Seo Tools For Startups

As a startup, you need to be able to keep track of your SEO efforts. You want to know what’s working and what isn’t, so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly. With these tools, you can do just that!

Seo Tools For Startups

Here is the first thing to keep in mind: Local SEO is a crucial part of your overall SEO strategy and there are various tools that will help you.

You can find lots of local SEO audit tools that you can implement to optimize your content using local SEO keyword tools. If you are operating from several locations, you should also check local SEO for multiple locations to learn about key strategies for your business.

Do you want to boost your website’s traffic?

Take advantage of FLUX DIGITAL RESOURCE seo tools

forecast-campaign-april

Here we list the best local SEO tools for you to find out the best SEO tools for local businesses. Some of them offer free services or trials for small business owners who cannot afford higher SEO services.

Moz Local

Moz Local helps you get the most out of your online presence. It is a primary local listing management tool that offers its users quick and easy location management. Moz Local maximizes your reach by sending accurate listings to the major aggregators, search engines, and apps that matter most to your customers.

You can save your time with Moz Local making quick edits across the board when your business data is updated and preventing repeated work. As to pricing, its basic plan costs $129 a year.

SE Ranking

If you are looking for a local SEO ranking tool for your business, SE Ranking is one of the best options. It provides SEO analysis and promotion you need on-board. For business owners and digital agencies, SE Ranking offers 100% accurate location tracking, in-depth website analysis, marketing plans, keyword suggestion tool, and powerful reporting tool.

It costs between $39 and $189 with different plans for various needs of businesses and enterprises.

Bright Local

The all-in-one local marketing platform, Bright Local, makes local marketing simple with its excellent features and solutions. You can get the full picture of your digital marketing and social media performance as well as understand which marketing channels are working best.

Bright Local also enables you to compare rankings against your competitors on major search engines. If you want to try this experience, you can get a 14-day free trial before making a payment.

Serpstat

Serpstat is one of the free local SEO tools providing various services, especially for small businesses. Serpstat’s data is offered for free, and you can subscribe to any plan based on your needs if you need more limits.

You can find keyword research, search analytics, competitor research, on-page audit and much more in Serpstat. Among many local SEO tools, Serpstat is one of the best in tracking competitors and improving your content.

Neil Patel

Learn how you can outrank your competitors! Neil Patel claims that it outperforms other local SEO tools by getting more traffic with a handful of tactics.

You just write your competitor to outrank, and their experts analyze and show you why your competitors rank so high and how you can outperform them. As to pricing, they have a plan of $89 a month besides 7-day free trial.

Ahrefs

With its intuitive design, reliable data, and innovative features, Ahrefs helps businesses or startups analyze the competitors’ search traffic and uncover the keywords they rank for. It also offers a detailed backlink profile for any website. It enhances your local SEO strategy by allowing you to see who is linking to your site and how powerful your backlinks are.

The main features provided by Ahrefs are keyword, backlink, and content research as well as competitive analysis and rank tracking. By being powered by170 million root domains, they emphasize that they provide the best and the complete data.

Yext

Yext is another excellent local SEO ranking tool if you are a local business that needs to boost brand awareness, drive traffic, and increase sales. Trusted by leading companies around the world, Yext helps you increase digital performance, improve operational efficiency, and enhance the consumer experience.

Apart from other local SEO tools in the marketplace, Yext offers an automated local listing management tool allowing you to get your listing data populated.

Advicelocal

advicelocal

Through data-driven local search technologies and solutions, Advicelocal helps businesses to accelerate the visibility of their business’ location information on top search engines, apps, and social networks.

If you want to experience Advicelocal as a data aggregator or data accelerator, you can contact their team. They do not have any pricing information on their website, but they claim that they ask for a small price for incredible results.

Whitespark

whitespark

Whitespark is one of the best local SEO tools for small businesses through several services, including building citations, earning reviews, building high-quality backlinks, and tracking rankings. It helps businesses and agencies improve their rankings and also get new customers by managing their local search.

Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder is the most famous tool used by lots of businesses and agencies. It helps you quickly find the key citations your competitors have that you need and improve your local ranking factors.

Another popular tool offered by Whitespark is Reputation Builder that makes it easy for your customers to review your business on popular platforms. In this way, you have an opportunity to reach more customers and get more business through the door.

ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO software suite that contains tools for link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking and site audits. Most of the features inside of Ahrefs are designed for marketing professionals.

In short: Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool that people use to get higher Google rankings.

What is Ahrefs Used For?

Ahrefs is mainly used to analyze a website’s link profile, keyword rankings, and SEO health.

Ahrefs – Backlinko overview

You can also use Ahrefs to conduct keyword research for Google, YouTube, and Amazon.

Ahrefs – Keywords explorer

And many people use Ahrefs to find content that’s performed well (in terms of social shares and/or links) on a given topic.

Ahrefs – Content explorer

When Ahrefs first launched in 2011, it was mainly a tool to analyze a site’s backlinks.

Ahrefs – Old homepage

And its feature set has grown A LOT over the years. In fact, I’ve been an Ahrefs customer since 2013.

Ahrefs – Backlinko account history

Over that time I’ve seen Ahrefs grow from a link analysis tool into a fully-featured SEO suite that now competes head-to-head against Moz Pro and SEMrush.

Today, Ahrefs is mostly used by:

  • Small business owners that do SEO for their own websites
  • SEO agencies that work with multiple clients
  • “In house” marketers that run marketing for their employer’s site
  • Affiliate marketers that run several different sites
  • SEO consultants that advise clients on their SEO strategy

How Much Is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs’ pricing depends on the plan that you choose. And whether you go with monthly or annual billing.

Here’s a breakdown of Ahrefs pricing.

Ahrefs pricing table

While Ahrefs doesn’t currently offer a free trial, they do have a 7-day trial for $7.

Is Ahrefs Better Than SEMrush?

I recently wrote a review that compared Ahrefs vs. SEMrush.

Backlinko – Ahrefs vs. SEMrush post

So if you want a deep dive into how these tools compare, I recommend checking that out.

But the short answer is that I prefer Ahrefs over SEMrush. Both tools are excellent (in fact, I subscribe to both). But I like Ahrefs’ UX a lot more. Otherwise, the tools are very similar.

With that, here’s a quick breakdown of how Ahrefs compares to SEMrush:

Ahrefs and SEMrush compared

To be clear: this guide isn’t an Ahrefs review. But a lot of people ask me if I like Ahrefs or SEMrush. So I wanted to quickly answer that here.

CHAPTER 2:Ahrefs Terms and Metrics

Chapter – Ahrefs terms and metrics

If you use Ahrefs for more than 30 seconds, you’ll notice that the tool contains A LOT of different terms and metrics.

(Like “UR”, “Ahrefs Rank” and “CTLDs distribution”)

And, to be honest, Ahrefs doesn’t do a great job of explaining what these things mean in plain English.

For example, they describe Domain Rating as: “the target URL’s backlink profile on a 100-point logarithmic scale (higher = stronger).”

Huh?

So before we get into all of Ahrefs’ key features, it’s important to learn how to “speak Ahrefs”. I’ll also translate any technical stuff into easy-to-understand terms.

Common Ahrefs Terms

Here’s a breakdown of the terms that you’ll run into as you use Ahrefs.

URL Rating (UR): The link authority that a webpage has. Calculated as a combination of the quality and quantity of backlinks that point to that page.

Domain Rating (DR): URL Rating applied across an entire site (this is basically the equivalent of Moz Domain Authority).

Anchors: A breakdown of the most commonly-used anchor text in a site’s link profile.

Referring Domains: The number of different unique websites that link to the page or site you’re looking at. A high amount of referring domains correlates with higher rankings in Google.

CTLDs Distribution: A breakdown of a site’s links by top level domain (.com, .edu. .de etc.)

Ahrefs Rank: A worldwide ranking of a site’s link profile. Like with Alexa ranking, the lower the number, the better the link profile.

