What is Ahrefs and How do you use it for SEO?

If you are trying to market your website and get higher Google rankings, Ahrefs will greatly help you. It is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) software designed to help your website grow search traffic. 

Search Engine Optimization is when you optimize a webpage to improve and expand the quantity and quality of site traffic from the organic search results of different search engines. Since search engines show users the most relevant results on a certain topic, this SEO software helps your website by showing different search engines that your site’s content is the best among different content for a specific topic. 

Read on to learn more about Ahrefs and to know how to use it for search engine optimization.

What is Ahrefs? 

Ahrefs is an SEO software with different tools for competitor analysis, keyword research, link building, rank tracking, and site audits. These tools aid in improving your website’s Google rankings. Aside from these, many marketing professionals use this SEO software to determine their highest-performing content on a specific topic. 

For Ahrefs to work, this tool infiltrates the web and saves lots and lots of data from it. After that, the data becomes accessible through a simple user interface. Every day, Ahrefs processes over eight billion pages a day, and it also updates every 15 minutes. 

Different Tools Offered by Ahrefs

Ahrefs offer several tools that make data analysis a lot easier. Some of these tools include:

Content Explorer- This tool will aid in looking for the highest-performing content from your website. The Content Explorer tool looks into different social media channels and determines what content from your webpage has the most number of shares on different platforms. 

Keywords Explorer- This tool determines the best keyword ideas for your webpage and helps estimate site traffic.

Rank Tracker- The Rank Tracker tool is helpful when you want to trace your ranking at any location. This tool could generate daily, weekly, or monthly reports for your website and applies to desktop and mobile rankings.

Site Audit- This tool helps in determining any SEO issues, if there are any, on your website. It also allows you to check on your website’s SEO health from time to time. 

Site Explorer- The Site Explorer tool aids in analyzing your website’s backlinks profile, as well as that of your competitors, much easier. This tool is also very helpful in determining profitable and high-ranking keywords for both organic and paid searches. 

These tools may seem quite bit overwhelming, especially for site developers and marketing professionals new to Ahrefs. However, Ahrefs’ tools and features will get easier to explore over time. But in the meantime, here is a deeper guide on how to use Ahrefs for SEO, which will be helpful for beginners. 

Ahrefs helps you find relevant link prospects faster and easier

If you want to do SEO for a certain webpage, Ahrefs could help look for several link prospects quickly. For instance, if you manage a site that’s all about fitness and lifestyle, you may search all websites with content containing the words “fitness and lifestyle.” Then determine the best pages, and you could negotiate with them and ask them to feature your website and link them to their content. 

With Ahrefs’ Content Explorer tool, you can now easily find all webpage containing your keywords, filter them out to your liking, and generate the best pages that can be your link prospects. 

Ahrefs help determine the popular searches on Google

Every day, Google gets billions of searches all around the world. So to expand your website’s traffic on this search engine, you must determine what people are usually searching for. This will allow you to produce content that’s relevant for many. 

The Keywords Explorer tool in Ahrefs allows you to do keyword searching and helps generate relevant keywords you might want to use for your content. This tool lets Ahrefs users see related and relevant terms to their chosen keywords. 

Aside from these, this tool also helps determine the Keyword Difficulty score of a certain keyword. The higher the score, the more difficult a certain keyword is to rank. However, this does not imply that users must not use that specific keyword. It simply means you must put in a lot of work in order to rank your keyword. 

Ahrefs also helps in knowing your competitors’ search traffic

To know how much effort you should exert to make your content relevant, you should determine the status of your competitors’ websites. You must know how much is their search traffic and if it’s possible to beat that traffic with your current traffic rate. It’s also helpful if you know your competitors’ high-performing pages so that you can get ideas on how to market your content better. 

With the help of Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool, you can now easily determine your competitors’ search traffics and compare them to your website’s traffic. This tool also lets you see content posted on your competitor’s websites and their corresponding search traffic. 

Ahrefs gives you knowledge on your ranking progress 

It is possible that several keywords from content on your website may have a higher ranking in Google. So it is important to monitor your ranking progress to know the keywords that could help your website grow. 

Ahrefs’s Site Explorer tool can show almost all of your website’s keywords ranking in search engines. Aside from this, if you also want to keep an eye on several of your website’s most relevant keywords, you can always add them to the Rank Tracker tool. 

Ahrefs could also detect SEO issues that might affect your performance on different search engines

Search engines have different recommendations a site developers or marketing professionals must comply with for their websites and content to be more appealing so that users can engage more with their content. However, despite complying with all these recommendations, your website could still be hidden sometimes and could get a very small engagement from users. This may happen because of some undetected SEO issues on your site. 

With the help of Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool, you can now easily detect SEO issues that might affect your website’s performance. This tool will scan and find common SEO issues and also give you recommendations on how to deal with these issues. Aside from these, the Site Audit tool also allows you to establish recurring site audits and help you observe your site’s SEO Health Score from time to time.