Ahrefs Guide: How To Use Ahrefs for SEO, Content & Link Building October 12, 2015 by Nate Shivar ­­> Get The ShivarWeb Newsletter

The biggest problem for website owners and marketers in 2015 and beyond

isn’t the tools available. It’s figuring out how to use the tools they have.

Ahrefs is one of the (if not the) most powerful suites of social media & SEO

tools that I’ve ever used. Most SEOs know it as a “backlink checker” that

competes with the more well­known Moz, SEMRush and older­school backlink

checkers like Majestic. But a “backlink checker” grossly undersells Ahrefs as a

marketing tool.

Ahrefs has so many features that you can get lost and resort to simply staring

at your own links – maybe rank tracking a few keywords. Here’s the guide to

how to use Ahrefs that I wish existed when I first signed up.

*Reader’s Note – all images are clickable if you want to see the full resolution.

Glossary

Dashboard

Site Explorer

Content Explorer

Positions Explorer

Keywords Explorer

Ahrefs Labs

Ahrefs Glossary

Every piece of software has its own little universe of jargon. I’ll use these

words throughout the guide. So here’s a glossary of terms.

URL Rating – Ahrefs’ measure of the quantity and quality of links pointing to a

given URL. Link quantity and quality correlate with higher rankings in search

engines.

Domain Rating – Ahrefs’ measure of the quantity and quality of links pointing

to an entire domain. Link quantity and quality correlate with higher rankings for

all URLs on a domain in search engines.

Ahrefs Rank – Ahrefs’ ranking of a domain’s rating relative to all the other

domains on the Internet.

Backlinks – The number of hyperlinks pointing to a URL.

Referring Page – The number of pages with a hyperlink pointing to a URL. A

page can have multiple links.

Referring Domains – The number of unique domains with a hyperlink

pointing to a URL. A domain can have multiple referring pages and backlinks.

Referring Content – Ahrefs’ measure of the relative traffic that a unique piece

of content sends to a given URL based on the popularity of the referring

content.

Anchors – The anchor text used within a URL’s backlinks.

Sitewide / Not Sitewide – Ahrefs’ categorization of a link showing whether it

shows in the same location on every page of a referring domain or not.

Fresh Index/Live Index – This is a new feature rolled out in an effort to

maintain a historical index of links. Here’s the full blog post and here’s the

Ahrefs definition:

Live Index – contains all links that were “live” on Ahrefs’ last re­crawl;

Fresh Index – contains all links that we’ve seen “live” starting 13th of August (including those, that were “dead” on our last re­crawl).

Top Pages – A given URLs’ top pages based on the criteria that you sort for.

Ahrefs Dashboard The Ahrefs Dashboard is where you keep track of all your data. You can add

a URL to keep a running snapshot of a domains health. It will quickly show

you any technical crawl errors, new links, new referring domains, and a

snapshot of Ahrefs’ domain rating and URL ranking.

On the dashboard you can also keep track of keyword rankings, any content

alerts, and any links that you are trying to disavow.

Key Features I think the main features of the Ahrefs’ dashboard are keyword rankings and

content alerts. Although I don’t think rankings are as important as they used to

be back in the days of old school SEO, they can be an interesting diagnostic

indicator, and another data point to factor into your analysis. Since tracking is

included with Ahrefs, it’s worth adding your critical keywords.

Alerts are useful for both planning outreach and for competitive analysis.

Target several phrases that are directly relevant to your website so that you

can get a feed whenever a new piece of content is published around that

phrase or keywords.

Fun Hacks Email notifications are boring, but setting them up is a great way to hack your

habits and discipline so that you can use Ahrefs’ data.

Unless you are extraordinarily disciplined, it’s easy to let monitoring and alerts

slide. That’s why I love setting up Google Analytics intelligence alerts and

Ahrefs’ email notifications. Set them up at a useful interval, and you’ll never

miss an issue.

Site Explorer Site Explorer is Ahrefs’ bread and butter and oldest feature set. It allows you

to enter in a URL and check that URLs backlinks.

Ahrefs gets this data by running a crawler around the Web just like Googlebot.

Every backlink checker tries to replicate how & where Googlebot crawls links.

No backlink checker is Googlebot. And no crawler can cover the entire Web.

According to analysis by some of the best technical SEOs, Ahrefs is at the

front of the pack.

