This review will cover Ahrefs in all its areas.
Many content creators use an SEO tool that can improve their ranking in google.
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool that has useful features for digital marketers, website owners, and SEO professionals. Whether you’re just starting out or an experienced individual, it will help you achieve your SEO goals and improve your website’s authority.
Website authority, known as domain authority (DA), is a ranking metric used to predict how well a website will rank on googles search engine, but we will later correctly talk about it.
Do not underestimate Ahrefs feature to perform keyword research. It can provide an insane amount of data for finding keywords and content ideas. In addition, Ahrefs keyword research tool is excellent for rank tracking; many SEO professionals use it to keep updated.
Keyword Researching With Ahrefs
Even though Ahrefs is better known for its backlink analysis capabilities, using its keyword-researching tool will help your website rank immensely. The keyword research provides information on keyword search volume, competition, and related keywords. This information can be used to help website owners to choose the best keywords to target and optimize their content for ranking. You should take into consideration that these are not a reflection of real-time data, but they are helpful as building solid websites requires months of good work.
Always check Organic keywords, that is considered to be a goldmine for your keyword research. This section can give you a lot of ideas, but of course, you need to filter them.
This is highly related to your website’s authority as it will determine what keywords you should target.
New sites should target longer tail keywords, and more authoritative websites can target more competitive keywords.
If you’re new and are building a website, you should filter your results accordingly with the keyword volume (average search volume per month).
It would be best if you were doing this until your website builds some authority, and afterward, you can search more competitive keywords. Be aware that the location plays a significant role in your keyword targeting, as keywords that are popular in the US might be irrelevant in the EU.
Keep An Eye on Your Competitors
Building a website is a very competitive field; to better understand and be one step ahead of others, you should keep an eye on your competitors.
You have the option right under “Organic Keywords” to check the “New” keywords. This might not seem very important at first, but having momentum with new keywords might drastically impact your website’s ranking for the better.
Hitting Google’s first page might create a snowball effect on your website and help you proliferate. On the other hand, consistently competing with others on new keywords will make it harder for your competitors to build a strong foundation.
Of course, you should always be using Ahrefs to its maximum capabilities; therefore, using its other tools will increase your chances of building authority for your website.
These other features that Ahrefs provides are:
- Backlink analysis
- Site Explorer
- Competitor Analysis
- Rank tracking
- Content Explorer
- Content Gap
And not only.
Let’s dive deeper into these features.
What Are Backlinks
Links on websites that generate traffic to your site are known as backlinks or inbound links. The quality and quantity of your backlinks will help your website rank higher in Google and Bing search engines.
Backlinks are a reflection of how popular your website is regarding its users. Therefore, SEO strategies are highly recommended for implementing, analyzing, and managing backlinks performance.
Organic traffic is a target of every ranking website; to increase it, you must invest time and resources in on-page and off-page SEO.
On-page optimization is creating content that directly reflects what your website is about.
Whereas Off-page optimization demonstrates to search engines that your content has value and is insightful for third parties, the backlink is the most important value statement.
There are different types of links: Internal links, external links, and Backlinks.
Internal Links are the links between web pages on the same domain, and they help people to navigate the website throughout their reading and blogs.
External Links connect to other domains and have a more comprehensive range of intentions:
- Referral link
- Support a claim made in the copy
- Recommend something
- Provide broader context for a specific topic they are covering
Fundamentally, each link is on the page to provide additional value to the reader. It’s essential to understand that each link has a direction, and it’s coming to the targeted page. Therefore, this is considered a backlink; search engines recognize the value backlink provides and reward the website.
This is how backlinks that point to your website indicate to a search engine that your content has value. Backlinks are known to bring the most value and are the most effective ways to rank your website.
Now let’s get back to website authority for a while.
What is Domain Authority?
If your homepage gets backlinks from a high-authority website, this boosts the authority of your homepage. Domain authority describes the network of URLs. Backlinks from external sites or internal links from your site also build authority from one URL to another.
You always want to attract as many backlinks as possible; these should be from websites with higher authority, as the lower authority backlinks will also affect your website’s authority. Therefore, attracting suitable backlinks will positively affect your website in the long run.
