Majestic SEO Tools review

One of the stronger backlink checkers currently available

Majestic SEO
(Image: © Majestic)

TechRadar Verdict

While its top tier packages would hardly be considered cheap, Majestic remains a user-friendly and reliable option for finding out what’s going on with your website’s SEO performance.

Pros

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    Based on a database containing over 8 trillion URLs

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    Track site performance in real-time

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    Evaluate competitor websites to improve your own

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    Easy-to-interpret stats and charts

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    Annual discounts

Cons

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    Lite and Pro packages only include one user account

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    Understanding more advanced functions takes time

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    Historic Index tool left out of the basic plan

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    Lacks direct phone support

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Majestic SEO, now known as simply “Majestic”, is Search engine Optimization (SEO) tool  to survey the internet for links to your website. The company behind this product is based in the UK with the claim to have built the world’s largest “Link Intelligence” database. This is essentially a map of the internet that tracks every website that links to your pages.

Majestic synthesizes all of this information to provide all sorts of insights for helping you understand and improve your internet search positioning. The sheer size of the Majestic database behind this software translates to better results than most backlink checking tools.

Majestic SEO: Plans and pricing

Majestic pricing tiers starts at the $49.99/month Lite package to a fully-featured API option that can stretch up to $399.99/month, depending on how many search resources you need access to, along with other features. 

Majestic SEO 2

(Image credit: Majestic)

Majestic’s Lite plan is offered for individuals or businesses who plan to do a low level of backlink checking. It also gives access to most of the key tools included with the other packages such as a Majestic’s Fresh Index (more on that later), a keyword checker, and lists of referring domains. The Lite package is limited as it comes with just a single user account, and limits you to 5,000 index item units and 1,000,000 analyzable backlinks. On a monthly basis, the Majestic Lite costs $49.99, but the available annual subscription lowers the price to an effective $41.67 per month.

Moving up a tier is the mid-range Pro plan that costs $99.99 per month on a monthly basis and $83.33 per month when paid annually. Although this package still only includes a single user account, it adds plenty additional including an Historic Index, Custom Reports and a Rank Tracker. Pro users also get upgraded resource access including 125,000 index item units, 300 report units and 20 million analyzable backlinks.

At the top of the plans, Majestic’s API plan gives developers access to the underlying code of the Majestic system for integration directly into their own platforms. Prices here start at $399.99 per month for 100 million analysis units, with the option to increase even higher to $1,599.99 per month for 1 billion analysis units, with the same option to pay annually for a discount. Resource limits also get similarly increased, with additional features of Custom Monthly Reports, and the ability to create OpenApps.

Majestic SEO: Features

Majestic builds its platform on an enormous Link Intelligence database that contains, according to Majestic’s latest count, approximately 9 trillion unique URLs. With millions of new sites and articles created every day online, the challenge of building a completely-comprehensive database of links between every website on the internet is a near impossible task- but Majestic gets closer to doing so than most.

Realize though, that simply having access to a huge database isn’t much good without useful features to allow the extraction of meaningful conclusions from it. Thankfully, Majestic also stands out for bringing features such as “mutual link” pages to show you all the connections between two sites, and also side-by-side comparisons to display the top metrics of multiple URLs on one page.

Also, the Fresh Index updates each day as new links get added to your site from across the web. This great tool helps you comprehend the impact of changes to your website, such as your latest press release or a site redesign.

Many users will be attracted to the Majestic product for its ability to generate informative, in-depth information about their sites, and there’s no question that these simple metrics, easily understood in one glance, are certainly of great value. To this end, Majestic users get access to two simple site indexes: a “Historic Index” and a “Fresh Index.” Why two? Well, the Historic Index is based on a database that has accumulated since 2006, allowing you to see how your site’s SEO performance has changed over time, while the Fresh Index is based on the latent information.

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(Image credit: Majestic)

Getting a handle on a detailed breakdown of the performance of a single domain or URL is a snap through the Majestic Site Explorer tool. Users, with any subscription tier, can access this page to visualize stats such as your number of referring domains and external backlinks- and how those numbers have changed over time. 

Majestic SEO: Interface and use

Getting up to speed with the Majestic system is really quite simple. That’s even more impressive with the realization of the sheer volume of different stats and metrics Majestic provides access to. Most tools are accessible via your profile at Majestic.com, and there’s also a simplified interface for examining backlinks available through a Google Chrome plugin(opens in new tab).

Through the main Majestic site, switching between different features is performed through a simple “Tools” menu right at the top of the page. Obviously, the Majestic interface differs from tool to tool, but generally, pages get laid out cleanly and attractively, with a simple color scheme, and large stats and diagrams that draw your eye to the most important information first.

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(Image credit: Majestic)

We especially appreciate the useful figure that you’ll find on the Majestic Site Explorer information page, the Trust Flow against Citation Flow scatter plot, which gets designated the  “Link Profile.” From just a glance, this chart indicates the overall trustworthiness of a URL based on the number of times it’s been linked to by external sites. 

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(Image credit: Majestic)

A key factor that determines any web page’s SEO performance is the number of backlinks that it receives from trusted sources. Majestic’s Backlink History checker does this with an interface that makes the data easy to interpret. Then there is the option to either order backlinking sites by their trust score, or enter a color-coded view that visually distinguishes URLs by their scores on individual topics. 

Majestic SEO: Support

Should you run into trouble using some of Majestic’s more advanced tools, help can be found through the Majestic Help Center, that contains a great deal of information, as well as a Majestic API Reference Guide. Should you need further assistance, you can send a query to the Majestic technical support team via a support portal, or via a direct email. Some support shortcoming include no direct phone support, and that the hours of support or the expected response time for a query are not designated. 

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(Image credit: Majestic)

Majestic SEO: The competition

The size of Majestic’s link connection database sets it apart from alternative SEO tools such as Serpstat, which is similarly priced, making it likely that Majestic will produce more accurate results when analyzing your site. Majestic also easily beats out more basic SEO tools such as SEO Spider and Yoast SEO which aren’t capable of producing the kind of detailed insights that this product can.

Majestic SEO: Final verdict

Majestic SEO remains an awesome and powerful tool for owners of single websites and developers of search ranking tools alike. It does more than just provide access to an enormous database of internet page links, it also makes it a snap to compare the performance of specific URLs and access actionable metrics to completely change the way you do digital marketing. 

With contributions from