Why? With Site Explorer, they not only have a large link index that closely

replicates the Googlebot, they also extract & overlay additional data.

They pull out anchor text (the actual text within the link), backlink type,

backlink follow status, social metrics, IP Address, and HTTP status. These

additional pieces of information – paired with an enormous index of URLs –

sets Ahrefs apart and turns it into a marketer’s suite.

The Site Explorer, however, is also the most daunting of all the tools because

there is so much information. So here’s what I think are the key features.

Key Features of Site Explorer The first key feature is Inbound Links. Search engines use Inbound Links as a

proxy for human endorsement. More links from trustworthy sites on relevant

pages equals more organic traffic. The links feature allows you to pull all the

links to a specific URL and then sift and sort to dig up the information you

want.

The second key feature is Top Content. This feature allows to look at how

specific pages on a URL perform. You can sift and sort by links, shares, or

Ahrefs weighted importance score.

The third key feature is Top Referring Content. This feature shows you what

content on the Internet that has a link to the URL you are exploring has the

most links/shares or estimated traffic. You can get a ballpark estimate of what

links send referral traffic to your URL.

The fourth and last key feature appears in both Inbound and Outbound Links

– and that is Broken Links. This feature shows you which links are linking to or

linking out to a URL that no longer exists.

What You Can Do With Site Explorer Whatever you are used to doing with other backlink checkers, you can do with

Ahrefs. There’s plenty you can do directly in the main screen, but keep in

mind that you can also do an Export to Excel / Google Sheets if that’s your

native work environment.

Determine What Marketing Tactics Are Working for Competitors

You can take your competitors – big and small – and see where they are

getting their links from. You can go and try to get the same links. Or (and I

recommend this approach), you can use the information to understand what

has been working in the industry and use it to develop your own unique

tactics.

You can also look at Referring Domains, which will group the links by domain.

Determine What Content Does Well

We all browse the Internet in a “filter bubble.” Sometimes it’s hard to believe

that a site or blog post that you love isn’t more widely shared.

Or at a more higher level, many marketers think that the content that

generates shares will also directly generate links. That perception is a myth.

You can use the top content report to understand exactly what works well.

Understand what pages actually get links if you are building your organic

presence. Understand what gets shares. Understand what types of content

gets picked up.

Do press releases matter? Do infographics actually work? What’s the one

piece of content for competitors or industry publications that drives 80% of

their links and shares.

You can answer all those questions with the Top Content report.

Identify Low­Hanging Fruit / Easy Link Opportunities

Site Explorer has a Link Intersect report that allows you to input several URLs

and learn which websites are linking to competitors (or industry sites), but not

your site. You can get this same data by exporting links from several sites and

running a few Excel tricks. But the link intersect tool does it quickly.

Does an industry publication have links to all your competitors, but forget to

link to you? Is there a reporter that interviews your competitors but not you?

Find out with the link intersect tool and discover some quick wins that will

bring you up to an even playing field.

Identify Influential Marketing Prospects

You can use a combination of the Top Referring Content report and the

Inbound Links report to identify influential websites that are already linking to

competitors and/or industry publications. But you can take it a step further and

sort by Domain or URL Rating to figure out who matters the most. In a world

of limited resources and time – priorities matter.

But be sure to note your goals…

Conduct A Broken Link Building Campaign

Broken link­building is one of the most effective and consistent link­building

tactics in SEO. The idea is to find resources that no longer exist, rebuild them,

then pitch to get the links pointing at the broken resource switched to point at

yours. Or, on the flipside, correct any broken links that your site has.

I’ve written a full guide to Broken Link Building here. You can do broken link

building manually, but Ahrefs’ broken link reports allow you to do broken link

building efficiently and effectively.

Pro­tip – Jon Cooper of PointBlankSEO built a handy Chrome Extension

called LinkMiner that pulls from Ahrefs data, allowing you to prospect quickly

as you research.

Fun Hacks with Site Explorer

Quickly Find Worthwhile Broken Links

Take a giant site and look at Broken Outbound Links. You’ll quickly get a list

of broken resources. Take all those URLs, and look at Inbound Links. The

sites that link to your broken URLs are prospects for a broken link building

campaign.

