To succeed in your link building efforts, you want to develop a system whereby your website will acquire links naturally. By using tools like Majestic, you are taking away much of the guesswork so you can successfully acquire links. Majestic has always been one of the main tools that I’ve used in my ‘link building tool suite’ to source and acquire natural links. Whether you are new to SEO or a veteran, Majestic allows SEOs to source and leverage data that will improve our own and client’s SEO performance. Below are 8 ways I use Majestic to find and acquire natural links that will boost the SEO competitiveness of the sites that I work on.
Competitor benchmarking
Use the insight from competitors in your field to get data on links that is powering their site’s ranking success. I would normally do research on at least 10 leading domains for a keyword to find their link data using both the historic and fresh index. From there, I’d generate a prospect list based on the top sites that are linking to their content. I would find out which content allows them to acquire links successfully and replicate a similar tactic in order to acquire links.
Monitoring the growth of your link portfolio.
The portfolio mix of your links is just as important as the individual links that you acquire. Matt Cutts said it best that the links that you acquire should be natural, not just look natural. This means website owners should engage in link building activities that earn them natural links. The major issue the SEO industry is facing at the moment is that most people are too reliant on one form of link earning. The major being guest blog posting. The thing is, there are so many other forms of links that many websites can acquire that will amplify their organic search performance. An example of the desired portfolio mix includes:
- Edu links
- Blog links
- Government links
- Link mentions
- Reference links
- Recommendation links
- Organic growth
- Natural portfolio
- Natural anchor text
You can use Majestic to develop a wide range of prospects to improve the link mix of your website. Use the data from Majestic to actually see which sites are linking to content that you can provide in your industry. You can easily do this by comparing other relevant or competitor websites to identify more prospect opportunities. Guest blog posting, Forums and directory link building are some of the more scalable ways to gain links, however you can also acquire links from conducting interviews, participating in memberships and contributing valuable content to your relevant web audience. To learn more, you can check the following resource.
Resource: 60 ways to build natural links to your website.
Gain relevant links by leveraging “Clique hunter” to identify industry hubs
Clique hunter is an interesting tool within the Majestic suite that you can use to identify industry hubs that are linking to relevant and leading websites in your organic search space. You want to leverage Clique Hunter as a qualifying tool for your link prospect.
Select a keyword or phrase that you will be targeting and place the search query into Google. For example, look at the keyword ‘Buy SEO’ and you take the first five results, you will have domains that you can input into Clique Hunter.
After running the tool, the results should provide you with a portfolio of domains that you can then export into a CSV file. The CSV file will provide you with data, which you can use to qualify the sites by external links to relevant sites and their authority.
I prefer to review my list of sites by Domain and Page Authority. Other SEOs use Page Rank as a filter as well due to the ease of review. You can also see this resource written by one of the members from the Majestic team below.
Resource: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2346122/hub-link-building-with-majestic-seo
*Please note that the resource is from 2014 and the PageRank filter that is mentioned may not be as relevant since Google stopped updating Page Rank.
Reclaim mentions
Many people rave about reclaiming mentions by using tools such as BuzzSumo, however you can also identify mentions by using Majestic. You can sort your data by FlagMention. This will show you where your website has been mentioned across the web. You can reach out to web editors in a bid to gain a live text link through to your website. Be sure to conduct reports using the fresh and historical data.
Reclaim lost links
Sometimes your links will be removed without your knowledge. This can lead to fluctuations or demotions in your organic rankings. Sometimes these lost links are accidental with the web page or website being moved, or certain areas of the website are deleted. With Majestic’s tool, you can keep an eye on any links that have been removed and reclaim them promptly before any damage to your organic search rankings occurs.
You can sort the report by FlagOldCrawl to identify any of the links that have been removed. You can then collect the data and reach out to those sites via email to reclaim the links that were lost on the site. You can see some more specific details from Alex Juel’s post below.
Resource: http://www.goinflow.com/majestic-seo-guide/
Identify image link building opportunities
Majestic provides data relating to the alt text from image links. Rather than having an alt text link to your website that uses an image code or irrelevant text, reach out to the website owner to see if the alt text can be changed to something more descriptive. The weight of the alt text isn’t as strong as in-content links, however it will still pass valuable link juice and relevancy through to your web content and domain.
Broken link building
Another effective link building tactic is broken link building. You can achieve this by monitoring relevant websites using Majestic’s historical review to identify any lost links on that particular website.
Once the links have been identified, you can identify any relevant content that can be linked to on your own website. If you don’t have the content available yet, you will need to create it. Once it is done, you can create an email that you can share with the website identifying that they have a link that is broken and that it can be replaced with your link.
Blogger outreach
If you would like to outreach to a series of bloggers and web content editors that are known to link to other websites, Majestic can help you identify these websites. Using the Fresh and Historical data index, you can input blog domains and find out which other sites link to them. You can repeat the process with the list of domains that are provided for each domain, thus building out your link prospect list to the hundreds or even thousands. You can also use Majestic to see how influential these blogs are.
Acquiring natural links can be challenging, however Majestic offers the largest link index that will greatly assist with successfully executing link building initiatives. It is one of my default link building tools for almost a decade and as link building focuses on more content and natural acquisition practices, the data that Majestic offers will be crucial to SEOs link building success.
Author bio
David James is the founder of digital marketing agency “Business Growth Digital Marketing”, specialising in content marketing, SEO and digital lead generation. He writes for digital marketing publications and has consulted for major global brands including Mazda, SAP and Lynx. A keen travel explorer and gym junkie, you can connect with him on Google+, Facebook and Twitter.
- 8 Majestic hacks to get powerful links to your website - February 1, 2016
Hi David,
Thanks for the very useful information. Not sure how to sort/where to sort for the "FlagMention."
Do you know which report that comes through?
Thanks,
March 2, 2016 at 12:53 amBeth Bridges