Tool name and maker

Majestic Marketing SEO by Majestic-12  

Competitive set

• Moz
• SEM Rush  

What this tool does

Majestic SEO is a link intelligence tool which allows you to assess surrounding online prominence along with your own link data. To this end it competes with Moz’s Open Site Explorer and in a way with parts of SEM Rush.

Price as reviewed

There are different price plans depending how much data you require. The four levels are:

1.   Platinum - £250 a month

2.   Gold - £99.99 a month

3.   Silver - £44.99 a month

4.   Silver Quarterly - £29.99 a month

The pricing levels clearly outline what is available in each plan, so you can determine which is best for you. The chances are that as a PR agency you won’t use all the features of the tool or need to pull as many lines of data so you could probably get away with paying for a Gold or Silver package (but don’t tell Dixon Jones that I told you so).  

The test

We’ve been using Majestic SEO for seven years now and it has been very useful for a variety of different reasons. Over this time, we have been able to complete competitive analysis when pitching to prospective new business and complete backlink analysis for our clients to review the trustworthiness and effectiveness of their link profiles. 

We can also use Majestic to identify new target media opportunities or sectors or use it to research what type of PR our client’s competitors have undertaken historically.

We use Majestic in a few other ways too which I’m not going to share in this post – Majestic gives us a pretty powerful competitive advantage and has helped us secure wins in the past over other agencies due to the insights we have presented.

We particularly like Majestic’s Trust flow score as a more accurate measure of a domain’s trustworthiness. Moz’s domain authority can be a bit misleading sometimes and Trust Flow and Citation Flow gives a more well-rounded insight.  

How it performed

Majestic SEO is easy to navigate making it simple to use once you know your way around it. The tool has a detailed database which allows you to thoroughly search for backlinks for clients and that of their competitors – all of which is useful information for link building activity.

Beginners do need to make sure that they are getting data for root domains as otherwise users might pull data for all sorts of different canonicalisations. Beginners might also struggle with all the terminology but there are plenty of online resources to help users (every day is a school day, right?)

Likes

There is a lot to appreciate about this tool as it can facilitate a number of different needs.

There are several reasons why this is an effective tool: 

• Trust Flow – it is simply the best link level metric
• Allows you to download competitors link profiles which can be effective for competitive analysis
• Offers a detailed list of backlinks which is key for backlink analysis
• The data can provide new ideas for media relations and influencer outreach
• Allows you to review and compare different domain and page authorities which can also be ranked in a trust factor format

Dislikes

Although I do believe Majestic SEO is a great tool, there are some improvements that I think could be made:

• The ability to put the wrong URL format in will confuse many young PR executives and can result in the wrong data being presented to a client – although it’s an error, it could be embarrassing.

Star rating (out of 5)

Written by James Crawford, managing director at consumer and B2B PR agency PR Agency One.