The inverse works also works well. Take a giant site – one that has plenty of

resource pages. Pull Broken Inbound Links. Then pull the links pointed to

those URLs. That will be your prospect list for a Broken Link Building

campaign.

Explore Wikipedia & Top Publishers

Pull link metrics on Wikipedia URLs related to your industry – remember that

you can search by subfolder. Create marketing ideas around the results.

Take a publishing focused site either in your industry or related to your

industry and pull a top content report. This will allow you to skip to content that

you know works. It will also give you link opportunities that are outside of what

your competitors have.

Take an industry publication or industry­related Wikipedia pages. Pull a Top

Referring Content report. You’ll likely get list that includes mainstream media

publications. Click through and do research on the journalist who linked out to

the piece.

Narrow Results

As I mentioned with Wikipedia, don’t forget that you can search for just a

subdomain, a subfolder or a specific URL in Site Explorer.

Content Explorer Ahrefs’ Content Explorer shows the most shared content around any topic. It’s

like Site Explorer’s Top Content report…but for the entire internet. For

marketers who read a bit – it’s basically BuzzSumo but you get it in addition to

Ahrefs’ link data.

But like Site Explorer, the key to Content Explorer is understanding the

features’ functionality. That will take it from a trivia tool to a marketing tool.

Key Features The key – and really only feature of Content Explorer – is the ability to search

by topic. You enter a phrase and it tells you the most shared / linked to

content about that topic across the Internet.

However, you will quickly notice that there’s a wide gulf in the results you get.

If you enter a broad topic, you get a lot of meaningless noise (re­posted

clickbait stuff). If you enter a specific topic, then you’ll get very few results.

The key is understanding how to narrow & curate the results. And that is

where Boolean Operators come in.

I can feel your excitement.

But really if you’ve ever used Google Search Operators like site: or even

putting a phrase in quotes, you’ll know how you use these. Just navigate to

Advanced Search in Content Explorer.

The ones I’ve found most useful are exclude a word, filter a site and define

date range (especially for seasonal ideas).

To use boolean operators effectively though, you have to approach Content

Explorer with a goal in mind. It’s fun – and sometimes useful to just click

around – but it’s most useful when you are looking for a specific piece of data

to support a strategy.

For example, you want to create a blog post that drives Facebook likes. Or,

you want to create an infographic that drives links. Or, you need to understand

what type of Christmas content stands out in December. If you have a specific

goal in mind, you can mix, match and combine boolean operators to focus

your search.

What You Can Do With Content Explorer

Inform PR Strategy

“Press release and pray” is not an effective PR strategy, especially if you want

a quality pick up from a major publication.

The best angle for getting a press pickup is that the piece will bring in readers.

You can use Content Explorer to figure out what pieces do well and what type

of content a publication likes.

You can even drill down to figure out what a specific journalist likes to write

about – and what content they were most successful with.

In 2013, I got a personal blog post to go viral with exactly 1 email pitch to a 1

journalist. I knew what the journalist wrote about. And I knew what drove

pageviews for them. It was a perfect fit for both of us.

*Note – this feature is still in the early days for Ahrefs. You’ll get the most out

of it by pairing it with Google search operators.

Understand a Topic

“The curse of knowledge” is a concept that says the more familiar you are with

a topic, the less you understand how to think about a topic from the

perspective of those less familiar.

And it’s a huge problem in content marketing. You can use Content Explorer

to understand what angles, language and facts resonate with people on any

given topic.

Look for Top Performers’ Commonalities

On a related note, you can use Content Explorer to figure what form your

content should be in. Many times a text post won’t work but a video will. Or an

infographic will work in one industry but not in another. For example, if you run

Content Explorer and see that every top performer has a video included…you

should probably include a video in your content.

Set Benchmarks

Every company would love for a positive story to “go viral” but that term is

basically meaningless because it can mean anything to anybody depending

on context and a dozen other factors.

In a study of content by Moz and BuzzSumo, they found that 75% of content

got zero shares and zero links. Zero.

And then, on any given day, BuzzFeed will be able to manufacture 1 million

plus shares across every platform.

Purina Cat Food might be able to create a piece of content that generates a

hundreds of thousands of shares because they are a huge brand operating in

the cat market.

GE is an even bigger brand than Purina but they won’t get a million shares

because they make stuff like aircraft engines.

