What is Ahrefs, Ahrefs tool tutorial
This tutorial will teach you how to use the Ahrefs tool. Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool mainly used for link building, keyword analysis, competitor analysis, website ranking tracking and website diagnosis. If you are familiar with the code, you should know that the page link is called in the code through the ahrefs tag, and this tool is branded with this.
This article directory (quick navigation)
- Ahrefs can be used for
- of data names in Ahrefs tool
- External link analysis function
- Keyword analysis function
- Content analysis function
- Other useful features of Ahrefs
what Ahrefs can be used for
Under normal circumstances, Ahrefs is mainly used to analyze the links, keyword ranking and health of the website. Taking our own website as an example, the comprehensive information in Ahrefs is as follows:
It is a pity that Ahrefs , like other well-known foreign SEO tools, is mainly developed for foreign languages (mainly English), the data analysis ability of Chinese websites is relatively weak, and many information data are very inaccurate. Our website currently has 800+ keywords for various homepage rankings , and the search traffic has exceeded 10,000 in June 2020 (Google’s official traffic analysis tool statistics), while the statistics on Ahrefs are only 323.
Taking the traffic valuation of Ahrefs as a proportion, the monthly traffic value of our website should be about 5758 US dollars, and the exchange rate is 6, that is 34548 yuan, and one year is 414576 yuan. That is to say, the SEO traffic of our website is equivalent to saving us 410,000 advertising fees every year ( Ahrefs ‘ cost standard calculation is based on the corresponding click cost of Google PPC advertising). From the above data, it can also reflect the huge benefits that SEO can bring to the website.
This is also to explain that if your website is a Chinese website, the data provided by the traffic statistics function and keyword statistics function of Ahrefs will have large errors. It is recommended to use Google’s official tools for statistics. In addition, from the long-term use, we found that the traffic of websites is relatively small (the monthly traffic is less than 1000, but this data is not bad for ordinary websites, especially enterprise websites), and the statistical data of Ahrefs is not accurate enough. Traffic, Ahrefs can only find a few or a dozen traffic. In the above situation, it is recommended to check the traffic with Google analysis tool , and check the keyword ranking with Google webmaster tool .
To better illustrate the Ahrefs function, we return to the English website. For example, the well-known Apple website:
You can also use Ahrefs to do keyword analysis for Google, YouTube, Amazon and other platforms, enter query keywords:
It will give very detailed relevant data:
Many people also use Ahrefs to find topics to create high-quality content:
its brand name Ahrefs , this tool launched in 2011 with backlink analysis as its main selling point.
The development over the years has transformed Ahrefs from a link analysis tool to a powerful comprehensive SEO tool.
Explanation of data names in Ahrefs tool
After you use Ahrefs , you will find that this tool contains many types of data information, such as “UR”, ” Ahrefs Rank” and so on. To be honest, Ahrefs ‘ interpretation of these data terms is not very good. Through its own English annotations, it is still difficult for you to understand what some data mean. For example, its interpretation of Domain Rating is “the target URL’s backlink profile on a 100-point logarithmic scale (higher = stronger).”, which translates to the rating of the backlink of the page , 100 is the full score, the higher the stronger, This explanation is rather vague. Therefore, before using Ahrefs , it is best to understand the specific meaning of various data names. The following is our vocabulary explanation for some commonly used data.
URL Rating (UR) : Page rating. Calculated by Ahrefs based on the quality and number of backlinks this page has .
Domain Rating (DR) : The domain name weight, that is, a comprehensive weight value of the entire website, is obtained by combining the UR of each page.
Anchors : Anchor text used for external links on the site.
Referring Domains : Associated domains. The source website domain name of the external link to the page or website. The higher the number of associated domains, the more favorable it is for rankings.
CTLDs Distribution : Top-level domain distribution. The top-level domain names included in the external links of the website, such as .com, .edu , etc.
Ahrefs Rank : Ahrefs Rank. Among all the sites included in Ahrefs , the ranking of the target site is similar to the Alexa ranking.
Parent Topic : The topic. For example, SEO is a big field, link building is a branch under SEO, and SEO is the Parent Topic of link building.
Traffic Potential : Potential traffic. If you can rank first for a certain keyword, how much traffic can you expect to get.
Keyword Difficulty : Keyword ranking difficulty. Ahrefs is an evaluation of the difficulty of ranking for a keyword, the higher the more difficult.
Also Rank For : Ranking keywords in the same period. For example, a page that ranks in the top 10 on “Google SEO” may also have a top 10 ranking on “Google SEO”.
External link analysis function
This feature is one of Ahrefs’ earliest and most important features. With this feature, you can do many things, such as analyzing external links from competitor websites to discover new link opportunities. Next, we will explain in detail how to use this function.
