Complete Guide On How To Use Ahrefs (2020)
Today I’m going to be showing you how to use Ahrefs. I’m going to give you pretty much all of the tips and tricks I know of for Ahrefs. This guide is actually for a spreadsheet that I’ve made that you can download from here. I am going to be doing tutorials for all the different tools that I use about 30 plus tools for a month give or take when I do SEO.
Ahrefs’ Pricing Plans: Which one is really worth getting?
Let’s get right into it, the first thing we have to do is head over to Ahrefs. There’s a couple of different pricing plans for Ahrefs. The plan that I am personally subscribed to is the Standard plan. I think that this plan is the one that’s worth getting because if you’re going to be subscribing to the Lite plan, you don’t actually get to see the great amount of competitive research which is sort of a problem, I wouldn’t recommend that one.
In the event that you really can’t afford the standard plan yet which is currently priced at $179, I would probably just get SEMRush instead, I’m not really fond of this software but it’s probably better if you subscribe to it than the alternative.
Before we proceed, if you’re a more visual learner, you can check out this video that tackles the same topic as what we’re about to discuss in this article:
Ahrefs: Initial Thoughts
Once you open up Ahrefs and are subscribed to a plan, you can now add your domains and get started on tracking the keywords, the progress, and how they are doing. Generally, I don’t really even use this because for the most part, I enter the domain that I want to look at so really the biggest benefit about Ahrefs is the ability to do competitive research.
If I wanted to rank for something that I am competing with its ranking for, I can use Ahrefs to go see what they are doing and that’s really where the most value comes from with this tool.
There are a couple of other things that I want to show you that are also really beneficial that Ahrefs does. To guide you better let’s use my own website as an example. As I enter my domain on the bar provided, these are the following data that pops up:
Ahrefs Rank
UR
DR
Backlinks
Referring Domains
Organic Keywords
Organic Traffic
Traffic Value
These are just the initial data that you will be getting right at the start. These are basically the assigned ratings based on links that Ahrefs gives you. Your individual page and your DR is your entire domain, from here you can see that DR shows the relative “backlink popularity” of the target website compared to all other websites in Ahrefs’ database on a 100 point logarithmic scale (higher = stronger). Ahrefs calculate DR based on the number of websites linking to the domain’s URLs and their backlink profile strength.
If you click on the backlinks to see what links are pointing to the domain and generally how you want to do it is you want to look at one link per domain because you don’t usually want to see all of them. It is kind of hard to look at if you got thousands. Using my domain as an example, we have 285 backlinks from unique domains and what you can do is if you want to see what the links are, you can see them if you click on the link provided. By clicking into it, you will see the anchor text is owned by me.
If we keep scrolling down, we can keep going through all of the links. You won’t be doing this process all the time, the only time you will be needing to do this is if there’s a bunch of spammy links pointing to your site and if you want to disavow those links in terms of whatever or not you need to disavow links, that is completely up to you. I don’t personally do it, I know some people still do.
Apparently, Google has created updates where they just completely devalue links that don’t matter anymore. So unless you’re getting a manual penalty from Google, disavowing is probably not advisable, but that decision is still completely up to you.
Broken Tab
If you go to Backlinks > Broken you can see if there are links that are going to your website that are actually broken. You can also go on your competitors’ websites, using me as an example, you can see that one of my competitors’ websites has a bunch of broken links coming in from sites. You can actually try to grab those, let me show you how it’s done:
Go to their website
Check all of their broken links
Download all the links
Use an outreach tool
Reach out to the website owner about the broken link pointing to the site.
Organic Keywords
This is where a lot of people spend most of their time. This is where you see what other competitors have for their organic keywords and here you could see the different positions for these keywords, the volume, and difficulty.
Keyword difficulty estimates how hard it will be to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a given keyword in a given country. It’s calculated by taking a weighted average of the number of linking domains to the current top-ranking pages. The result is then plotted on a logarithmic scale from 10 to 100 (low difficulty to high).
This gauge is from a 0 to 100 scale, this kind of gives you an idea of how difficult the keywords are that your competitors are ranking for and how difficult they are for you. What that means is if you’re going to be trying to target keyword difficulty, let’s say 50 or 60, you are probably going to want to have higher metrics. If you are trying to write for something that has a high difficulty when you have higher metrics for your DR and hopefully you are so.
Obviously, you would be on an individual page or you are on your homepage wouldn’t be the same as the new page that you would be making. The point that I'm getting at is that if you have a fair amount of pages with high URS you can internally link them to other pages and get these other pages to rank higher as well.
Either way, if we keep going down, we can see all the different keywords. Right beside the keywords, there is a graph icon, if we click that we can see the history of where they have been ranking. From there we can see when the page is actually ranking at certain points and dates.
Right next to the graph icon we can see the SERP button if you click on this, it will show you all the different ways it is ranking or all the different pages that are ranking. The types of things that are ranking in the search results like videos, image packs, thumbnails, videos, etc.
Top Pages
This feature is really convenient because you can actually see where most of the websites are getting most of their traffic. You can see the top key, the top pages, the estimated traffic for each of these pages, the estimated CPC value, the number of keywords these pages are ranking for, and so on.
You can actually see the type of keywords that the page is ranking for. If you click on a specific keyword, it will show you the keyword difficulty and if it has a low keyword difficulty, then that gives you the idea of whether it is something that you can actually rank for if it is within your range.
Using my blog as an example, we can see that my article about White Hat SEO has very difficult keywords which makes sense that I am not ranking as high because I don’t have as much authority as probably some of the websites that are currently ranking for this keyword. The way that we could find that out is to take the keyword and look at the pages that are ranking. From here you will see the different pages that are ranking.