Parent Topic: The broad topic that a keyword falls under (for example, “link building” falls under the Parent Topic “SEO”).

Traffic Potential: The amount of traffic you’d get if you ranked in the #1 spot for that keyword.

Keyword Difficulty: How hard (or easy) it will be to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword.

Also Rank For: A list of keywords that the top 10 results also rank for (for example, pages that rank for “content marketing” might also rank for “what is content marketing”).

With that out of the way, let’s get into the features!

CHAPTER 3:Backlink Analysis

Chapter – Backlink analysis

Backlink analysis is Ahrefs’ bread and butter feature.

And there’s A LOT of cool stuff that you can do here, from analyzing a competitor’s backlinks to finding toxic links that point to your own website.

In this chapter I’m going to show you how to get the most out of this feature.

Backlink Profile

To look at a site (or page’s) links, just pop a homepage or page URL into “Site Explorer”:

Ahrefs – Site explorer – Backlinko

And you’ll get a dashboard with info on that site’s backlinks, metrics and organic traffic.

Ahrefs – Site explorer – Dashboard

(More on that later)

To deep dive into that site’s link profile, hit “Backlinks” in the sidebar.

Ahrefs – Site explorer – Backlinks menu

And you’ll get a full list.

Ahrefs – Site explorer – Backlinks

If a site has a ton of backlinks, I recommend going to “Link type” → “Dofollow”.

Ahrefs – Site explorer – Dofollow filter

That way, you don’t have to sift through tons of semi-worthless nofollow links.

For example, my site has 196,849 backlinks.

Ahrefs – Backlinko backlinks

But if you only look at dofollow links, that number drops to 163,629.

Ahrefs – Backlinko dofollow backlinks

Still a lot of links. But it’s a lot easier to manage.

I usually also hit the “One link per domain” or “Group similar links” button here.

Ahrefs – Site explorer – Filters

That’s because, most of the time, you don’t want or need to see every single link a site has. It’s more to get a general idea of WHO links to that site and why they link to it.

And when you add the “One link per domain” or “Group similar links” filters, you get that information… without having to sift through as much noise.

So:

Now that you have a complete list of a site’s dofollow backlinks, what can you do with this information?

What You Can Do With This Report

Here are the two main things you can do with the Ahrefs backlinks report.

1. You can find pages that link to your competitor… and that might also link to you.

For example, when I looked at the links pointing to Ahrefs.com, I found this page:

Smashing Magazine – Technical SEO article

And when I look at the page, I can see that it links out to lots of different websites:

Smashing Magazine – Article links

(Specifically, websites that write about technical SEO)

So if I had an article on my site about technical SEO, I’d want to pitch my post to the person that runs the page.

Rinse and repeat this process until you’ve gone through your competitor’s entire link profile.

2. You can use their link profile to get an idea of WHY people link to that site.

For example, let’s look at Moz’s link profile:

Ahrefs – Moz backlinks

I notice right away that a good chunk of their links point to studies that they’ve published on the Moz blog:

Moz backlinks to studies

So if I wanted to get links from these same sites (which I do), I just learned that original data and research is a great way to do it.

Now that you’ve seen a site’s overall link profile, it’s time to start digging deeper into the data using some pretty cool Ahrefs features.

“Link Intersect”

This is an awesome feature that not that many people know about.

Here’s how it works:

In the top navigation hit “More” → “Link Intersect”.

Ahrefs – Link intersect – Menu

Then, put two or more competing sites into the fields:

Ahrefs – Link intersect – Input sites

And voila! You get a list of sites that are linking to all of the sites you put in.

Ahrefs – Link intersect – Results

Why is this helpful?

Well, if someone links to one of your competitors, it doesn’t tell you much. It could be because they have a relationship with that particular site. Or maybe they got lucky.

But if a site links to THREE of your competitors (and not you), this shows that they have a tendency to link to websites in your niche.

And if you use the same approach that your competitor’s used to get their links, they might be willing to link to you too.

