Estimating what Trust Flow you need in a vertical

There’s this one particular question that I hear almost every day: “What Trust Flow for a website like mine?”. Well, this question hasn’t been taken completely from outer space; so let’s investigate this further using space related websites!

Trust Flow

Trust Flow is a metric developed and owned by Majestic to help you evaluate whether the website or URL has a good backlink profile. Based on all the backlinks which point to a specific URL, as well as algorithmic calculations, Majestic scores the page with a number between 0 and 100. Websites achieving 20 in Trust Flow start getting a significant amount of backlinks; but should that rule be applied across all websites, countries and industries? The answer is NO.

Trust Flow scores in your industry

Each business operates in a different type of industry. The word ‘Technology’ is very general because we can divide it into Software Technology, Mobile Technology, Digital Technology, Car Technology, Airspace Technology and so on. The same applies to Health, Finances, Recreation and Fashion. That’s why in order to find the average score of Trust Flow for a website like yours; it is first necessary to investigate and specify your local market and its key competitors.

Here’s the quickest way to do it using Majestic:

1. Specify your local market

What exactly is your website about? Do you provide tax advice for the local population or are you running a global finance advice company? I know we all aim for the highest targets, but you need to ask yourself these questions first.

If you live in small town in Alabama, is the company in New York City really your competitor just because they also offer plumbing services? Or maybe it is a company 20 miles down the road? Simply map the area of your business wherever it is graphically (20 miles radiant) or online (blogs about decorating cakes written only in Spanish); and create your own list. The more websites you use – the better; but they need to be closely related with your business or industry. Relevancy here is key!

2. Generate a list of your key competitors

Now simply create a list of your competitors (or websites you wish to analyse). For the purpose of this article, I am going to use space-related websites written in English. Here’s my top 10 list:

• virgingalactic.com
• space.com
• spaceadventures.com
• nasa.gov
• space-travel.com
• spacefoundation.org
• space-facts.com
• spacedaily.com
• news.discovery.com/space

3. Upload your competitors into Bulk Backlink Checker

The next step is to upload your list to Bulk Backlink Checker. You can either copy and paste up to 150 URLs or upload a file up to 400,000 URLs.

Please remember to click on Trust Flow in ‘Sort results by’ menu! Once this is done, simply click on Check backlinks counts button to view the results.

4. Analyse the results

If you did everything right, your results in Bulk Backlink Checker should look like this:

Bulk Backlink Checker would not only show you the scores of Trust Flow for all these websites, you would also see our Topical Trust Flow information. This means that you would be able to further investigate how much you and your competitors have in common, in regards to your backlinks profile. Maybe you are covering the niche that no one else has taken care of? Maybe somebody, who you perceived as your close competitor, has changed their strategy and started expanding into new markets? The answers are all here, just analyse it carefully!

5. Calculate the average score of Trust Flow

In order to download the data, click the Download Data button and choose the type of file you want to use: Excel, CSV or TSV, and save this on your computer.

Then all you have to do is to open the file and search for the column Trust Flow:

Simply drag the cursor across all the numbers in column and check the average number which appears in the bottom right corner of your document:

This number (53) represents the average number of Trust Flow across all these websites. If you apply this to your market/industry/key competitors, you would be able to check how the Trust Flow of your website compares with it.

Is that my desired Trust Flow?

In short, yes. But it would be even better if the Trust Flow of your website could exceed the Trust Flow of your competitors, putting you in the favourable position of having a superior backlink profile.

What if your Trust Flow is much lower? At least now you know that you have something to work on and what your goal is! Maybe you can start analysing key players more intensively, listing the outlets, analysing where they get ‘those good backlinks’ from. Maybe it’s the partnership they have? On our blog, we have written a number of articles on how to improve the Trust Flow of your website and how to analyse your competitors.

What are you waiting for? Calculate the average Trust Flow for your industry now!

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