The Power of Local Backlinks

Pieter Serraris says: "I think it's one of the best tools for us when it comes to monitoring backlink profiles for our customers.

I work at a Digital Marketing agency, so a lot of customers, and in SEO, we need to keep track of the backlink profiles of our clients. When I look at Majestic, it's still the best tool out there for us. It's still the most reliable, gives the most input, and we've been using it for over a decade now.

One of the strengths of Majestic is that it just kept focusing on on what they're good at, this huge backlink archive or profiles they have for the entire web, for all our clients, and we're actually still using it on a regular basis and getting a lot of wins out of it, now more than ever."

How important is it to keep a regular eye out on backlink profiles, and how often do you do that?

"It's not on a daily basis, but we actually do it on a regular basis, like monthly for our existing clients. For new clients, we always start there. We always start our clients projects off with an audit. I think it's an unmissable part of any SEO audit. We also use it in pitches for new and potential clients because it can shed some light on what might be needed for this client to help them realize what might be needed. Backlinks are something you can easily neglect, but they are still one of the key pillars of SEO."

So it helps to direct you in terms of revisiting a strategy or starting a strategy to begin with. Are these the kind of metrics that you would also share with clients as well, or is that just for your own use internally to actually know what to do strategically?

"We always need our clients' approval, obviously, to get started, but in order for us to know which direction to look at, it's key. So there are a lot of things you can learn from Majestic, like finding broken links that are scattered all over the internet that you cannot find with a regular crawler, like Screaming Frog, but also just comparing your website to your competitors to create a level playing field.

When it comes to backlink profiles, finding the right topics, etc, it's all crucial. We often share this with a client, but it's not a key metric, and then every now and again we’ll show the progress. For starters, it's always something to share with the client, and then it's down to us to dive deeper into the big numbers that are available in Majestic."

Talking about big numbers, are there certain sizes of clients or types of businesses that you're more likely to use Majestic or is it simply every client that you have that you utilize Majestic with?

"We use it for most of our clients. For a very small one, which we actually used to have some more of than we do now, then it's more difficult to make good comparisons. But now that we mostly work for e-commerce websites, for international companies, and for bigger local companies, then it's really, really useful to have a clear view of how they are performing compared to the competitors, because it often is one of the biggest explanations of why a site is doing good or is underperforming."

So why is it more relevant, and more important for international companies, and are there any types of businesses from clients that you can recall that you have used Majestic to actually provide something very specific for a particular client?

"I think we often work for clients that have local websites or that have websites in multiple countries, but these websites, or these companies often have a headquarters somewhere. So for them, it's not always easy to keep in touch with the local countries, with the other country’s websites. So this is actually a use case I came across for one of these clients.

I can explain best with this use case. One of our clients, they did pretty well in Belgium, in the Netherlands, etc, but they were underperforming in France. We did a big analysis with competitors in France, seeing that on a technical level, they were equally good. Everything was okay. On-page and everything was fine. But when we looked at the backlink profile, we noticed that in France, they did not have, or had very little links from local French websites.

So we immediately noticed that discrepancy and saw that this was the reason why this site was underperforming. They had a decent backlink profile if we just looked at the basic number of backlinks or authority or whatever every other tool might call it, Domain Authority, Authority Score, etc, then we saw no difference.

But when we dug deeper in Majestic, we saw that there were practically no domains linking to it from a .fr domain name. That made our job easier and meant that we could start focusing on that together with the client."

Okay, so in that particular instance you're looking for domains with the.fr domain name. Would you also look at, perhaps something like the IP address of where links came from, if it was a .com or is it more useful just to look for a specific country level domain name?

"Yeah I think it's always part of the job to also look at the domain, at the IP addresses , etc. and it's always part of the deep dive you have to have to take. In this particular case, it was, in my opinion, really the signal of the top level domain that was the one that they were missing.

Obviously, the addresses of the domains can also be something to look out for. If I look at it for a smaller country like Belgium, often the IP address is from abroad. So that's maybe not always the best thing to look at. So for us, it depends. It's part of the job to investigate that as well."

There's a lot of things in SEO, and it's very difficult sometimes to actually determine the likely impact of a change that you're having, because there are potentially hundreds of changes that you could be making to a site, and it's about identifying the change that's most likely to have the impact.

So how did you go about determining that getting links from a country specific domain is probably one of the most important things for you to be doing at that time?

"As I mentioned, we checked all the other metrics and all of the other pillars of SEO as well. We knew that it was a good domain because we saw practically the same information in other countries working very well. It was translated, but in a decent way, to French. Technically, everything was in order, et cetera.

We knew that we had to start looking in another direction. Maybe it differs country to country, and maybe in France, having these specific French domains linking to your website is more important than in Belgium or in Germany, but it should really be on the radar of every SEO to keep track of this."

What kind of measurable improvement were you able to get as a result of doing this? I mean, for instance, were you able to measurably see an increase in certain keyword rankings, maybe traffic, organic traffic, or position on the SERP based upon doing this work?

"Actually, all of these. It's like a snowball effect that at first you start working on gaining quality links from French websites, and this is almost immediately followed with the rankings going up first for the first few keywords, but then the entire website follows and then clicks will follow organically too after a while. It's the regular order of things, and I think it had a positive impact where step by step, the site was performing better and better."

How often do you go back to Majestic to benchmark improvement?

"I think a monthly level is the way to go for us depending on the specific client. Obviously for some clients we do it a bit more often because for them, more active link building might be a big win. For other clients, we might be looking at tracking backlinks or monitoring things.

It's interesting to keep track of how you're doing now, especially now with all AI search, etc, it's no longer just for SEO, but being found throughout the internet on more than one website, more than just your own website, is also for your discoverability and Chat GPT a very important metric.

So as I said, it's maybe more important now than ever, to monitor your presence on the Internet."

Well, thank you so much for being a Majestic customer for over 10 years. Where can people find out more about you online Pieter?

"You can find me on LinkedIn, but my company is OMcollective.com. Feel free to visit our website or connect with me on LinkedIn."

Pieter Serraris is a SEO Lead at OMcollective, and you can find him over at OMcollective.