It’s 2024 and 93% of marketers and business leaders still testify to the positive impact of SEO for their website performance and marketing goals. If you have been in the SEO space for a while, you have probably lived through several “SEO is dead” cycles, but it keeps going strong, even as search engines continue to evolve their strategies.
This evolution has made SEO increasingly competitive, and what separates SEO leaders from novices is the build-up of marginal improvements that the leaders are equipped to make. That’s why data-driven marketing is important. And that’s the promise of popular SEO toolkits such as Ahrefs. There probably isn’t just one thing you can do to achieve SEO success. But by tweaking a lot of small settings, you can achieve a lot.
More so, you can glean data from your competitors to ensure that you maintain good standing in your niche and are not falling back. With Ahrefs, you can achieve this through features such as competitor analysis, backlink profiling, keyword research, technical SEO audits, and AI features.
In this article, which is an advanced guide to Ahrefs, we show you how you can exploit these features to capitalize on your competitors and get ahead in your SEO strategy.
Advanced Keyword Research Techniques
Basic keyword research typically focuses on search volume and keyword difficulty. However, Ahrefs has unique features that provide a more comprehensive of what’s going on with search.
For instance, its “Traffic Potential” metric does not just tell you the search volume; it indicates how much organic traffic the top-ranking page for a specific keyword receives. Through that, you get to see keywords with the highest traffic potential and prioritise them.
Users in the Enterprise plan get to use the keyword clustering feature, which groups keywords by parent topic or by terms. So, by focusing on overarching topics and grouping relevant keywords under them, you can have a more organized and strategic approach to keyword targeting.
Other advanced users of Ahrefs can use the SERP updates feature to see day-to-day changes for organic keyword positions, organic pages, and referring domains for your target website. With this approach, even the minutest fluctuations in SERPs do not escape your notice, and when they happen, you can quickly reinvent and polish your strategy.
Backlink Analysis and Acquisition Strategies
Another important point to note in this advanced guide to Ahrefs is that analyzing competitors’ backlinks is crucial for identifying replicable link-building opportunities. For instance, examining which pages on your competitors’ websites have attracted the most links can help you unearth a lot of clues about the type of content that resonates with their audience (and will resonate with yours too).
Ahrefs is renowned for its robust backlink analysis capabilities. Specifically, it boasts the world’s largest index of live backlinks (over 14 trillion), and the index is constantly updated with fresh data every 15-30 minutes. This extensive index is the backbone of Ahref’s Site Explorer tool and is used to calculate crucial metrics.
Another strength of Ahrefs in this area is in the extensive range of tools and filters available to streamline your backlink analysis. So, you can use filters to focus on specific types of links, maybe dofollow or nofollow links, identify links from specific domains, or even pinpoint links with certain anchor texts.
One useful tool you should check out is the “Link Intersect” tool, which allows you to discover websites that are linking to multiple competitors but not to you. Such websites represent untapped link sources that are already familiar with your niche and may be more receptive to linking your content.
Content Strategy and Optimization Using Competitor Data
To find low-competition topics with high traffic potential within your niche, Ahrefs can be a very useful tool, particularly its Content Explorer feature. Content Explorer is a searchable database comprising billions of web pages, and which allows you to uncover top-performing content in your niche and high-quality link prospects.
By applying certain filters in Content Explorer, you can easily discover pages that receive substantial organic traffic despite having few and no backlinks. These low-competition topics can be excellent opportunities to create content that can rank well and drive significant traffic to your website.
Additionally, there is the Site Explorer tool, already mentioned in this advanced guide to Ahrefs and which can be useful to understand a competitor’s website structure and identify which parts of the website attract the most traffic.
Technical SEO Audits and Competitor Benchmarking
Technical SEO is the foundation of a website’s search engine visibility. On Ahrefs’ the bulk of the technical information that you need can be found in the Site Audit tool, which provides a comprehensive analysis of your website’s technical health. That enables you to quickly catch issues that can negatively impact your search rankings.
When crawling your site, the Site Audit tool can potentially flag hundreds of technical and on-page SEO tools, including speed, Core Web Vitals, heavy CSS or HTML, indexability, and more. And, of course, it provides recommendations on how to fix these issues. This ensures that your website is not just optimized for search engine crawlers but also for user experience.
Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool is blazing fast, crawling up to 170,000 URLs per minute and executing JavaScript. So, you can be sure that you are not missing anything when you use it. You can even conduct technical SEO audits of your competitors’ websites and use that information to benchmark what the level of technical performance of your website needs to be to effectively compete.
Ahrefs AI and Future Trends
Next in this advanced guide to Ahrefs is that over the past couple of years, like many other companies around the world, Ahrefs has been increasingly integrating AI into its platform to enhance user experience and streamline SEO tasks. A key example is the AI-powered keyword suggestions within Keywords Explorer, which generates lateral keyword ideas based on seed keywords and user prompts.
Ahrefs also utilizes AI for content optimization with its AI Content Helper, currently in beta for Enterprise users. The AI Content Grader tool analyzes top-ranking pages for an existing article and keyword, extracts main subtopics, compares them side-by-side, and scores them to highlight areas for content improvement.
Importantly, Ahrefs’ commitment to AI extends to its free SEO tools, offering over 40 AI-powered writing tools designed for various purposes, including SEO, content marketing, social media, and product-related tasks.
Strategy before Technicality
The aim of this advanced guide to Ahrefs is not just to show you the technical capabilities of Ahrefs as an SEO toolkit. The bigger picture is to show how SEO is more of a strategic capability before anything else, and the technical features of your SEO tool should only serve more strategic goals. As a reader of Startup Growth Guide, this is where you can find all the strategic insights you need to run a successful business. Follow us for more.
Featured Image by Ahrefs
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