Using MajesticSEO for a quick competitor analysis
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Using MajesticSEO for a quick competitor analysis

23rd June 2011

MajesticSEO is one of the tools I use most when doing competitor analysis. From my perspective its origins as a search engine index puts it ahead of other link analysis tools in that the sample size of data is often superior. That said I have noticed that there is a large amount of link decay in the historic index so if you would like more accurate data use the Fresh Index.

Getting Started

I chose to analyse www.iwantoneofthose.com partly because I am a fan boy when it comes to gadgets and partly because their product set should attract a great deal of natural links.

Once logged in click “Create Report” which is at the bottom of the reports screen and configure your report remembering to choose the fresh index.

Once the report is created you’ll see it in your Reports page, click on that and you’ll see the dashboard.

Filtering

So from this report we can see that we have found 11,840 links before any filtering has been applied. Filtering is very important though as we want to make sure were analysing the links that count. So click on the options tab and do the following:

  1. Setup a date range filter, this should only be applicable in when using the historic index
  2. Limit the source flags, I tend to exclude NoFollows, Frames, Redirects, Deleted, Alt Text and mention. Filtering by mention however is a great way of isolating people that have mentioned the website and not linked less useful for competitor analysis but very useful for your own link building initiatives.

Once you’re finished click “update and force analysis” and then wait for the report to be ready in the reports page.

Backlinks History

Now that our filtering has come into effect we have 10,160 links to analyse. The history tab then shows us the backlink discovery over time. In the fresh index this is limited to the last 30 days so probably less useful than the historic index trends.

Countries

Clicking on the countries tabs shows us the number of backlinks from each country. With local links playing a large part in ranking a website this is especially useful. From this we can see that the majority of links are from the US followed by the UK and Germany.

Anchor

The anchor tab shows the anchor texts that have been used in those links ordered by the best AC Rank. AC Rank is MajesticSEO’s version of page rank but scales from 1 to 15. From this we can see that the most valuable links are brand related with “gifts” being the most prominent non brand anchor text.

TLDS

TLDS play a factor in determining the locality in much the same way as GEOIP does in the countries tab. The TLD tab shows the TLDs of the linking domains which gives you another layer of information when analysing the performance of a website.

Ref Domains

The referring domains tab shows the number of backlinks from particular domains. Unsurprisingly it has a great deal of links from blogspot. It also has a number of links from other popular gadget blogs.

IPs

The IPs tab gives you links from specific IPs which could be the same server hosting multiple sites linking back. We can see that 212.100.243.206 links back a great deal which seems to be owned by Gasta.in, a global search engine for India. Each of these can be analysed further to uncover any other nuggets of information that are contributing to their rankings.

Top Backlinks

Again these are sorted by AC rank and show anchor text too. Often I find the best thing to do is download the entire link set and manipulate it in excel to enable you to look at a large dataset easier. Another quick way to analyse them is to drop them in a wordle to get trends about anchor text and source URLs. To download the raw data just click the download tab, enter your parameters and click prepare download.

Well that’s how I use MajesticSEO but I’m sure others use different aspects of it to provide different insights on competitor analysis so feel free to share these in the comments!

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Written By
Louis Venter is the founding director and CEO of MediaVision, a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) company specialising in all areas of search. His particular interests are organic search marketing, paid search marketing, conversion strategy and online PR.
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