Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs and real SEO

SEO has been an elusive subject for webmasters for 15+ years now but no one has really figured out how exactly search engines(mainly Google) work. The modern era of SEO began with the penguin and panda updates. These updates hit many webmasters hard and many never fully recovered. These updates penalized many of the "blackhat" SEO tactics and forced many people who where just farming low-priority links like link farms to re-examine their strategy. Google has done further updates to kill the effectiveness of article writing to get links, link exchanges, directories, and PBN's(private blog networks). A variety of ever ongoing tweaks have made cheating the search engine far harder than in the former days where stacking titles, meta tags, and link farm links could easily rise you to the top. Today I'm going to talk about the paid SEO tools suites of Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic and how to use them to increase your SEO rank for more traffic. This article will also talk about a few other tools and things to look for while doing research.



First, lets get one thing straight. The goal of promotion using SEO or other means is not to get ranked high in Google or any other search engine. The primary goal is the drive targeted traffic that may result in conversions to your website. It does not matter if this traffic comes through SERPS, backlinks, word of mouth, or any other method. As long as it is good targeted traffic, you want it. I've often noticed that in terms of bounce rate and page views per visitor that traffic that comes from links from similar sites as mine do better than traffic that comes from organic search. For this reason, when I build backlinks, I will try to build dofollow as well as nofollow backlinks instead of just dofollow links. A nofollow link from a popular website within my niche will often be more valuable than a dofollow link from a smaller site just because of the amount of traffic it drives. Links from popular sites, whether dofollow or nofollow, can also result in links from other sites that scrape or feed their news and so is important for getting your name and brand out there. Therefore although I do prioritize dofollow links, I do spend a lot of time and effort to get good nofollow links as well.

If you are serious about SEO, you'll need to first set up the Google Search Console in google analytics. In order to do this you'll need to link your Google webmaster tools account with your Google analytics account. This gives you invaluable data such as which keywords are driving you traffic, your rank for particular keywords, and the click through percentage you are getting each on keyword(this is very important to improving your search traffic without gaining positions in Serps). After you set this up, it takes a few days before data starts to come in so be patient. After getting a few week's worth of data, it is worth going through and analyzing your keyword effectiveness to Maximize the traffic you are getting from your current SERP positions. Doing this alone may greatly increase your search traffic without doing any SEO at all.

Next you should head on over the alexa.com and check out your Alexa ranking as well as that of you competitors. A low Alexa ranking means that a site has lots of traffic(top 10,000 is great) whereas a high Alexa ranking means the site has very little traffic(above 1,000,000 is bad). However, bear in mind that a good Alexa Ranking can be faked by using the toolbar and getting a few friends to use the toolbar but a bad one cannot be faked. If a site does not have any users with the Alexa toolbar, it generally means that said site does not have that much traffic. Also bear in mind that certain niches tend to have higher Alexa ranking that others. The webmasters and web resources niche tends to have inflated rankings because these users are more likely to have the Alexa Toolbar. When building links, I find that those links that have good Alexa Rankings tend to give me the most SERP boost as well as targeted traffic.

The third thing a serious SEO should do is subscribe to a suite of SEO tools in order to fix site issues and track backlinks and get down and dirty with the SEO work. For this I suggest either, Moz, Ahrefs, or Majestic. All three have strengths and weaknesses and which one you choose depends on what you need. I know there are other suites like Raventools, but these are the three I have sampled, tried, and paid for and I do believe they provide what you need for success in SEO. We'll give an analysis of each of these tool suites below.

Moz:

Moz is probably the oldest and most well known out of the three as even casual SEO's know their name. After Google's pagerank bar started going out of favor, Moz swept in with their Metrics of DA/PA and became the standard in the SEO world. Although these metrics are still useful, I find that they are not updated very often and the data they are updated with each time they do update is surpassed by the link data from Ahrefs and Majestic.Their backlink checker, open site explorer, is in the same state. It still gives a lot of good backlinks in data but it isn't as good as the ones from Ahrefs and Majestic. Moz seems to be focusing more on their community and the knowledge that comes from it that the actual SEO tools themselves. Moz does, however, have a good set of on-page tools to alert you of errors on your page and suggestions on how you can improve. Having used MOZ for a month, I feel like their various metrics and tools are a strong suite but their backlink checker and DA/PA have been overtaken by the competition. However, if you want to draw from the community of knowledge, Moz is still worth subscribing to.