Best By Links

“Best by links” = pages on a site that have the most backlinks.

And I can tell you from experience that this is one of the BEST features in Ahrefs’ entire toolkit.

I’ll explain with an example.

A few years ago, I put Moz into Ahrefs and looked at the “Best By Links” report.

Ahrefs – Best by links – Moz

And I saw something that shocked me.

A good chunk of Moz’s most linked-to pages were huge ultimate guides.

In fact, their 2nd most authoritative page is their Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

Moz – Beginners guide to SEO

This page had more links than their free SEO tools, their popular blog… and tons of other pages that I thought would have more links.

In fact, this single page has 114K backlinks.

Moz – Beginners guide to SEO – Backlinks

(That’s more than most entire websites have).

That’s when I realized: “I need to publish more definitive guides!”

And a few months later, I published my first big guide: “The Definitive Guide to Keyword Research”.

Backlinko – Keyword research guide

And it was a huge hit!

To date, this guide has 4.45K backlinks from 1.47K domains:

Keyword research guide – Backlinks and referring domains

In fact, a lot of the sites that linked to Moz’s guide now also link to my keyword research guide:

Ahrefs – Link intersect – Moz vs Backlinko

This approach works so well that I’ve started to double down on definitive guides.

Backlinko – Definitive guides

Which is one of the main reasons that our organic traffic has grown by 19.92% over the last 8 months.

Backlinko – Traffic increase

And it all started from the insight that I got from the “Best by links” report.

“New” Backlinks

This feature gives you a list of sites that just linked to your site (or a competitor’s site).

Ahrefs – New backlinks

Why is this helpful?

Because it shows you link building opportunities that are working right now.

For example, here’s an old backlink to my site:

Backlinko – Old backlink

I got that link 5+ years ago. You MIGHT be able to also get a link from that page.

But as time passes, it’s less and less likely that person is going to go back to an old page and add a link. Plus, SEO techniques change all the time. Specifically, strategies get overused and no longer work.

Which means that it’s entirely possible that the approach I used to build that link no longer works.

On the other hand, here’s a link that’s only a month old:

Kyliesaunder – Backlinko backlink

The person that wrote that new article is going to be MUCH more receptive to adding your link vs. someone that published something 5+ years ago.

Bottom line? “New” backlinks can help you identify fresh link building opportunities that you can tap into right away. They also help you see what’s working best in terms of link building right now.

“Lost” Backlinks

Lost backlinks is just like it sounds:

You get a list of pages that used to link to you… but recently removed your link.

Ahrefs – Lost backlinks

This is helpful for “Link Reclamation”… or getting lost links back.

For example, I recently lost this link:

Cision growth hack article backlink

Well, if I can find out why that person removed my link, I can sometimes get that link back.

That said: it’s normal to lose links. Sometimes scraper sites will delete a page. Or someone will update a post and remove your link because it’s no longer relevant. The idea here isn’t to obsess over lost links. Instead, use this as a way to get legitimate lost links back.

Note: Sometimes Ahrefs will show “link removed” even though the link is still there. So make sure to look at the page to confirm that your link was actually removed.

CHAPTER 4:Keywords Explorer

Keywords Explorer

Keywords Explorer is Ahrefs’ keyword research tool.

And it’s legit.

Why?

Because it gives you INSANE amounts of data on each keyword.

It’s like putting a magnifying glass (or a microscope) over a given keyword.

And in this chapter I’ll show you how to use Ahrefs for keyword research.

Keyword Overview

When you enter a keyword into Keywords Explorer, you’ll notice a bunch of cards above the fold:

Ahrefs – Keywords explorer – Overview

This is the “Overview” section that gives you a high-level overview of the term that you just searched for.

If you’ve ever used a keyword tool before, most of this stuff (like search volume and keyword competition) should be familiar to you.

Keyword difficulty and search volume

This overview is helpful when choosing a keyword for SEO… or quickly deciding between two different keywords.

