5 Ways We’re Using DeepCrawl’s Awesome New Majestic Integration

I love it when two of my favourite things come together. Like Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat or when you get a new flavour McFlurry. It gets you a little giddy inside and you just can’t wait to check it out.

Cue my latest favourite meeting of minds: DeepCrawl’s lovely new Majestic integration to help you better analyse your website’s links.

I’m going to assume you know what DeepCrawl is, but for the one or two of you who care enough to read this post but don’t know what Majestic is, it’s a nifty backlink checker that can give you a wealth of information about who’s linking to you. They also have a very cool Chrome extension that’s well worth a look.

These two SEO behemoths have joined forces and it’s very good news for anyone who wants a more in depth look at their internal or external links and their backlink profile.

Oh and it’s FREE for all DeepCrawl users and you don’t need a Majestic account either. Winner.

How to use the new DeepCrawl Majestic integration

The new Majestic integration is an absolute piece of cake to use. Previously, if you wanted to analyse your links in DeepCrawl, you had to import a list of your sites pages from one of various sources including Google Analytics, Search Console, Majestic, Ahrefs and some log file analysers.

You can still do that if you wish, but it perhaps wasn’t the most efficient way of doing things. However, now when you’re selecting what you want to crawl, you just have to select the box that says ‘Use Majestic for this report’. You’ve got a couple of other settings you can play with there (as you can see in the image below), but the rest is setup as normal. If you want super geek status, you can combine Majestic’s data with (manual) uploads of URLs from Ahrefs or any backlink tools you use for that matter and identify any gaps.

So you’ve done your crawl, with Majestic now doing the legwork in the background, but what do you do with this data? Here are 5 ways we’re going to be using the new DeepCrawl-Majestic integration…

Quicker, more in-depth tech audits

A good quality tech audit is an SEO’s bread and butter, and part of that should be analysing a site’s link profile. With this new integration, at just the click of a button we can get valuable insight on the health of a site’s internal, external and sitemap links, as well as those all-important backlinks.

We can see quickly if links are pointing to broken pages, or pages not even in the search index, which can cause your website to lose valuable authority.

This can be remedied with a relatively quick fix — either we can pop in some redirects or try and fix the broken link — and then we’ve instantly got a much healthier link profile, which we know the search engines love.

The crawl could also throw up problems with your sitemaps. It could be a simple broken link in there, which means it’s tougher for search engines to crawl the correct URL, or you might have non-indexable URLs in there, which is a waste of crawl budget. Again, these are relatively easy fixes that can improve the link structure and crawlability of your site.

However, it can also highlight deeper issues with how sitemaps are being generated or updated, warranting deeper investigation of whether the site’s CMS is functioning correctly, or your own manual processes are stringent enough.

Of course, this only scratches the surface of the kind of problems DeepCrawl can uncover for your tech audits, but the level of detail provided here is enough to make any SEO salivate.

Link reclamation part 1 / Links to broken pages

We love it when we’ve got lots of sweet high authority links pointing to a client’s site, but websites change and pages with loads of links can get removed. All of a sudden, those links are near enough useless.

However, the backlink report in DeepCrawl can easily help you identify broken pages with backlinks so you can do something about them. You can then redirect those pages or contact the person linking to your site and ask them to alter it.

Likewise, you can identify any disallowed or meta nofollow URLs with backlinks and react accordingly.

Link reclamation part 2 / Broken link building

As well as helping us to fix links already pointing to our site, we can also use this Majestic integration to build additional links. Here’s how…

We can crawl one of our client’s competitors using DeepCrawl’s super sleuth Stealth mode, and see if they have any broken backlinks and where they’re coming from. Straight away this is an opportunity for us to get in touch with the webmaster of the linking site and let them know about that broken link, suggesting something of ours to link to instead. We’re essentially doing them a favour as they won’t want any nasty broken links on their site. This works particularly well if it’s a competitor that no longer exists as they have no reason to still link to them.

This can also inform our content marketing strategy. If we know there’s a site with a broken link pointing to something, we can make something brand new for them to link to instead. Hell, even if it’s not a broken link, we can make something much bigger and better and ask them nicely to link to ours instead. It’s cheeky, but it works.

Improve internal and external linking

While it’s backlinks that often get the limelight, don’t neglect your internal linking. This helps Google and users better navigate and understand your website.

Majestic can pull internal linking data to help you ensure links are pointing where you want them to. You can quickly see all of the unique internal links on a website, which makes it easy to see if any pages are linking to parts of the site they, in theory, shouldn’t. If you’re looking at a page and thinking ‘why on earth is that page linking there?’ then users and search engine crawlers are likely thinking the same.

You can also see if any anchor text of your internal contains typos or formatting errors. This might sound like a small issue, but that anchor text is vital in informing search engines and customers what the target page is relevant for, so it’s worth fixing.

Perhaps even more helpful, however, is the ability to see any broken internal links. If your pages are linking to a page that 404s then it negates all value of that link, and if you have enough of them can completely destroy your whole internal linking structure. Not difficult to fix, but essential that you do.

Don’t forget about your external links! You can also check everything’s hunky dory there as well. A quick scan of this report will help make sure you’re not linking out to any sites you don’t want to — whether those pages are now broken or, heaven forbid, you’ve been hacked and someone has inserted some malicious external links.

Prospecting for new clients

When we’re trying to woo a potential new client, of course we’re going to go to them with any issues their site may have and how we can fix them. Again, this Majestic integration can help us do that, whether it’s part of a wider tech audit or there’s a specific issue we think they should know about.

What they do with this information is, of course, up to them, but it can most definitely help us open a dialogue about how our SEO services can help improve their website.

Do you want us to use DeepCrawl and all its bells and whistles to improve your website? Get in touch!