Ahrefs

Here we can add the domain or URL we want to start tracking. We can create projects for multiple domains or URLs. Each of the projects we add to the dashboard will occupy an individual bar on our dashboard, showing all the important data associated with it.

The projects we add here will also automatically add to the other tools we need, including Site Audit and Rank Tracker. The Dashboard condenses information from other tools, including Site Explorer, Site Audit, and Rank Tracker, to display it on a single screen so we can get a quick overview of how our projects are doing.

Overview

The default tab that opens when we go to the Dashboard is the Overview tab. We can see on the top left of the page that this is the selected tab. Each of our projects is displayed separately along the length of the page. Different metrics regarding the projects are displayed in individual boxes below the project name. Each of these boxes on the Dashboard is clickable. If we click on them, it will take us to the complete report where that information comes from. For example, if you click on the Backlinks box shown in the above picture, it will open a comprehensive backlink report for the project.

The information from the Site Explorer, shown by the yellow outlined portion in the image below, is updated every 12 hours.

However, the Site Audit metrics on the left side of this red box and the Rank Tracker metrics on its right are displayed from the last time they were updated.

GSC Performance tab

By connecting our Google account to Ahrefs, we can also see the performance metrics from our Google Search Console from Ahrefs’ dashboard. The GSC Performance tab on the top left will display this data. The filters to change the search type, country, device, or time available in the Google Search Console are also available in the Ahrefs GSC performance tab, along with some additional features. Where GSC can show us a maximum of 16 months of data, Ahrefs records data from much longer than that and can be configured to display this data. We can also change the display of the performance graphs to display a daily, weekly, or monthly view of our site’s organic traffic.

The dashboard isn’t the only place to benefit from when using Ahrefs. Site Explorer, Keyword Explorer, Rank Tracker, and Content Explorer are all very useful, depending on which area of SEO we are working on. We can also set up alerts for some important metrics for our projects.

Keyword Explorer

We have seen that one of the preliminary tasks to work on when building a site’s SEO is keyword research. When using Ahrefs, the Keyword Explorer is our primary tool for keyword research. It’s available with all the paid plans and provides a platform to discover keyword ideas for our niche and analyze the important metrics linked to them, such as ranking difficulty and traffic potential.

Overview report

When we search for a keyword in the tool, the first report we see is the Overview report. It gives us a high-level view of all the important data, including keyword difficulty, volume, and traffic potential.

We can customize our search to target any of the 200+ countries and ten search engines available in their database. Search volume gives us the total monthly searches for that keyword in the country we are searching for, while the global search volume gives the total searches for all the countries in the tool’s database.

The keyword difficulty score gives us a number on a scale of 1 to 100, telling us how hard it is to rank for the given keyword, 100 being the hardest. Under this score, we can also see the estimated number of websites we’ll need backlinks from to rank on the first pages of the SERPs.

Traffic potential can be easily confused with volume, but the two are entirely different metrics. Traffic potential tells us the organic traffic that a webpage ranking no.1 for the given keyword gets in a month. It’s important to note here that the page ranking no.1 for the given keyword isn’t getting all its traffic from this keyword alone. The traffic comes from all of the keywords that the page ranks for.

Ads History

Other than the Overview report, there are some other tabs in the Keyword Explorer as well. Ads History gives a history of paid search results for the searched keyword. Searching the keyword ‘By Domain’ on the Ads History page can tell us which of our competitors have been targetting the searched keyword for paid campaigns. If several of our competitors are targeting a certain keyword, chances are good that we might also benefit from it. We can also search the keyword ‘By Landing Page’, which would tell us which pages the paid traffic for the keyword is being directed to. Analyzing these pages can give us ideas for creating our own landing pages.

Keyword ideas

We’ll find multiple tabs under the heading "Keyword Ideas" on the sidebar. The matching terms report gives us a list of keywords that contain the keyword that we have searched for. In this report, we can search keyword ideas by ‘Terms Match’ or ‘Phrase Match’, where Terms Match will give us a list of keywords that include all the words in our searched phrase, but they may appear in any order. Phrase match gives us a list of keywords, including the exact phrase we have searched for and in the given order. We can also adjust the filter to show results in our preferred range of metrics. For instance, we can specify a maximum KD of 20, which means that all the keywords in the list will have a KD lower than 20.

We can also use the Related Terms report to find keyword ideas. As the name suggests, this report can help us find keywords that may not contain the words from our target keyword but are related. It can help us find other relevant keywords to target for the same page or create a sub-topic. We can search the keyword by "Also Rank For" or "Also Talk About", where "Also Rank For" will give us the keywords that the ranking pages for our target keyword also rank for. The "Also Talk About" list gives us a list of related phrases that the pages that rank for our searched keyword frequently mentioned on the page. By customizing the filters, we can find keywords with high volumes and low keyword difficulty. We can also filter keywords for our targetted SERP features.

There’s also a Search Suggestions tab under Keyword Ideas. In this report, we can see autocomplete suggestions for our searched phrase. Different from Google Search’s autocomplete, this one gives a bigger list of keyword ideas along with the SEO metrics for each. Again, we can customize the filter to display low-difficulty, high-volume keywords.

Traffic share

Under the Traffic Share heading, there are two tabs that we can go to. The first one takes us to the Traffic Share by Domains report, which gives us a list of domains that are getting the most organic traffic for the seed keywords we provide.

The Traffic Share by Pages report gives us a list of web pages that get the most organic traffic for the seed keywords that we enter. Both these reports give the best data when we enter multiple seed keywords instead of a single one.

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