Either way, Content Explorer can at least give you a ballpark benchmark for a

successful campaign. If your goal is shares and the best campaign in your

industry generated a 1000 shares – “success” might be defined as 100, not

10,000.

Understand Platform Types & Goals

As Moz & BuzzSumo found in their study, links do not always correlate with

shares. And shares on one platform do not always correlate with other

platforms, e.g., Facebook Shares vs. Twitter Tweets.

Use Content Explorer to figure out what content fits your marketing goals. For

example, if it’s a campaign to drive organic traffic, sort by links – not by overall

shares.

Fun Hacks

Click­through to Author

On the Content Explorer results, you can click through to look at a specific

writer. This is useful for tracking down guest post opportunities or finding

freelance journalist who write at a range of publications.

Export Twitter Sharers

Also on the Content Explorer results, you can view & export people who

tweeted each piece of content. This opens up a whole new world of Twitter

marketing opportunities.

But the most immediate uses are to:

Create a custom audience for Twitter advertising. If you know they tweeted one piece of content on a topic, they are probably interested in another. I did this for a small giveaway experiment.

Create Twitter lists for manual outreach later. If you identify a few highly influential accounts, you can set them aside for further research and outreach.

Take the data and send it to one of the dozens of Twitter tools for analysis of personas, related interests, best time to tweet, related followers, etc.

*Note – I’ve found this feature to be amazing but still buggy.

View URL Data

Lastly in the Content Explorer results, there’s a little drop down that will show

you detailed link data and the keywords that the content most likely ranks for.

That data is invaluable for planning a well­rounded piece of content.

Use Trends for Seasonal Data

The default Content Explorer results show in a table. You can switch over to

Trends view. You’ll quickly be able to see when content within a given topic

does well.

Positions Explorer Positions Explorer shows what keywords a domain is ranking for, then

provides estimates for what kind of traffic that domain and its pages are

getting organically.

It also tracks paid positions. Think of it like rank tracking for every domain on

the Internet.

Positions Explorer crawls Google search results pages (SERPs) and

aggregates the data into something you can search. They also pull search

volume from Keyword Planner. Then it triangulates the organic traffic going to

a domain based on standard click­through rates per position.

A couple caveats – everything in this tool is ballpark estimation. I do not

recommend you use it for reporting. There are many variables in play – each

with a lot of margin of error. Don’t let the exactness of the numbers lull you

into a sense of certainty.

With that said, I’ll go ahead and state that this is Ahrefs’ most underestimated

tool. Either that, or the marketers who know about it aren’t talking about it.

Regardless, here we go.

Key features

The most obvious feature is Ahrefs’ estimation for how many significant

keywords (i.e., they have search volume) a domain is ranking for and their

estimation of traffic based on those keywords.

That overview feature is interesting, but again, not super­useful without some

context.

The feature that provides 80% of this tool’s value is the Top Pages feature

under both Organic and Paid sections.

The other notable features are the Top Competitors, which shows what

domains most frequently share the same search results as the domain you’re

looking for. And also the PPC ads, which shows you a sample of PPC ads in

the SERPs.

What You Can Do With Positions Explorer

Understand Top Content for Other Websites

Although the exact numbers in Positions Explorer are not accurate, the

relationships and differential among the pages & keywords is accurate.

In other words, even if a given URL doesn’t drive XX visits per month, if it is

listed as the Top Organic Page – that position is accurate. The difference in

traffic between the top URL and the second URL is accurate as well – both for

a couple reasons.

First, because even if the traffic numbers aren’t exactly right, their relative

volumes are correct. Head terms show more volume than long­tail terms.

Second, because on the landing page level, nearly every site’s traffic will

conform to the 80/20 pattern – 20% of pages will drive 80% of the traffic. And

so on for every given set of URLs.

Why does this matter?

This data is invaluable because you can discover and build off competitor or

other industry websites. You can learn from all their content and go straight for

the best terms.

In the example above, you’ll see that for whatever reason, this company gets

almost all their non­brand organic traffic from a (not so special) Garage Kit

category page. It would make an excellent target for anyone in that industry.

Or you get to find out that your favorite website’s biggest winner is a

throwaway post that happens to rank for a really broad but noncompetitive

term.

Either way, you get to learn from your competitor’s best (and worst) content.

