Ahrefs—Part 2

Other than our site’s performance, we can also use the same tool to track our competitors’ performance and generate some actionable insights with the data we find. For example, we can see how our competitor’s performance is changing over time, filter the traffic volume by country, the top keywords that send them the bulk of their traffic, and see how the quality and quantity of their cumulative backlinks is changing over time.

Other reports

Besides the Overview Report, there are several other reports in the Site Explorer that can be helpful too. The Backlinks report, for instance, is an important one that gives us a detailed report of the backlinks pointing to a domain, subdomain, subfolder, or webpage. For each backlink, it will show the rating, referring domains, linked domains, traffic, and other metrics. We can filter the list using a number of customizations, such as dofollow links, to see only the URLs that pass link juice.

Instead of the individual backlinks, we can also go to the referring domains report to generate a list of the top domains linking to a website. There is also an Anchors report with a list of anchor texts for the backlinks pointing to the URL being searched. We can also use the Anchors report to find unnatural links. A high percentage of keyword-rich anchors with dofollow link type, for example, can be a sign of unnatural links, and we might want to consider disavowing them.

The same tool also includes an Organic Keywords section that can tell us the top keywords that a URL is ranking for. Again, we can customize filters to sieve out the most promising keywords to optimize our pages for. Finally, the Top Pages report gives us the list of the top-performing pages of the searched website. We can include words and phrases in the Include box to filter out pages for target keywords. This report can also be used to find the best-performing content and trending topics on websites such as Reddit, Medium, and Quora.

Site Audit

Site Audit is another useful tool for webmasters and SEO specialists. We can use it for auditing our site for on-page and technical SEO.

Overview

The Overview report gives a high-level profile of the website’s on-page and technical SEO health. The Health Score gives the percentage of error-free internal URLs on our site. The same report also shows a list of top issues affecting our website based on the total number of URLs affected by it. Clicking on the issue will give us a detailed description of the issue and ways to fix it. Clicking on a column will open the Page Explorer for the affected URLs.

Page Explorer

The Page Explorer report lets us customize the filters to display a list of URLs on our website that match the filter. For instance, if we want to filter out webpages that have titles longer than recommended, we can choose this filter in the Content dropdown menu.

Link Explorer

Link Explorer lets us diagnose the health of external and internal links associated with our website. We can use the report to find broken internal and external links.

Link Opportunities

The Link Opportunities report generates a list of internal linking opportunities for the page on our website. We can customize the filters to find pages on our website for internal linking specific to our requirements. For instance, if we want to link to pages about SEO optimization only, we can set Advanced Filters to ‘Keywords’ that ‘Contain’ the keyword ‘SEO Optimization’.

Rank Tracker

Rank Tracker helps us track our website’s ranking for our targetted keywords. We can also schedule regular updates for the ranking data.

Overview report

Similar to Ahrefs’ other tools, there is an Overview report that shows us all the basic keyword tracking metrics on a single screen. We can choose to view mobile or desktop rankings. Rank Tracker allows us to group our keywords by tags. When grouped in this way, we can filter tags to view the ranking of the tagged group of keywords. We can also filter the ranking by location or by position in SERPs. The positions filter also allows us to see the performance of keywords whose positions have recently improved or declined. We can also see whether a keyword has a SERP feature and if we rank for them.

Other reports

We can group keywords with tags and use the Tags Report to view the performance of these groups of keywords. We can use filters above the report to adjust the data in the table according to what we’re looking for.

There’s also a Pages report that lets us see the pages on your website that rank for the keywords we are tracking. When we click the keyword dropdown for any of these pages, we can see which tracked keywords the page is ranking for. The Grossing report shows the changes in the ranking of our tracked keywords with time. For instance, we can see how the ranking position has improved or declined in the last week or last month.

There is also a Metrics report that shows us all the keyword metrics for the keywords we are tracking. The report also shows us the ‘parent topic’ for the keyword so that we can target a more general topic with which we will also rank for the current keyword. The tool also includes reports that can help us see our ranking against our competitors for the keywords we are tracking. These reports are available below the Competitors section on the sidebar on the left.

Additionals

While we have covered the majority of Ahrefs’ tools, there are others too. Content Explorer, for instance, lets us search and generate insights from Ahrefs’ database of around five billion web pages. We can use the tool to get content ideas, low-competition keywords, link opportunities, and more. We can also set up important alerts using Ahrefs, for instance, when we gain or lose backlinks for our top-ranking pages, or when one of our pages ranks for a new keyword, or when we win a brand mention somewhere on the web.

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