Analytics are a key part of any robust SEO strategy. Without them, it’s almost impossible to differentiate between the parts of your website that are working and the areas that need extra work.
Fortunately, there are many SEO tools that can help you reach the analytical depth needed to scale your strategy. But within these tools are lots of different metrics – some of which will be more helpful than others depending on your goals.
One of these metrics is trust flow, and in this blog, we’ll help you to understand what it is and how you can use it to inform your SEO efforts going forwards.
What is Trust Flow?
Created by Majestic, trust flow is a metric that allows you to measure how trustworthy your website is depending on the quality of its backlinks. This is different from both your domain authority and domain rating, which depend on a lot more factors such as the quality of your content, internal linking and your site’s overall usability. Majestic trust flow focuses solely on whether your backlink profile is made up of trusted websites, making it a great metric for SEOs looking to hone in on this area.
Calculating Trust Flow
A website’s trust flow score will be between 1 and 100 and will depend on a variety of factors such as the quality of its backlinks and the authority of the domains those links come from. While the exact method that Majestic uses to calculate trust flow is unknown, it’s easy to find your score by performing a trust flow check.
You can run a basic trust flow check using Majestic’s free demo on their homepage, but this will only give you limited insights into your website’s backlink profile. To access in-depth analytics and a full overview of your trust flow, you will need to subscribe to Majestic’s SEO Backlink Checker, which is available on a three-tier pricing plan. Trust flow is included in each of the three tiers, so you can choose the level of investment that best suits your needs.
What is Good Trust Flow?
What’s considered a good trust flow will often depend on your SEO goals and the size of your website. A lower trust flow might be more acceptable if you have a very small website that you don’t plan to scale, however, if you hope to rank for more competitive keywords and grow your website, you may need to aim for a higher score.
Trust flow scores are typically grouped into the following bands:
· 0-10: At this level, your website has very little trust. However, it’s important to note that all websites will begin at a trust flow of 0 when they’re first created. If your website has been around a while and you’re still seeing a very low score, take a close look at your backlink profile to see what could be going wrong.
· 10-50: This is the range that most websites can expect to be in – and what you should be aiming for if you’re not there yet. Of course, if you’re at the lower end of this range, it won’t hurt to try and improve your score, but know that even large businesses usually fall within this band.
· 50+: A trust flow score that’s above 50 is typically reserved for very well-known websites, such as news platforms like Yahoo or informational resources like Wikipedia. As a result, it is very difficult to achieve a trust flow score of this level.
How to Improve Trust Flow
Improving your trust flow isn’t always easy, especially because Majestic’s algorithm is designed to prevent website owners from cheating the system. But if you stay committed to your SEO strategy over a longer period of time and build a strong, high-quality backlink profile, you’ll be in with a fighting chance. Here are some ways you can get started:
Audit Your Existing Backlinks
If your website has been around a while, chances are you already have a few backlinks, which could be helping or hurting trust flow score. Conduct a thorough audit and evaluate how many backlinks you currently have and the types of sites they’re coming from. Lots of backlinks from spammy websites could be dragging down your trust flow score, so it may be worth cleaning up these toxic links to make way for new, more valuable backlinks.
Don’t Disregard Topical Trust Flow
Simply securing backlinks from high-quality websites may not be enough to increase your trust flow; it’s also important for these websites to be topically relevant to your industry. Consider the types of high-authority websites your audience may be visiting and target these when searching for link building opportunities. Links from authorities in your niche will add a lot more value and trust to your website, as search engines will be able to better understand how your content fits in with the wider network of your industry.
Perform Competitor Analysis
Analysing the backlinks and trust flow scores of competitor websites can go a long way in informing your own link building strategy. Pay attention to the types of websites they have backlinks from as well as the topics their guest posts are covering. While there’s no need to copy exactly what your top-performing competitors are doing, learning from their successes (and their mistakes) can accelerate your growth much more quickly.
Trust Flow vs. Citation Flow
Majestic trust flow and citation flow might sound similar, but they actually measure two slightly different things. If you’re trying to improve your backlink profile and improve the amount of trust and authority your website has, it’s worth paying attention to both of these metrics.
Essentially, trust flow measures the quality of the backlinks you have while citation flow focuses on the quantity of backlinks you have. As a result, it’s advisable to focus more on your trust flow than your citation flow, as high-quality backlinks will always win against a large number of poor-quality links. However, the two scores work hand in hand and increasing them both as part of a robust strategy should benefit your website in the long run.
Ideally, you should aim for your trust flow and citation flow to be at a similar level, as this will show search engines that the links you have are consistently of a high quality. Having a high citation flow and low trust flow suggests you have too many low-quality links, which can make it difficult to increase trust even as you reach out to higher authority websites, as your ratio may be too off balance.
Majestic trust flow can provide you with a useful window into your website’s backlink profile, but remember that it’s only an indicator of how well your strategy is doing. Always use trust flow as part of a broader SEO strategy and don’t get too frustrated if you aren’t seeing results in the coming months. With consistency and hard work, you should see your trust flow and rankings improve over time.