Ahrefs:

Ahrefs is a very nice toolset for SEO professionals, their robust backlink checker is great and the way you can shift and organize data from it is my favorite by far. I used Ahrefs for about 2 months before I decided to go with Majestic, but that was mainly because of price. Ahref's DR/PR score rating is pretty good and highly correlated with both Majestic and Moz but seems to draw from a larger data pool than Moz. It also seems to be the one that updates the most often as your Ahrefs rank seem to change daily. Their on-page tools telling you your critical issues and non-critical issues is also great as I've used it to fix several serious issues on my site. These are worth looking at at least once a week to make sure you have your page title and other important things correct on your site. I used their on-page tools to identify that all my tag pages had the same title and quickly fixed it. Although Majestic's backlink index seems to be bigger than Ahrefs and has a better "fresh" index, I still prefer Ahref's backlink checker as it allows me to see one link per domain and organizes it by the time the link was found, which saves me a large amount of time when making contacts as recently found links from competitors are more likely to respond to your e-mails. In today's SEO world, Ahrefs should be a strong contender for your SEO dollars.

Majestic:

Majestic is the tool suite I use for my own SEO as it gives me all the information I need, has a great TF/CF metric for which to measure my sites against competitors and keep track of my progress. I had a hard time deciding between Majestic and Ahrefs but eventually decided to go with Majestic as its price was half that of Ahrefs and it had as much data in its backlink checker as Ahrefs did. It doesn't organize its link data like Ahrefs unfortunately which means I have to spend more time each day to sort though the information but for the price(49.99/month), Majestic is quite a bargain. However, please note that Majestic is just an SEO tool suite, it does not have the on-page tools that Moz and Ahrefs has so if you want or need those, you may want to consider one of those suites. However, if you are about building valuable backlinks, Majestic is the way to go as the TF/CF metric, I find, does correlate the best of a site's popularity.

How to use these tools in conjunction with Alexa:

After you familiarize yourself with their three sets of tools(MOZ and Ahrefs both have a trial period) and especially their rating systems, you want to realize that although, PA/DA, Ahrefs Rank, and Majestic TF/CF are good metrics, they are far from perfect. I do use them to gauge my site against others but I also keep track of Alexa rank. As a matter of fact, I find Alexa Rank to be a better indicator of search traffic and the value Google puts on your site that any of these rankings as overall traffic tends to be a better predictor of search traffic than any of these three rankings. If a site does not have overall traffic, then it can't have that much search traffic. The opposite is also true. If a site has a lot of search traffic, then it has to at least have a decent amount of overall traffic. However, to get really into SEO, you have to use all these ratings in conjunction with Alexa rank to gain insights and take some of your competitors traffic. One example is that if you see a competing site that has low PA/DA, Ahrefs Rank, and Majestic TF/CF(yes, check all three) but still a better alexa rank than you despite far inferior marks in their previous three ranking schemes, then that is an indicator that they have far better onsite SEO and site structure than you do. If you are not getting much SERP traffic and you see that they simply outdo you in SERP traffic and are therefore kicking the crap out of you in terms of competition, you can basically just Mimic what they do and generally I find, you will overtake them in SERPS if you do the same thing. It may take a few weeks or even a month or two but if you mimic their site structure and onpage SEO tactics, I find that the site with better backlinks and higher ratings with the three search suites I mentioned usually comes out on top. I've used this strategy to significantly increase my Search Engine Traffic. Speaking of onpage SEO and site structure, here are some tips:

1. https URL over http URL. Yes, https does cost an extra 5 bucks every year but it will give you a slight edge in Google ranking. If you can't afford $5 a year, then you should go work at McDonalds instead of doing SEO. Make sure to get your host to set up your https correctly as I've seen many people botch this and it will hurt your SEO rankings.

2. Choose one version of your domain URL and 301 re-direct all the other versions. This means decide if you want the https or http version and the www or the non-www version and then 301 re-direct everything else to that version. When you ask people to link you, make sure you ask them to link to the main URL of your site. It is far easier to do this in the beginning than trying to correct the mistake down the line.