But what makes Keywords Explorer unique is that you get to also see a keyword’s “Return Rate” (how often people search for a keyword more than once):

Ahrefs – Search volume – Return rate

Number of clicks:

Ahrefs – Number of clicks

Percentage of people that click on paid vs. organic results:

Ahrefs – Paid vs organic clicks

And “Clicks per search”:

Ahrefs – Search volume – Clicks per search

Why is this stuff important?

Or, put another way: what’s wrong with just looking at a keyword’s search volume?

Here’s the explanation:

As you’ve probably noticed, Google has been adding more SERP features to the results every year.

Things like Featured Snippets, “People also ask…” boxes, additional ads, video carousels, and more.

Thanks largely to these new SERP features, according to Sparktoro, “no-click searches” are up significantly compared to last year.

Sparktoro – Data on no-click searches

Which means you can’t just go by a keyword’s search volume anymore. You also need to know how many people actually click on the organic results. Because in many cases, these two numbers are completely different.

For example, take a keyword like “Mount Everest height”.

According to Keywords Explorer, that term gets 4.5K searches per month.

Mount Everest height – Monthly searches

But those 4.5K searches only result in 763 clicks.

Mount Everest height – Clicks

Which is why many SEO professionals now focus more on “Clicks” over traditional search volume.

Keyword Ideas

This is a list of keyword ideas based on the seed keyword that you searched for.

Ahrefs – Keywords explorer – Keyword ideas

In my opinion Keywords Explorer isn’t great at generating new keyword ideas. It tends to pump out simple variations of your seed keyword:

Ahrefs – Keywords explorer – Similar keywords

But if you want to find long tail versions of your keyword, this feature isn’t bad.

Plus, you can hit the “All keyword ideas” link in the sidebar:

Ahrefs – All keyword ideas menu

Which sometimes bubbles up a handful of interesting keywords.

How to get backlinks – Keyword

SERP Overview

At the bottom of the page you’ll see information on the pages that rank in the SERPs for the keyword you’re looking at.

First, you have “SERP History”.

Ahrefs – Keywords explorer – SERP history

This is a breakdown of how the rankings have changed since Ahrefs started to collect data on that term (this starts in 2016 for most keywords).

That way, you get some context around how pages have come and gone from the first page.

You can also see how much the results tend to fluctuate over time.

As you can see above, the keyword “link building” has been pretty stable over the last 3+ years.

(And it’s been super stable over the last year).

But if you look at a keyword like “creatine”, the results are all over the place.

Ahrefs – SERP history – Creatine

Why is this helpful? Well, if you see a SERP that hasn’t budged over the last 12 months, the chances of you coming in and mixing things up is pretty low.

(Unless you have a super authoritative domain)

On the other hand, if you come across a volatile SERP, that means that Google hasn’t found 10 results that they like yet. Which means you have a chance of cracking the top 10.

In addition to SERP History, Ahrefs also breaks down the 10 results based on Domain Rating, URL Rating, number of backlinks and more.

Ahrefs – Keywords explorer – SERP overview

This is your typical SERP breakdown for SEO. The only interesting feature here is the “Top keyword“ column.

SERP overview – Top keyword

This shows you the keyword that brings that page the most organic traffic. In most cases, it’s the keyword that you’re analyzing. But in many cases, you’ll uncover a keyword that you wouldn’t have even thought of searching for.

For example, when I search for “SEO tips”, literally 10 out of the 10 results all have “SEO tips” as their top term.

SEO tips – Top keyword overview

Not super useful.

But when I search for “how to do SEO”, I get a list of top keywords that I may not have otherwise found.

How to do SEO – Keyword overview

Keyword Research For Other Search Engines

Ahrefs’ keyword tool now supports a bunch of different search engines.

Like most keyword research tools, you can search for keyword data for a bunch of different countries (like Germany and the UK).

Ahrefs – Keywords explorer – Country option

But you can actually use Keywords Explorer for different search engines, including:

  • YouTube
  • Amazon
  • Bing
  • Yahoo
  • Yandex
  • Baidu

So if you do SEO for any of these non-Google search engines, you’re covered.