Website external links
At the top of the Ahrefs interface, click “Site Explorer” and enter the URL you want to view in the jump interface:
Then, you can see the detailed data of this website or page, including backlinks and traffic. For the specific form, you can refer to the data picture on Apple’s official website above. For a more in-depth look at the external links on this site, we need to click on the ” Backlinks ” section of the sidebar .
complete list of backlinks that this website or page has . Note: The completeness here is only relative , because no matter what SEO tool, it can only provide the information it has already included, which is the same as the search engine. However, no matter which tool, its crawling and indexing capabilities are definitely not as good as Google’s, so the links that Google can find, it may not be able to find; Google spiders are open, and tools such as Ahrefs can’t get information about those links. Many professional SEO companies will use this method to protect their high- quality external link resources .
Among all the backlinks found, it is recommended to focus on the backlinks of the ” Dofollow ” nature. There are two types of external links, ” Dofollow ” and ” Nofollow “, the former has a higher effect on the transmission of weights, and the latter is weak. Using the filter bar above the link, we can choose to filter out Dofollow links:
Many times, we need to understand the composition of external links as a whole , such as which websites give links to target pages? How much did you give? Why are they giving these links? If you go to statistical analysis one by one, it will be too troublesome, especially when there are many external links . For this requirement, we can use “One link per domain” to give us the desired result:
The role of external link reporting
Through the above operations, we can obtain the detailed external link situation of a website. How to use this external link report ? We summarize two aspects:
- Discover which competitor websites have links and look for link opportunities in these links
For example, I found that a link page owned by a competitor’s website contained multiple links to other website pages, similar to this:
And there happens to be a high-quality article about XML Sitemaps on my website , much better than the content of the page it currently points to, so we can contact the operator of the website and recommend our page to him. If all goes well and he replaces the link with our page address, then we get a nice backlink. Of course, if you don’t have the corresponding content, you can also create it in advance and then try to contact.
- Find out why the other party can get a lot of links
For example, by investigating the external links of a website, we found that its research articles have acquired a large number of external links. Most of the reason for such links is that the article is cited by others as some sort of basis in their content.
Knowing this reason, if we are also doing the same type of website, we should consider writing more articles of this type to attract others to link to our web pages.
cross link
Ahrefs called “Link Intersect”, which means cross-linked external links. This feature is very useful, but many people ignore it, or don’t find it at all. Click “More” above the main navigation and find this entry:
In the jump box, we can enter two or more competitor websites for external link analysis. You can also exclude certain sites using the “optional” below:
What is the use of this function? For example, if your competitor gets a link, it may be because of partnership, luck, or other factors; however, if the linked page also links to your second competitor’s website, or even more similar sites. This shows what?
It means that this website prefers to link to a certain type of website or page, which means that your chances of getting links from this website are often much higher than other websites.
Pages with the most backlinks
The entry for Best By Links is in the “Pages” section of the Ahrefs sidebar , but I think it would be more coherent to explain it here. The specific function of this function is to help us understand which page of the target website has the most external links, and there will be a specific ranking list. Take the Moz website as an example, select a page that can be displayed normally (status code 200 ok):
We have since obtained a very revealing result. From the above, we can see that an SEO guide article page called “Beginner’s Guide to SEO [Search Engine Optimization]” has the third highest link in the entire Moz website. Keep in mind that Moz has tens of thousands of pages, many of which are popular SEO tool pages that are overtaken by a single article page.
This shows that users in the SEO field are very interested in the content of this type of tutorial article, which makes this article widely disseminated and attracts so many links.
Recently acquired external links
The “New” Backlinks report will show us the backlinks recently obtained by the website. Click the “New” entry under ” Backlinks ” in the left column :
What’s the point of this report? What it tells us is the backlink opportunities that currently exist . For example, one is a page that has existed for 5 years, and the other is a page that has only been published in the last month. Of the two, if the conditions are the same, which one has a higher chance of getting a link?
No doubt it is the latter. Because the information is constantly updated over time, the value of the old page tends to be lower and lower, and its operators often have insufficient motivation to change and update it. As for the new page, its operator has just completed the work, and if there is better link content, it will undoubtedly be more motivated to update.
lost link
Lost backlinks means lost backlinks. The reason for the loss of backlinks is usually that the content is updated or the page where the backlink is located is removed. External links exist on third-party websites, and the phenomenon of loss is unavoidable. However, if there is a large amount of loss, it should be paid attention to, and it is best to refill.
Keyword analysis function
Ahrefs ‘ keyword analysis is integrated into the Keywords Explorer section. This function of it is also very convenient to use. Through keyword analysis, you can visually see the detailed data information of each keyword.
Keyword Overview
Enter the target keyword, and in the Overview screen, you can see a series of data cards for this keyword.
This data information is very helpful for us to choose suitable keywords. One of these data is unique to Ahrefs , at least I haven’t found other tools that do. That’s “Return Rate,” which means how often people search for that keyword repeatedly.
