Ahrefs for SEO – SEO toolkit

Ahrefs is undeniably one of the most powerful and widely-used SEO tools in the industry today. Mastering its functionalities and leveraging them effectively is absolutely essential for conducting comprehensive keyword research, analyzing backlinks, auditing websites, and monitoring search engine rankings.

An Introduction to Ahrefs

Founded in 2011, tool is a Singapore-based company that develops SEO software for marketers and agencies. Their core product is an SEO toolkit that provides keyword research, backlink analysis, site audit, rank tracking, and content research features. Some key capabilities of Ahrefs include:

• Keyword research – Discover high-volume, low-competition keywords in any niche using Ahrefs’ massive keyword database. Filter keywords by search volume, CPC, competition and more.
• Backlink analysis – See all the domains linking to a site. Assess link quality and find link building opportunities.
• Site audit – Crawl a site for broken links, duplicate content, technical issues. Check page speed and on-page optimization.
• Rank tracking – Monitor keyword rankings for a site in Google and 100+ other search engines. See ranking history and traffic estimates.
• Content research – Spy on competitors’ top pages and discover content gaps to target.

Ahrefs is trusted by over 500,000 users including SEO agencies, corporate marketing teams, bloggers and webmasters across the globe. Their database indexes trillions of links making it one of the largest link indexes for SEO.

Keyword Research with Ahrefs

One of the foundational SEO tasks is identifying the right keywords to target. Keyword research features make this process easy and accurate.

To begin keyword research in Ahrefs, start by entering a seed keyword that’s relevant to your niche. Ahrefs will automatically suggest additional related keywords along with monthly search volume, CPC and competition data.

Filtering Keywords

You can filter keywords by:

• Volume – Show keywords with low, medium or high search volume. This helps find long-tail variants.
• CPC – Filter by adwords cost-per-click data to identify lucrative keywords.
• Competition – Only see low, medium or high competition keywords. Competition is measured by number of ranking domains.
• Relevancy – Adjust a slider to only show closely related keywords to your seed keyword.
• Location – See search volume and competition data for a specific country or region.

Analyzing Keywords

When you find a promising keyword, click on it to see detailed metrics including:

• Search volume from multiple sources like Google and Bing.
• Click-through-rate (CTR) pulled from Google Autocomplete.
• The top 10 ranking domains for that keyword.
• Related keywords and questions.
• Keyword difficulty score from 0-100.

This data will help determine if a given keyword is worth targeting and what it will take to rank for it.

Backlink Analysis for Competitors

Studying a competitor’s backlink profile can reveal link building opportunities. Ahrefs makes this easy.

To analyze a competitor’s backlinks:

• Enter their domain name into Ahrefs Site Explorer.
• Click the Backlinks report.
• Ahrefs will showcase all the referring domains linking to that site.

From here, you can filter backlinks by type (dofollow/nofollow), anchor text, IP address, and more. Sort them by DR or UR to identify the strongest domains to pursue for link building.

Clicking on any domain shows even more detail – when the links were created, any associated anchor text, and what pages they link to. This level of backlink intelligence can heavily inform link building strategy.

Site Audit for SEO

Running a comprehensive technical SEO audit is crucial before optimizing a website. Ahrefs’ site audit tool crawls any site to uncover major issues and opportunities.

To audit a site’s SEO health in Ahrefs:

• Enter the site URL into Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool.
• Ahrefs will crawl the site and provide an overall performance score out of 100.
• Key metrics provided include page speed, mobile friendliness, HTTPS, indexability.
• See all broken links, duplicate content issues, and HTML errors.
• Get page-specific recommendations to improve technical SEO factors.

Regularly auditing your own site or a client’s site will ensure maximum visibility and discoverability in search engines.

Rank Tracking for SEO Campaigns

To determine if your SEO efforts are working, consistent rank tracking is a must. Here’s how Ahrefs’ rank tracker works:

• Add keywords you want to track rankings for.
• Pick the location and search engines to track.
• It will display current and historical positions.
• See estimated organic traffic for each keyword.
• Set up email/Slack alerts when rankings hit certain thresholds.
• Track competitors’ rankings side-by-side for comparison.
• Filter by device type – desktop, tablet and mobile.

Consistently tracking rankings will indicate whether your SEO strategy is producing results, and which areas need more work.

Content Gap Analysis

Finding the right topics to create content around can be difficult. Fortunately, Ahrefs has content research tools to discover gaps.

To perform content research in Ahrefs:

• Enter a target keyword or competitor domain.
• Ahrefs shows the top ranking pages for that keyword/site.
• You can sort these pages by traffic to see highest performers.
• “Weak” pages among the results indicate content gaps to target.
• Click into any result to see keyword opportunities related to that content.
• Use these insights to uncover exactly what topics need created content to outrank competitors.

By analyzing competitors’ content and traffic, you can discover strategic gaps to fill with new pages and posts optimized for target keywords.

Conclusion

Ahrefs is an invaluable platform for conducting critical SEO tasks like keyword research, backlink analysis, site audits and rank monitoring. Mastering the use of Ahrefs provides SEO professionals and agencies with the insights needed to boost their own or client sites’ search visibility and traffic. When used to its full potential, Ahrefs can be a key component of any successful SEO strategy.

joker

Professional data parsing via ZennoPoster, Python, creating browser and keyboard automation scripts. SEO-promotion and website creation: from a business card site to a full-fledged portal.