Keywords Explorer Mini-Case Study

Overall, Keywords Explorer has become one of my go-to keyword tools… especially during the later stages when I’m deciding between different keywords.

Let me walk you through a real life example.

A few months ago I was debating whether or not to target the keyword “SEO Audit”.

And to help me decide, I popped that keyword into Ahrefs.

Ahrefs – Keywords explorer – SEO audit

This single page gave me pretty much everything I needed to make a decision.

Specifically, I looked at the keyword search volume:

SEO audit – Search volume

(Which, at least according to Ahrefs, is more accurate than most other tools on the market)

And in my industry (B2B), 4.8K searches is pretty solid. So that was a good sign.

Next, I saw that the keyword difficulty was 61. And that I’d need backlinks from “134 websites” to rank in the top 10.

SEO audit – Keyword difficulty

So the keyword was competitive. But not insane. Another positive sign.

Next, I looked at “clicks” and “clicks per search”.

SEO audit – Clicks and clicks per search

And these two metrics told me that 91% of people that search for that term ultimately click on an organic result.

SEO audit – Organic clicks

Another great sign.

Then, I saw that the average cost per click for “SEO audit” was $19.

SEO audit – Cost per click

This told me that this keyword has strong commercial intent. In other words: people that search for this keyword are likely to convert.

And based on those numbers, I decided to create this post optimized around “SEO Audit”:

Backlinko – SEO site audit post

CHAPTER 5:Organic Keywords and
Organic Search Traffic

Chapter – Organic keywords and organic search traffic

This super helpful Ahrefs feature scrapes millions of Google results to see who is ranking for what keywords.

And when you enter pretty much any domain or URL into Ahrefs, you can see the exact list of terms that they rank for (and where they rank for them).

This allows you to quickly size up how your site compares to the competition.

You can also use it to keep tabs on how your own site is doing (the data updates so often that I basically use it in place of traditional rank tracking).

Let’s break down this useful feature in detail.

Organic Keywords and Organic Traffic

Ahrefs’ “Organic Keywords” and “Organic Search Traffic” features reveal all of the keywords that a domain ranks for… and how much search engine traffic that site is getting right now.

Ahrefs – Backlinko organic keywords and traffic

You can also see how these metrics have changed over time with this nifty chart:

Ahrefs – Organic traffic and keywords charts

How accurate are their organic traffic estimates?

Well, I decided to run a little experiment. According to Ahrefs, my site brings in 303K visitors from Google every month.

Ahrefs – Backlinko organic traffic

The real number (according to Google Analytics)? 342K.

Backlinko – Monthly organic traffic

Pretty close.

To be honest, there isn’t much actionable stuff you can do with this data. It’s more to benchmark where a site is compared to your site or other competitors.

The real value comes from the complete list of keywords that a competitor ranks for:

Ahrefs – Organic keywords report

You even get an estimate of how much traffic they’re getting from each term:

Ahrefs – Organic keywords traffic

So if your site has a similar Domain Authority, you have a good shot to rank for these keywords too.

In many ways, this shortcuts the entire keyword research process. Instead of typing a bunch of random keywords into a tool, you get a site’s entire keyword profile presented to you.

Traffic Value

This underrated feature shows you the approximate value of all the traffic a website gets from search.

Ahrefs – Backlinko traffic value

The higher this number, the more valuable the traffic is.

Why is this important to pay attention to?

Well, it’s one thing to get 1M visitors per month from Google. But if most of that traffic comes from keywords with little-to-no commercial intent, then it’s not super valuable.

On the other hand, if a site only gets 10k visitors per month, but that traffic is made up of people with strong buyer intent, this will show up in the Traffic Value report.

In fact, I tend to pay more attention to my Traffic Value number than anything else. As long as that’s going up, I know that the quality of my search traffic is increasing.

Example of How I Used This Feature to Find an Awesome Keyword

As you may know, my site is in the SEO and digital marketing niche.