From the above figure, we can also understand the specific click situation of this keyword: the monthly average total number of clicks and the click composition. For example: 60% of the search results were not clicked, 2% of paid ads clicked, 1% of both paid ads and organic search results were clicked, and 37% of organic search results were clicked . From this, we can also know that for most users, they are more willing to trust the natural search results, that is, the ranking that SEO is striving for, rather than paid advertising.
Some people may wonder, why are there so many users who only search but do not click?
In fact, it’s not that these people didn’t click on the results in the search, but the results they clicked were mostly special Google placements, such as: Featured Snippets (selected snippets), videos, People also ask (Q&A section), etc. It is Google’s diversified search results display.
But if you think that the effect of SEO is reduced because of this, you are wrong. The content displayed in these special positions also comes from various websites. Good SEO can improve the chances of your website being displayed in these positions.
At the bottom of the overview interface, we can also see which pages are currently ranked on the home page for this keyword:
And, a ranking page history for this keyword:
What are these data for? Through these data, we can understand the page changes on the home page of the keyword, which pages have entered the home page, and which pages have left the home page. If this result is stable for a long time, it means that Google has found the answer it likes, and it will be difficult for you to compete for the first page of this keyword; on the contrary, if the result is very unstable, your chances will also be reduced. will be much higher.
keyword ideas
The many functions of the Keyword ideas column can help us better expand related keywords.
There will be a large number of related words listed according to the keywords you entered, and then you can use the filter bar above to find keywords that meet your needs.
Do keyword analysis for other platforms
Ahrefs can also be applied to other search engines and platforms, such as: YouTube, Amazon, Bing, etc. You can also freely set the target country area.
Content analysis function
Ahrefs ‘ content analysis function, Content Explorer, can find popular content in a topic or keyword area for us.
widely shared content
Enter the target keyword or topic in the Content Explorer:
Then, you can see the N number of popular content pages under this topic, and the number of times they have been shared on social media:
Drainage value of content
The ultimate goal of SEO is to get more traffic. In the results given by Content Explorer, we can not only see the sharing of the content, but also the traffic value of the content.
Duplicate content
At the top of the content analysis interface, on the left, there is a Republished option to find out the content that has been published repeatedly:
The repeated publishing here does not mean that the same content is published repeatedly, but that the content on the same page is updated and published.
Google likes fresh and valuable content, and if a website does not have any updates for a long time, it will have a bad impact on rankings. In the same way, if a piece of popular content is kept updated, its ranking ability will definitely be more stable. The harder you want to exceed it, the higher it is.
Other useful features of Ahrefs
above focuses on explaining several major functions of Ahrefs , here are some practical functions to talk about.
competitor site
Competing Domains can tell us which sites are competing for similar keywords, so you can understand who your competitors are.
If your competitors have major e-commerce platforms or Fortune 500 companies, it will undoubtedly represent a huge difficulty in competition. You may want to avoid their edge and focus on smaller keywords first.
Content Opportunities
Ahrefs , Content Gap, is similar to the Keyword Gap of SEMrush , both of which help us find keywords that have ranking opportunities.
By comparing multiple competitor sites, find out the keywords they have in common that rank for, and then see if our own site has a chance to compete.
In the bottom column, you can enter your own website to prevent interference with the results.
Site Diagnostics
Ahrefs can perform a comprehensive diagnosis of your website to find possible problems. First, you have to create your website project “New project” in the “Dashboard” interface:
Then, fill in the information as required. Go to the third step, “Site Audit”, and Ahrefs will diagnose your site.
The diagnostic results will display many aspects of data information, such as normal pages, error pages that cannot be opened, and so on.
Paid Search Advertising
Although the Ahrefs tool was originally designed for SEO, it has grown over the years to include some useful features for PPC paid advertising.
Enter the URL and click the “Paid Search” column to view the Ads advertisements made by the website, including the traffic brought by these advertisements:
reminder function
reminder function Alerts can help us know the changes in the backlinks and rankings of the website at the first time. As soon as your competitor’s website adds backlinks or ranks for a new keyword, it will send you an email.
Website comparison feature
The Domain Comparison function allows you to visually compare and view various data of multiple websites, including the number of external links, the number of pages, etc., allowing you to understand the gap between competitors’ websites in a more detailed way.
Find dead links to websites
Ahrefs can detect the dead links in the website for us, without needing to verify the web links one by one.
Analyze anchor text links
Anchor text links are the most efficient form of external links to transfer weights , but if your anchor text links are too single, it is easy for Google to think that they are over-optimizing and be penalized.
The increase in external links to the page
Best by links ‘ growth can view the changes in the external links owned by the pages in the recent (last 1 day, 7 days, 30 days) .
Summarize
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool, it claims to have the second largest index library besides Google, so its data richness has a great advantage over other SEO tools. However, no matter how good SEO tools are, they only provide data information, and the final SEO effect depends on whether you can effectively use these data.
About The Author