3. Make sure your file extensions are accurate descriptions of what your content is about. This one is one I see many sites not doing as they either use jumbled URLs and non-descriptive urls. This is a big mistake. While people may like shorter URLS(which isn't a problem these days with things like tinyurl), search engines seem to have no problems with long, descriptive urls and it does effect SEO ranking. Sites with the same DA/PA and TF/CF will vary drastically in SEO traffic, even if they are in the same niche, and much of that will be because one site has good URL structure while the other site doesn't.

4. Make sure to put your title in H1 tags and tag your content. Since many websites are run by CMS's like wordpress, make sure you have h1 tags and title tags correct for your pages. Tags are also a huge part of SEO as I've seen many results go directly to tag pages. Many CMS treat tags like categories and Search engines like big sprawling sites with lots of categories.

5. Make sure your CMS is not generating duplicating titles. This is specifically prevalent on search pages of CMS, make sure each search page has its own unique title based on the term being searched.

6. Use alt text for your images. You want your images showing up in google image search as well and sometimes in search results, do not forget to do this and choose very descriptive URLS for your image filenames, it will help.

These 6 tips are pretty crucial for onpage SEO success and so many sites are not doing it. If you prefect these techniques, you may see search traffic despite low ratings.

Now that we have onpage SEO covered, we can move to offpage SEO or building backlinks. I would not suggest using a service like Posirank to build links as services like that tend to use PBN(private blog networks) which Google discourages. Looking at some people who have used such services in the past and having signed up for a account just to see the prices, I can see that they are very expensive and I will not be using them because even if I don't get banned from Google, it is just not worth the price. I also see a trend where your rankings almost immediately drop off if you stop buying links from them. This looks to mean that your link gets deleted if you stop using their service and these blog posts are not permanent. I believe this is bad for long term SEO. I will echo the sentiments of many others in regards to link services like these: short term gain for possible long-term loss. I would instead suggest you do off-page SEO the right way, even if it does take much longer, using backlink checkers. For this you will need Moz's Open Site Explorer, Majestic's Backlink Checker, or Ahrefs Backlink checker. There are free ones, but these three are far superior to the free ones and are worth paying for. The best way to use these tools is to gather a list of both your closest competitors and the biggest players in your industry and use the backlink checkers on them. With the data you get, go visit every once of those sites and for any site that is blogging about them or has a list with them in it, find the contact link and ask the webmaster to add you to that list or see if they will blog about your or accept a guest post from you. Your response rate will not be great but every link does help. All three backlink checker tools also give you the rating of the page/site those links are on so you can prioritize accordingly. You must be consistent in doing this. Set goals that you can achieve like five contacts a day or 25 contacts per week. After a month or two, you will see your ratings slowly creep up and your SERP traffic will start creeping up as well. Getting guest posts on well-known blogs as well or getting a feature on sites like Product-hunt will also give you a big boost. Although I do not encourage link exchanges, it is not bad to trade links with sites with similar traffic as yours as both of you will be receiving targeted traffic, just don't have a page with no content and just outgoing links. Just remember, that consistency is the long-term thing you have to have to achieve success in the long run when it comes to success in SEO. It is not a sprint, it is a marathon. That being said, I also discourage the outright buying of links from popular sites. There are a lot of people selling guest posts on sites like Huffington Post or other popular sites for upwards of $1,000. This is simply not worth it because although the domain rank is high, the page your link will be posted on will be pretty low usually. A lot of times you will not get $1000 worth of traffic back and it won't help you that much in your SEO efforts. Organic link building methods in the end will win out against buying expensive links.

There are also people out there trying to sell high DA/PA domains and high TF/CF domains for lots of money. I strongly advise against you buying these domains. There are spam methods to get a high rating for domains but many of these sites have incurred Google penalties for using such methods and as such, these domains are totally worthless. While buying an old aged domain(that has a site with it) in your niche may be worth it, buying a high rating domain much of the time is falling for a scam. I've seen numerous blackhats in various forums brag about how they used illegal SEO methods to get a site to a high rating, then sell it to some sucker who doesn't realize the site is penalized from Google. A good way to check if a high rating site is penalized or banned from google is to search for the exact title of the domain. If it doesn't rank on the first page, there's a good chance it has been penalized and you should not touch that domain. These are the tips and trick for long-term SEO success. Be persistent and resilient, make contacts, and remember your content, URL structure, and file names. Using these tips and tools will help you on your way to SEO success. Have any questions or want to hire me for SEO consulting, contact, webmaster[at]goodfreephotos.com .