events in a wide range of sporting activities.
By exploring and reviewing the links you find in Majestic, you see the results of your competitor’s promotional strategies – and understand what they’re doing.
You then have a foundation on which to build your own promotional strategies in order to overtake them.
5. Discover the most popular content in your market
Knowing your own most popular content means you can build on your success and develop more of the same.
Knowing your competitor’s most popular content means that you can understand how they get their links and build a strategy to overtake them.
In the ‘Pages’ tab in the Site Explorer Tool, you’ll find the pages (i.e. content) that attract the most links. In this screenshot we can see the ‘common threads’ initiative from Patagonia.com together with a screenshot of the page that attracts the link.
Figure 8: The most popular content pages on Patagonia.com
Majestic shows you the media coverage, links and social shares that the most popular content in your market attracts and quantifies it. This provides wonderful insight for your content marketing efforts.
6. Uncover business relationships within your market
In his book, ‘Brandscaping’, Andrew M. Davis explains how partnerships are crucial to business success today – and that those partnerships can come in surprising ways.
But how do you find the multiple relationships your competitors have built up?
The answer is that partnerships can be revealed using link data – and further analysis reveals the strategies behind those partnerships.
For example, would you have expected that outdoor clothing company, Woolrich.com has a partnership with craft brewer, Dogfish? But by scanning Majestic results, you can see that such a partnership does exist:
Figure 9: Screen shot showing relationship between Dogfish and Woolrich Outdoor Clothing
Link analysis shows you what your competitors are doing and identifies opportunities you may not have realised.
7. Track new initiatives automatically
Majestic’s tracking reports allow you to automatically monitor the activity of multiple competitors.
Figure 10: Screenshot of tracking report results.
At Majestic, we’ve come to realize that the value of our tools goes way beyond SEO and now touches every aspect of digital marketing strategy. Link intelligence helps businesses be more competitive online – no matter what industry they’re in.
The ideas expressed in this report are further developed and explained in our free 12-part video course, ‘Getting up to speed with Majestic’.
Because our proprietary data is so extensive, Enterprise customers can use our API to dig in and extract custom data that is uniquely useful to them. To find out more, contact support@Majestic.com.
What link intelligence means for Global Entrepreneurship Week 2015
Global Entrepreneurship Week runs from 16-22 November. Majestic wanted to take an opportunity to explore the role link intelligence can play in supporting business growth and innovation.
Of course, link intelligence is important in SEO, but there are many other ways that insights from Majestic’s database can be helpful to business. These include:
1. See how well-established you and your competitors are in your online marketplace
2. Discover the most influential media in your market
3. Find the top 10 niches within your market
4. Discover the most popular content in your market
5. Identify the strategies your most successful competitors employ
6. Uncover business relationships within your market
7. Track new initiatives automatically.
You’ll find these entrepreneurial insights useful if you’re in business yourself or have clients who are:
Majestic has published a short whitepaper in PDF format that you can download and share with your clients. But for now, let’s look at each in turn:
1. See how well-established you and your competitors are in your online marketplace
The more quality sites that link to you, the more established you are in your marketplace. So the number of ‘referring domains’ gives you a quick and simple way to rank your competitors – and see how you compare against them.
In this screenshot, we’ve used the Bulk Backlinks Tool to rank nine leading outdoor clothing sites in descending order of referring domains:
As you can see there’s a huge difference between REI.com with over 37,000 referring domains and Altrec.com with just over 4,400.
This data indicates the size of the task you face in establishing yourself in the market. Can you realistically hope to displace REI.com from top spot? Or should your initial strategy focus on displacing Altrec.com?
2. Discover the most influential media in your market
Circulation figures, particularly for niche media are notoriously difficult to verify so how do you decide to spend your marketing budget effectively?
Add in the plethora of blogs and social media influencers for which there is little reliable data and it can be hard to justify your allocation of budget.
However, link data gives an objective and accurate measure of how influential any media really is in the marketplace. You no longer have to fly blind.
Here’s an example for the food industry. Suppose you came across a list of 100 food blogs, you can immediately see which are the most influential using the Bulk Backlinks Tool:
This allows you to focus your budgets on sites where you can expect maximum return.
3. Find the top 10 niches within your market
Niche marketing is more important than ever and the Bulk Backlinks tool gives you an immediate view of the top 10 ‘topics’ or niches in your market, together with a metric for how influential each of your competitors are in each of the top niches.
You have an immediate view of how strong each competitor is in each niche:
In the Site Explorer tool, you can dig deep into these niches to look for specific opportunities using the ‘topics’ tab and filter features, as we show here using Ryanair.com as an example:
4. Identify the strategies your most successful competitors employ
Majestic lets you seen the exact page on which any link sits and the exact page to which the link leads – together with a wealth of information on the nature of the link:
So by clinking on the URL in Figure 5, you see the link to REI.com in situation. In this case, it’s an article on GearPatrol.com entitled, ‘Two Ways to Build a Campfire’:
In this case, an instructor from REI’s Outdoor School was quoted.
And you can also see the page to which the link on GearPatrol.com points:
Now we can see that one of REI’s strategies is to provide extensive and attractive training course and events in a wide range of sporting activities.
By exploring and reviewing the links you find in Majestic, you see the results of your competitor’s promotional strategies – and understand what they’re doing.
You then have a foundation on which to build your own promotional strategies in order to overtake them.
5. Discover the most popular content in your market
Knowing your own most popular content means you can build on your success and develop more of the same.
Knowing your competitor’s most popular content means that you can understand how they get their links and build a strategy to overtake them.
In the ‘Pages’ tab in the Site Explorer Tool, you’ll find the pages (i.e. content) that attract the most links. In this screenshot we can see the ‘common threads’ initiative from Patagonia.com together with a screenshot of the page that attracts the link.
Majestic shows you the media coverage, links and social shares that the most popular content in your market attracts and quantifies it. This provides wonderful insight for your content marketing efforts.
6. Uncover business relationships within your market
In his book, ‘Brandscaping’, Andrew M. Davis explains how partnerships are crucial to business success today – and that those partnerships can come in surprising ways.
But how do you find the multiple relationships your competitors have built up?
The answer is that partnerships can be revealed using link data – and further analysis reveals the strategies behind those partnerships.
For example, would you have expected that outdoor clothing company, Woolrich.com has a partnership with craft brewer, Dogfish? But by scanning Majestic results, you can see that such a partnership does exist:
Link analysis shows you what your competitors are doing and identifies opportunities you may not have realised.
7. Track new initiatives automatically
Majestic’s tracking reports allow you to automatically monitor the activity of multiple competitors.
At Majestic, we’ve come to realize that the value of our tools goes way beyond SEO and now touches every aspect of digital marketing strategy. Link intelligence helps businesses be more competitive online – no matter what industry they’re in.
The ideas expressed in this report are further developed and explained in our free 12-part video course, ‘Getting up to speed with Majestic’.
Because our proprietary data is so extensive, Enterprise customers can use our API to dig in and extract custom data that is uniquely useful to them. To find out more, contact support@Majestic.com.
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