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    How good is it to be a positioner – good? Well when you have access to a number of tools that allow you to analyze the various factors that affect your website’s google ranking.

    Why to many? All of the tools are based on different databases, and it’s well known that looking at something from more than one perspective gives you more.

    Why not?

    One of the tools that will allow you to develop an SEO strategy is Ahrefs – a paid tool that allows you to analyze your link profile, keywords, content and more. Let’s take a closer look at what Ahrefs offers.

    what is Ahrefs and some tips on how to use it

    One of the most important features Ahrefs offers is the analysis of a site’s link profile.

    panel-ahrefs

    After going to the „Site Explorer” tab, we will be able to check the link profile of the studied site, its keywords and the traffic generated from the search engine. The first analysis that Ahrefs shows us with graphs and tables presents a large amount of data that will overwhelm the layman and delight the expert.
    Knowing what this data is will allow us to draw conclusions and develop an appropriate SEO strategy. Let’s start with an analysis of the link profile.

    DR, UR, backlinks, number of referring domains

    • URL rating (UR) – the strength of the link profile – not of the entire domain, but of a selected sub-site. In this case there is a scale from 0 to 100 with 1 being a poor score and 100 being a very good score
    • Domain rating (DR) – is the same as UR, with the difference that it applies to the entire domain.
    • Backlinks – the number of links our domain has received from other websites.
    • Referring domains – the number of domains that contain a link back to our site.
    • Organic keywords – the number of keywords for which our site is positioned.
    • Organic traffic – estimates how many users visited our domain in the last month.

    In the side menu, you will find tabs that take you to detailed analysis on the subject of links. You won’t find audits, comparisons with competitors or key phrases here. That information is found further down. Do you already notice how extensive Ahrefs is and how much information you can get from it? Let’s take a look at the ones related to links.

    Ahrefs links

    Under this tab you should see information about all the links that refer (return – hence backlinks) to our domain. Using this tab we will find out how many leads to our site, where they come from, are they nofollow or dofollow and whether they are still active or have been lost.

    Lost backlinks

    This is where we can find links that, for some reason, do not go directly to the tabs that return response code 200 on our site. Most often we will find there links leading to subpages that return a 404 response code on our site. A given state of affairs can result from several things, such as:

    • when changing the structure of the site, we did not implement proper redirects by which external links lead to bookmarks that are actually no longer there,
    • we did not properly conduct, or someone conducted, link-building activities,
    • we removed a category or product on the store and failed to implement proper redirection.

    And to the redirection now let’s go.

    There are two ways to recover broken links. The first is to implement proper 301 redirects so that the linking consequently leads, by the shortest possible route, to a bookmark that on our site returns a response code of 200.

    The first way is to implement proper 301 redirects so that the linking consequently leads, by the shortest possible route, to a bookmark that on our site returns a response code of 200.

    Another solution that can also be applied here is to contact the owner, or owners, of the sites from which the linking leading to the 404 bookmarks takes place, with a request that they correct the links to lead directly to the subpages of interest.

    Linking domains

    This is where you can check information about the referring domains to our site: address, traffic, number of dofollow links, new links, lost links, referring links, status (new or lost) or DR of the domain.

    Anchors

    In this tab, we can check if the anchors match the keyword phrases of our site, are similar to them or if they correspond to the content they lead to. As in the previous tab „Referring domains” we will find here such information as links directing to the target or their last status, but also, anchor text (that is, the phrase under which the link is), dofollow links, TOP DR, referring domains.

    Referring IP addresses

    This is a tab that generates a report that groups all referring sites and domains by IP address.

    Internal backlinks

    On this page, we can take a look at all the internal links found on the surveyed site. The detailed information we can find here for the pages found are:  URL rating (UR), the number of domains that link to this page, the number of outbound links from the page (in the table this is referred to by the abbreviation extr.), traffic, the number of keywords the page is positioned for (key.), anchor and backlink.

    Links section

    Compared to the previous tabs, this page looks a little different. Here you can make an analysis of the page that links our competitors, but not us.

    Keywords Explorer

    This is where we will be able to analyze individual keyword phrases. An interesting option is the ability to analyze keywords not only on Google, but also YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and others. When browsing, be sure to select the appropriate country.

    The information we can draw from here is:

    • keyword difficulty, which is the difficulty of reaching the top10 for a given keyword in a defined region, where a value of 0 indicates an easy level
    • search volume, which indicates the average number of searches for a given phrase
    • traffic potential,
    • global volume

    Below, however, is a section with suggested key phrases. It is divided into:

    • phrase matching – examples of all keywords containing exact match, i.e. exactly the same phrase we are analyzing,
    • questions,
    • also ranks for – in the expansion we get a list of phrases on which pages that are in the TOP 10 are positioned, in addition to the keyword we specified in the search engine.
    • talk about – these are other keywords and keyword phrases that appear on the top-ranking pages appearing in the TOP 10.

    Content Explorer

    The last screen we’ll discuss will be the Content Explorer, through which we can find a relevant new blog article idea, search for a not-so-competitive keyword or select sites from which it would be useful to get a link

    When searching for a phrase (topic), we can set a filter for where we will search. We have a choice: everywhere, in the title, in the content or in the URL.

    After searching, we will get an analysis of the results in terms of filters such as:

    • Pages over time – a graph showing the seasonality of the phrase, when you hover over a column you will see how many pages have been published only once and how many pages have been updated
    • Major authors – this table lists authors who have written articles related to our search phrase, the number of articles on such topic and their traffic

    Under the report, on the other hand, we have the current search results showing us information about a particular domain:

    • meta title,
    • meta description,
    • address URL,
    • date of publication,
    • number of words the article contains,
    • the author’s data,
    • domain raiting,
    • domain raiding,
    • subpage traffic,
    • value of traffic on the subpage,

    After going to the report, you will get additional information regarding: history, link profile and organic keywords of the selected domain.

    Summary

    Ahrefs is a powerful tool dedicated to SEO work, and this post does not discuss all its capabilities. In addition to analyzing the link profile of our domain or competitors, its resources can be helpful in the process of creating new content for the site or selecting key phrases.

    Although there are many tools on the market to support SEO activities, Ahrefs is among the best and is one of the most frequently mentioned. This is supported by the multiplicity of available data and its quality.

    Ahrefs is one of the most widely used tools for SEO.

    After prolonged interaction with Ahrefs and learning how to use it, the optimizations implemented with its help will positively affect the improvement of positions in search results.

    Let's talk!

    Joanna Osiecka
    Joanna Osiecka