And because my site has been around for 6 years, I’ve pretty much already covered the major keywords in my space (like “link building” and “on page SEO”).

Backlinko – Link building and on-page SEO guides

Which is why I’m always on the hunt for marketing keywords that aren’t super obvious.

Thanks to the Organic keywords feature in Ahrefs, I was able to find one.

First, I put a competing site into Ahrefs.

Ahrefs – Coschedule overview

And when I looked at their top keywords, I found a term that had high search volume and a high CPC.

Coschedule – How to write a press release keyword

So I decided to create a blog post optimized around the term: “how to write a press release”.

Backlinko – Write a press release guide

Even though press releases are related to SEO, it’s one of those keywords that would have never come to my mind without being able to reverse engineer another site’s keywords.

CHAPTER 6:Content Explorer

Chapter – Content explorer

Ahrefs Content Explorer is designed to show you content that gets lots of social shares… not necessarily backlinks.

(Basically, it’s a mini version of BuzzSumo).

And in this chapter you’ll learn how this feature works.

Find Highly-Shared Content

This is the main reason that people use Content Explorer.

All you need to do is pop a keyword or topic into Content Explorer…

Ahrefs – Content explorer – Paleo diet

…and you’ll get a list of articles that got tons of shares on social media:

Ahrefs – Content explorer – Paleo diet results

If a specific social media network is important to you, you can sort by shares on that specific site:

Ahrefs – Content explorer – Sort by social shares

Otherwise, you just want to scan the list to get a general idea of what’s working. Or to find a specific piece of content to use for The Skyscraper Technique.

Sort By Traffic Value

Like I mentioned back in Chapter 5, I’m a big fan of using Traffic Value as a metric for how a site’s SEO is doing.

And what’s cool about Content Explorer is that you can sort the results by Traffic Value. That way, you don’t just see content that got a bunch of shares… but content that’s still bringing in valuable traffic today.

Ahrefs – Content explorer – Sort by traffic value

Find Republished Posts

There’s a little dropdown tucked away in the top left-hand corner of the screen that lets you find content that’s been republished.

Ahrefs – Content explorer – Republished menu

(In other words: content that someone updated on the same URL).

This can give you a better idea of why a specific piece of content did so well.

For example, when I searched for content related to “SEO tips”, I noticed this result got a ton of shares.

Ahrefs – Content explorer – SEO tips

And when I hit the “republished” feature, that post is still the #1 result in Content Explorer.

Ahrefs – Content explorer – SEO tips – Republished

Which tells me that this page has been regularly updated and relaunched over time.

CHAPTER 7:Helpful Ahrefs Features

Chapter – Helpful Ahrefs features

Now it’s time to cover a few random Ahrefs features that don’t fit neatly into any of the categories that we’ve talked about so far, including:

  • SEO site audits
  • Finding competitors
  • PPC features
  • Directly comparing domains
  • And more

Let’s check them out:

Competing Domains

This report gives you a list of domains that are trying to rank for the same terms.

For example, this report lets me know which sites are competing against me in Google’s organic search results:

Ahrefs – Competing domains report

So I made a note to hate those sites 🙂

But seriously, this feature isn’t super useful to use for your own site. After all, you probably already know your SEO competitors like the back of your hand.

Competing Domains is more helpful if you just launched a new site or you took on a new client.

That’s because this report can show you the SEO landscape for that site in a few minutes.

For example, you can see if the competitors are rinky dink blogs… or Fortune 500 companies.

You can also check out the “Best By Links” report for some of the competing sites.

Ahrefs – Best by links – Backlinko

That way, you can learn what types of content works best in this space.

Content Gap

Content Gap shows you keywords that your competitors rank for… but you don’t.

In my experience, this is more helpful than analyzing a single website. Because if you find TWO competing sites that rank for a keyword, there’s a great chance you could rank for it too.

For example, I put two of my competitors’ sites into this feature:

Ahrefs – Content gap – Input competitors

And I also made sure to put my site in the “But the following target doesn’t rank for” field.