Basically, backlink building is essential to SEO, and building your domain authority is highly related to it. Focus on creating high-quality backlinks; the higher the quality of the backlinks, the higher your page ranks on search engines.
Link Building: Grow Your Authority
Patience will be your best friend when it comes to building backlinks, as it is the most challenging method of SEO to build authority. To build backlinks, you need to convince another web page that they will benefit on their website by linking to your website.
The process of actively acquiring backlinks is known as link building. Although, I wouldn’t recommend to email random people asking them to link you, as this will not be in your best interest, link building is a process that requires consistency.
Backlink generation can happen in several ways; it works similarly to lead generation; you need to reach people with your content.
Here are a few possible ways you could generate backlinks:
- Someone might find your content useful and decide to link to you.
- You linked someone, and they checked your content and linked you back.
- If you already have an existing business relationship with other platforms, encourage them to include your website on their mentions.
- Mutually beneficial business partnerships
- Charity work can generate goodwill as they are happy to promote the companies that support them.
- Building relationships with bloggers, they already have an audience of their own, and if they find your valuable content for their audience, you might benefit from each other.
Think of link-building as a natural consequence of your work. Your content will always be the best way to attract and generate backlinks.
To have an idea of what a good domain authority score is, consider these:
- Below 30 – Poor
- 30 to 40 – Below average
- 40 to 50 – Average
- 50 to 60 – Okay
- 60 to 70 – Very good
- 70 to 80 – Impressive
- 80 to 100 – Perfect score
Consider that a DA score of 95 to 100 is such high that it includes sites like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. But building your authority score to 70 is more manageable than improving your score above 70 or 80.
Why is Domain Authority Important?
There are thousands of websites targeting keywords, and Google has to decide which site to rank higher. Google obviously wants to ensure the user that he will have the best experience. Therefore, it will look for topic relevance and websites with a history of producing high-quality content, and the websites with a higher score are prioritized in the ranking.
Some websites have a higher ranking on SERPs on certain topics; this is because they have established authority in their niche, and the search engine will prioritize them when ranking websites.
Reminder: Websites with high-quality backlinks are considered authoritative and rank higher on SERPs for a specific niche.
The Benefits of Growing Your Authority
Now, one would wonder – “Why to bother and to grow Domain Authority?”, and the simple answer is that higher DA sites get more traffic than lower DA sites. The studies have proven that the top 3 search results get most of the traffic, with increased traffic, sites can show their products, and enhance their business performance.
Building high Domain Authority will also make your a credible site for affiliate marketing. This is a great way of being able to generate proper links. Understand that improving your DA will not happen overnight, it will take time and patience, consider it as your baby and take care of it as one.
Here are some tips that might help with DA:
- Trust the process
- Set your website properly
- Improve your websites loading speed
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
- On-page and Off-page SEO – Make sure to optimize your titles and page descriptions to make them easily identifiable. Optimize images and other media elements, use natural keywords in your content, and focus on building organic traffic.
- Link audits – Internal links are vital for improving your website’s DA. The websites linking to your content should be high-quality; ensure you only have high-quality websites linking to you.
- High-quality backlinks
Ahrefs study found that 55.20% of websites don’t get organic traffic since they don’t have backlinks.
Here are some statistics on how Ahrefs can help improve your business performance:
- Businesses that use their tool have seen an average improvement of 15-20% in their SERPs.
- The backlink analysis feature can help businesses identify low-quality (toxic links) and take action to remove them.
- Keyword research tools allow businesses to identify the best keywords to target, reducing the time invested in keyword searching by 34.3%.
Remember this:
If a website doesn’t have an outstanding SEO performance, this doesn’t mean that it’s a bad opportunity. Google is just one website and one marketing platform; a link opportunity’s value can’t be based only on one platform. But, if you are interested in building an authoritative website in Google, you should be aware of everything mentioned above.
In conclusion, if you are serious about SEO, you should try Ahrefs. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Ahrefs reviews out there. Therefore, I suggest you make one for yourself that will provide you with the most insightful information.