It’s been a while since my last review here at Reviews Boss – my apologies for this, but I’ve been crazy busy with some other exciting projects. However, now I’m back on deck and ready to drop some seriously good reviews that will hopefully help you save money and get better results (as well as uncover some powerful tools and training that you might not have otherwise come across!)
Because this is going to be quite a lengthy review, I’ll just be dripping out elements of it as I go along. I’ve decided to change my review style a bit and just add additional content to reviews as I go along. So although it will be a bit more “stream of consciousness” on this site from now on, the big upside for you is that there are going to be a lot more reviews and detailed content to go through.
So anyway, let’s get this show on the road and dive into my Majestic SEO review.
What Is Majestic SEO?
Basically, it’s a backlink analysis platform. If you’re looking at using Majestic, then you probably already know that backlinks to your site are an essential factor that goes into determining how well you rank in the search engines for any given keyword.
At the end of the day, the more high quality links you can pick up, the better.
How Much Does It Cost?
There are a number of different pricing plans for Majestic, depending on exactly how much of a “power user” you are. You can also pay
Please note that Majestic is priced in British pounds. Thanks to “Brexit” there has been a marked decline in the value of the Pound – now is a better time than ever, especially if you’re using American dollars, to get a Majestic SEO subscription. You can purchase denominated in Euros or US Dollars, but considering the value of the Pound, you are probably going to get the best deal purchasing in that particular currency.
If I’m to be honest, I think that Majestic’s pricing structure is a bit too confusing and convoluted. There are so many different tiers, and monthly/annual pricing for each tier. “Silver” tier also has a quarterly option available, priced in a monthly equivalent amount (that is actually the option I have for my account, as I do sometimes “go off the boil” with SEO and web marketing software).
Is There A Free Version?
You can get a limited number of free searches every day by creating a free account. However, you only get top level statistics (the Trust Flow and Citation Flow) of the domain/page you are searching, and you will only get to see a small number of actual backlinks.
If you are only interested in getting top level stats, then you may be able to get away with a free account. And if you are feeling particularly naughty, you can get unlimited free searches by using a VPN program like Private Internet Access.
However, you will be missing out on the best elements of Majestic’s analysis by using only the free version. I strongly recommend that you spring for a paid membership.
What Can I Do With It?
As mentioned a number of times so far in this review, you can use Majestic SEO to enable you to analyze the backlink profile of any website or web page. In particular, you can look at important metrics like:
- The number of backlinks pointing to the site
- The number of referring domains pointing to the site
- Trust Flow & Citation Flow (these are Majestic statistics – if you’re at all familiar with SEO, then you may well have heard of these metrics already)
- Topical TF & CF metrics
- Anchor text profiles
- The exact links pointing to the site
- Pretty much anything else you could hope to do with regards to analysing backlinks
Who Is It For?
Majestic SEO is for anybody who wants to analyze the backlink profile (and individual backlinks) of any website. It doesn’t just have to be your own. You can use it on client sites, competitor sites, and any other site or page under the sun.
Uses for Majestic SEO’s backlink analysis include:
- Analyzing the backlinks of a competing site/page that you want to outrank
- Finding potential sources of backlinks for your own site/client sites
- Broken link building (go to backlinko.com if you want to learn more about this)
- Checking your site’s backlink profile for potential “bad neighbourhood” links
- Basically any task you can think of where you need to look at what links are pointing to any given page or site
Conclusion
Is Majestic SEO worth having a subscription to? If you are in any way interested in getting ahead with SEO – whether for affiliate marketing, client-based SEO work, running in-house campaigns for your employer, or for any other reason – it is definitely worth having in your “tool box”.
I know a lot of SEOs, especially the more advanced ones, recommend Ahrefs over Majestic. However, Ahrefs is a lot more expensive than Majestic. If you’re wanting a good way to get started with backlink analysis, then I do believe that Majestic SEO does a perfectly good job.
Nice review Sam. Perhaps you could do a ‘ahrefs vs majestic’-review?
I’m using both, Ahrefs and Majestic, but in the end: if you don’t know how to use it, you are still a fool with a tool.
For the ones with a bigger budget, look at adding Semrush to your package as well!
Thanks for your comment Klaas.
I agree – it’s something in the pipeline for me as well (doing more X vs Y reviews, as well as category-based roundups). Ultimately, I want this humble site to become the go-to place online for honest reviews of products and services for digital marketing professionals.
The advantage of ahrefs over majestic is the speed to detect new links and the incorporation of new tools. There is also a new tool Fuseon Link Affinity that works on the affinity of links. Very interesting.
Really informative, thanks for sharing this!
Do you prefer Ahrefs or Majestic SEO?