Ahrefs – Content gap – Input own site

And boom!

Ahrefs – Content gap report

I get a list of 12,000+ keywords that I could probably rank for.

Site Audit

This is basically a web-based version of Screaming Frog.

To use it, pop in your site’s homepage:

Ahrefs – Site audit – Input website

And give the site auditor time to do its thing.

(Depending on how many pages your site has, this can take a few minutes to several hours)

When it’s done, you get a thorough technical report on all of your site’s pages:

Ahrefs – Site audit – Report

Including pages that are redirected, blocked by Robots.txt, or that have a noindex tag applied.

Ahrefs – Site audit – Internal pages report

Paid Search

Even though Ahrefs is designed first and foremost for SEO, it does include a few features to help with PPC campaigns.

To use it, put a competing site into Ahrefs. And hit “Paid Search”:

Ahrefs – Paid search – Moz

And you can see which ads generate the most traffic for that site:

Ahrefs – Paid search – Moz ads

(Which is a GREAT resource for writing your own ads)

Keywords that send them the most paid traffic:

Ahrefs – Moz – Paid keywords report

And landing pages that most paid visitors end up on:

Ahrefs – Moz – Paid top pages

Alerts

Alerts is helpful if you want to stay on top of a site’s links and rankings.

That’s because you can ask Ahrefs to send you an email every time you or a competing site gets a new backlink… or starts to rank for a new keyword.

Ahrefs – Alerts

Domain Comparison

Here’s where you compare 2-5 sites head-to-head.

Ahrefs – Domain comparison

Why is this useful?

It’s a great way to see how your site compares to the competition.

For example, when I put some of my main competitors into the Domain Comparison tool, I can see that I’m behind when it comes to “referring domains”:

Ahrefs – Domain comparison report

So instead of cranking out more content, I might want to put more time into link building.

If I just looked at my site’s links in a vacuum, I’d see that I have 14k referring domains and think: “That’s a lot!”.

But in an insane competitive space like SEO and digital marketing, 14k referring domains is good… but not enough to dominate the search results.

BONUS CHAPTER:Advanced Ahrefs Tips and
Untapped Features

Chapter – Advanced Ahrefs tips and untapped features

Here’s a handful of cool things that you can do with Ahrefs that I’ve picked up over the years.

So if you want to squeeze even more value out of your Ahrefs subscription, this chapter is for you.

Easily Find Broken Links

Ahrefs takes a lot of the grunt work out of Broken Link Building. That’s because Ahrefs shows you all of a site’s broken links:

Ahrefs – Broken links report

(So there’s no need to run Check My Links a million times)

Analyze Anchor Text

Keyword-rich anchor text can improve your Google rankings… to a point. If your anchor text is too optimized, you could find yourself with a Google penalty.

So check out the “Anchors” report to make sure that most of your anchor text is made up of generic and branded anchors:

Ahrefs – Anchors – Report

Best By Links Growth

This shows you pages that are getting links right now (specifically, within the last day, week or month)

Ahrefs – Best by links growth – Backlinko

Super helpful for figuring out what people in your industry are linking to.

Batch Analysis

If you’re doing SEO at any sort of scale, Batch Analysis is for you. Instead of analyzing URLs one-by-one, you can analyze up to 200 URLs in one go:

Ahrefs – Quick batch analysis

Find Guest Post Opportunities

Did you know that you can use Ahrefs to find sites in your niche that accept guest posts? Well, you can. This video walks you through the steps.https://www.youtube.com/embed/NKurQTHDcDc?rel=0

Top Content

This is basically “Best By Links” for social shares. In other words, you can see which pages get shared most often on social media:

Ahrefs – Top content report

There’s a BIG difference between content that gets linked to and content that gets shared (source).

So if your #1 goal is to get shares on social media and referral traffic from blogs and news sites, this is a feature that I recommend checking out.

Conclusion

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

Check out other publications to gain access to more digital resources if you are just starting out with Flux Resource.
Also contact us today to optimize your business(s)/Brand(s) for Search Engines

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