SEO professionals won’t shut up about backlinks.
It’s always link building this and link building that…perhaps they can’t stop talking about it because it’s actually essential.
One of the biggest determinants of a website’s domain authority and search engine ranking is its backlink profile.
Backlinks are so important that they are used as a form of currency in the SEO world. It’s an excellent strategy to grow your website’s reach and improve its SEO.
The problem is, there’s a lot of guesswork when it comes to analyzing link building strategies. This is why tools like Majestic exist.
There’s been a bit of controversy over this SEO tool over the past few years, with critics stating that there are many downsides to using Majestic.
Let’s take a closer look at this SEO tool, shall we?
What is Majestic?
Well, stars are majestic, but I digress.
The Majestic SEO tool uses Link Intelligence data to help its users find out who links to their websites.
This is done through website crawling to track backlinks and gives a detailed analysis of domains.
Perhaps the best way to explain this is to show you.
To analyze Pearl Lemon Leads, I input the URL in the Majestic Site Explorer and got a detailed analysis within seconds.
Backlink Data & Reporting
In seconds, Majestic reported information on the external backlinks for Pearl Lemon Leads. Fresh external backlinks were about 1,000, and historical ones were not much different.
The referring domains were fewer than the historical ones which already gives me more insight into how the website is performing.
Here’s a more detailed analysis of the backlink profile:
As you can see, Majestic goes into specific detail to show its users the types of backlinks they receive. This type of data is very useful for SEO teams that want deep analyses of their clients’ backlink profiles.
Link Context
It’s one thing to see how many external backlinks are available for a site, but it’s another to understand the context.
Majestic offers a new feature that gives you a comprehensive overview of your audit backlinks. This provides more insight into whether a backlink is a good or bad link.
This tool gives insight about:
- How many internal and external links are nearby
- How dense internal and external links are
- Whether the external link is an editorial one
- How many images surround your link
This means that with this tool, you can get detailed information about where your links go to. No more guesswork!
Topical Trust Flow
This tool scores your website to show you where it is positioned compared to the top sites in over 800 different categories.
With this, you’ll get an illustration of the relevance of your web page based on topics and keyword research.
Photo credit: majestic.com
This information can be quite useful for SEO agencies that are trying to better understand their relevance and positioning in comparison to their competitors.
Visibility Flow
The Visibility Flow enables users to find editorial-style links on high ranking websites. You get this type of information instead of information about directory-style links.
Visibility Flow works as a link-level score that prioritizes high-quality editorial links. This could make it easier to gain more relevant directory-style links for your website.
Flow Metric Scores
The scores you’ll find here measure the impact of your content. This provides real insight into the effectiveness of your content strategies and can give you ideas on what to improve on.
Flow Metric scores are available here:
- The Service platform at Majestic.com
- It can be used for API
- Majestic Browser Plugins and the Mobile App
The impact of your content is measured and illustrated for you in a way that makes the data come alive.
This is not the most user-friendly way to present data unless you have a lot of expertise in SEO, which many people do not.
User Experience
The Majestic user experience is…not great. It can feel overcrowded and overwhelming because of the wide selection of tools that Majestic offers.
This can be a negative thing for potential customers that are not SEO experts. If you are just starting in the SEO industry and trying to make a groundbreaking link building strategy, Majestic might not be the best place to find your footing.
The UX usability is subpar, and there is a lot of work that needs to be done to improve the overall user experience.
This platform is constantly updating and improving its software to provide unique features and tools to its users. However, this is one of its biggest weaknesses.
If you’re not a stickler for incredible user experiences, then you might not look at this as an issue. But if it matters to you, then you’ll have to try to get used to the platform over time.
Pricing and Payment Plans
Majestic offers users the opportunity to choose between making monthly payments or annual payments.
There are three main options for the monthly payment plans.
The Lite plan is a starter plan that is the cheapest of all three payment plans. It’s best suited for light users who do not need a lot of data analyses.
The Lite payment plan costs $49.99 and offers:
- 1 million analysis units
- Bulk backlink checker
- Keyword checker
- Referring domains
- Keyword generator
- Site explorer
- Trust flow
- Topical trust flow
- So much more!
(The Lite annual payment plan costs $499.99.)
Keep in mind that this payment plan has restrictions and limits. If you want to have more resource allowances per search or per month, you’ll have to choose those separately. Even your access to APIs is limited on this plan and has to be chosen separately as well.
The Pro plan is ideal for SEO agencies and professionals who have more needs than light users. This payment plan offers access to all Majestic website tools.
The Pro payment plan costs $99.99 and offers:
- 10 million analysis units
- Everything in Lite, plus
- Custom reports
- Compare sites
- Flow metric history
- Backlink history
- Share campaigns
- Email alerts
- Full business profile
- So much more!
(The Pro annual payment plan costs $999.99.)
This payment plan is full-stack and adds an element of professionalism with the ability to share campaigns and have a personalized business profile. This can be useful for SEO professionals who audit other people’s sites. However, this payment plan is still limited to one user.
The API payment plan is the most expensive one is ideal for SEO agencies that require a lot of data. This is the only payment plan that offers the option to have 5 users.
The API payment plan costs $399.99 and offers:
- 1000 million analysis units
- Everything in Pro, plus
- Full API
- Create OpenApps
- Custom monthly data
(The API annual payment plan costs $3,999.90.)
This payment plan is limitless and offers its users the full experience.
Unfortunately, the Lite and Pro package only allows one user per account. It would have been better if the Pro payment plan had more flexibility, but that’s not the case.
This means that if you are an SEO team, then you’ll have to purchase the most expensive option, the API payment plan.
That might not be the best option because this plan seems like it’s best suited for SEO agencies. Do you catch my drift?
Pros & Cons of Majestic
These are the Pros of using Majestic:
- Advanced backlink data and reporting
These are the Cons of using Majestic:
- Low UX usability
- A few unnecessary features like the business profile
- Expensive payment plans
Final Verdict
Majestic is…a lot.
On the one hand, it provides cutting-edge tools that help users analyze their backlinks and develop strong link building strategies.
But on the other hand, it’s not very user friendly, and the UX usability is so low that it’s enough for some people to try another software altogether.
Despite this, Majestic could be the answer to the unending backlink questions SEO professionals have. The detailed reports, analyses, and data it offers its users is quite impressive.
If you invest in the Pro or API payment plans, you’ll get the most out of this platform because you’ll be able to do this for other clients as well. And backlink tracking is quite important for SEO strategies.
The issue here is, there are some real setbacks to this platform. The Majestic SEO team constantly adds new features that are actually kind of pointless at times. For example, the business profile feature is quite unnecessary, it’s just a directory of services within an SEO tool which seems quite odd.
There’s a lot going on in this SEO tool, it’s not as expensive as Ahrefs, Moz and the rest, but it isn’t actually the best on the market.
If you want to invest in an SEO tool that offers a good user experience, SERP analysis, uncomplicated, and well-explained features, Majestic isn’t your pick.
If you’re budget conscious, try using Ubersuggest, which offers free SEO features that are way more user friendly and easier to understand.
If you’re an SEO professional who has greater data needs and a bigger budget, just stick to Ahrefs or Moz.
The final verdict is: Majestic scores 75%.
If you want other alternatives, try using Ahrefs or Ubersuggest.
But if you like this tool, then you can sign up for Majestic here.