Competitor Research
Going back to Ahrefs’ competitor research, you can see the amount of traffic value, if you click this it will show you the value of the pages or the top page. This is based on the value of how much money they are supposedly bringing in the backlink profile.
The graph that you see on the dashboard will just show you the number of links that you have been accumulating over the last three months and then on a much bigger graph you will see below is all-time stats.
You will see right beside the “Backlink profile” tab on your dashboard is the “Organic search”, this tab will show you organic rankings that you have been having all-time for the last 30 days, you can sort this up from the last 30 days to a whole year.
For the last tab in the dashboard, we have “Paid search”, this tab will show the stats for any paid advertisement that you are running on your website. In my case, I’m not running any paid ads for my domain so it won’t show me anything.
On the right side of the dashboard, you will see a list of different countries, from here you will see where you’re getting most of your traffic from and your top competitors based on the keyword share, right below you can also see all the domains that are ranking for similar keywords.
Content Explorer
Ahrefs’ content explorer tool is something that the company recently upgraded. What it does is it gives you the ability to take any keyword and it will give you all the different pages that are ranking for these keywords. Now, this is something that I don’t really want to look up just because it’s a little too specific. If I were to look up something I'm going to get a lot of ideas, it may give us four million pages ranking for SEO and more specifically.
For instance, let’s type in “search engine optimization”, because there’s a lot of posts regarding this topic with a lot of similarities for the topic, it has a tendency to confuse the keyword research. What you can do in order to solve this issue is you can add these different filters like referring domains, so if you wanted to go for a post that you think you could only get zero to three links to and you want it to at least have more than 400 organic traffic.
So right now we have 253 pages with those metrics and what we can do is we can sort by the domain rating and then look through results that have domain rating around what we have, that way we kind of have a more comparable place to fight on in a sense.
To go further into the example, you can see a page that says “How To Monetize A Website: 14 Ways To Make Money Online”, the DR for this is 30 which is within our range, there’s only one domain pointing to this post and the post has 775 organic traffic with a traffic value of 7,000, this is within our metrics, so if I click into “Details”, it will actually show me different organic keywords at this post is ranking for and where it’s receiving most of its traffic. Still for this page, you can see 1,200 volume outward position for and keyword difficulty 5.
Keyword Explorer
Keywords Explorer is based on the world's largest third-party search query database. There are tens of thousands of keyword suggestions. You'll never run out of keyword suggestions. Keywords Explorer is based on a massive database of over 7 billion keywords that is updated monthly with new data.
A total of 171 countries backed the initiative. Not from the United States? It's no problem. Data for 171 nations is available through Keywords Explorer.
There are ten different search engines. There are other search engines than Google. We can estimate keyword numbers for places like YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Baidu, and others by processing vast amounts of clickstream data.
Volumes of Searches that are Accurate On a regular basis, Ahrefs use clickstream data to modify their search volumes, ensuring they're constantly up to current.
Among your keyword suggestions, look for the "low-hanging fruit." Based on the current top-ranking pages, Ahrefs’ KD score predicts how difficult it will be to rank for your keyword.
Metric of "Clicks". The presence of a large search volume does not imply that people will click on the search results. Only Ahrefs can show you the estimated amount of clicks for your keywords.
For your desired keyword, look in the "Parent Topic" section. A single page can rank for hundreds of keywords that are closely related. Parent Topic decides if you may rank for your goal keyword on your page while focusing on a more general topic.
Metrics for Advanced SEO: Return Rate, Clicks per Search, Percentage of Clicks, Percentage of Paid Clicks, and more are SEO stats that no other tool will show you.
You can enter up to 10,000 keywords at a time and see the search volumes for each.
If you are trying to target different topics on your website, you might want to go for either the main target which is like SEO certification or you want to go for the shoulder in each of that which would be similar to top online training programs, that way you can go for easier keywords that aren’t completely directly related because they are going to be really hard to rank for when you first start out but you are still going to be able to go for keywords that are things that you can eventually build up to that would be competitive.
Site Explorer
This tool will be responsible for showing you keywords that your competitors are ranking for that you are not ranking for. If you enter in your competitors, what it will do is it will show you all the keywords that they are all ranking for.
Site Explorer from Ahrefs integrates three significant SEO tools into a single interface:
Organic traffic research - Investigate what keywords your competitors are ranking for and which sites receive the most traffic from search engines.
Backlink checker - Find out which websites link to your competitors' websites and evaluate their backlink profiles.
Paid traffic research - Find out if your competitors are using bought search ads and where their paid traffic is going.
Investigate Organic Traffic
Determine which keywords your competitors rank for in search and how much traffic each keyword generates. Simply go to their websites and look through the "Organic search" part of the reports in Site Explorer.
Ahrefs have enough coverage to present an accurate picture of websites' organic search traffic because Ahrefs monitors over 150 million keywords in the United States alone (+ more for over 150 countries).
Backlinks should be investigated
Do you want to investigate a website's backlink profile? Simply enter the URL into Site Explorer and select the "Backlink profile" tab.
Site Explorer is the greatest tool for backlink research because Ahrefs has the quickest backlink crawler in the business and the world's largest index of live backlinks (over 14 trillion links).
Look into paid keywords
Do you want to see if your competitors are bidding on PPC advertisements and which keywords they're using?
To access all the juicy facts, go to the "Paid Search" portion of the reports.
Pages dedicated to research
The "Pages" section allows you to rapidly determine which pages on a target website have the highest number of backlinks and social shares.
Look into incoming links
The "Outgoing Links" section provides insight into the linking patterns of a target website.