Do Better Keyword Research

The toughest challenge of keyword research is thinking laterally. Making the

jump from different variations of a single obvious keyword to complementary

or semi­synonymous keywords that reflect the real intent of your audience.

For example, it’s the insight that helps you make the leap from “winter

gloves”…”gloves for winter”…”gloves for cold weather” to “mittens.” Or if

you’re in the plumbing industry, making the leap from “outdoor faucet” to

“sillcock.”

Those leaps are tough. Google’s Keyword Planner is mediocre at the job. And

often it means using tools likeGoogle Correlate in ways they aren’t traditionally

used.

But Ahrefs’ Position Explorer solves this issue by allowing you to take top

pages and viewing what other keywords those pages are ranking for. It gives

you a bigger seed list & introduces more diversity into your keyword research

process.

Steal Ads

You can use the Paid section of Positions Explorer to swipe ad ideas from

competitors. If you can see the angle/benefit that competitors are using, you

have a direction to either copy or play off or test both.

Find Competitors for Keyword / Link Research

Most SEOs are familiar with telling clients that their SERP competitors are

different from their real­world competitors.

But outside of scraping a few head or vanity terms, it’s fairly difficult to find

SERP competitors systematically. You can use Ahrefs’ Positions Explorer to

at least add a few new ones to the mix.

Fun Hacks For marketers who love Excel and/or Google Sheets, you can export

keywords under both Top Pages and Organic Keywords.

If you want to remove brand & noisy terms, go to Organic Keywords and filter

by phrase length. Longer phrases will often give you more insight.

Keywords Explorer Keywords Explorer is Ahrefs’ tool to pull and manipulate keywords generated

in Google Search Autocomplete (aka type a keyword, hit space but not enter).

For SEOs who know their tools, it’s like Ubersuggest or KeywordTool.io.

Key features There’s one key feature to this tool: pulling a ton of keyword variations straight

from the source. Google Autocomplete is one of the most useful keyword

research tools because the variations not only give you longer­tail, more

specific terms to target, but they also provide a window into user intent.

Ahrefs’ goes a step further and matches the keyword variations with search

volume data from Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner. In that respect, it

makes the tool similar to the paid version of KeywordTool.io…except for that

it’s built into your Ahrefs subscription.

Here’s the catch though with Keywords Explorer – like Ubersuggest and

KeywordTool.io, it relies on Google’s Autocomplete API. Google announced

that they were going to discontinue public access on August 10th, 2015.

Thus far, all the tools seem to work accurately. What Ahrefs does with the tool

after they no longer have access remains to be seen.

What You Can Do With Keyword Explorer Either way, in the meantime, you can quickly do a lot of interesting keyword

research all within Ahrefs. Take a broad keyword, and run it through Keyword

Explorer to get a lot of useful variations on your broad keyword.

Ahrefs Labs

Ahrefs Labs is Ahrefs’ collection of apps that take Ahrefs’ data and put it into

something useful. It includes Ahrefs’ API, the Link Intersect tool, the Domain

Comparison tool and others.

Key Features If you are trying to manipulate data at scale quickly, Ahrefs Labs is where to

go. Most of the tools are either specific use, or are mentioned in Site Explorer.

The SEO Toolbar is useful to have installed on your browser, so that you can

get a sense of marketing data as your browse the Internet. It’s a great way to

get immersed in SEO/Social data and develop an intuitive sense of what

matters on a webpage.

The SEO Toolbar also has a SERP overlay function that will pull data and

overlay it on your Google Search Results Page.

The Ahrefs Top tool is interesting, but I’ve yet to find a good use for it.

Under Apps, I highly recommend Jon Cooper’s Link Minerapp. If you are

doing broken link building, it’s a must have. It syncs up with Ahrefs and pulls

data straight to your broken link scan.

Next Steps

Ahrefs is fairly pricey, but it has a giant feature set. Like most marketing tools,

its usefulness is only limited by your creativity and understanding of the

feature set.

Approach Ahrefs with specific marketing goals in mind, and you’ll get a lot of

value out of it. Be sure to use it as more than a backlink checker.

If you are curious about other marketing tools, here’s how I categorize the

universe of Ahrefs’ competitors. They generally all specialize in 1 channel, but

overlap with a secondary channel.

Ahrefs = Primarily SEO with Social components and some PPC data.

Moz = Primarily Analytics/Education with SEO and Social components.

SEMRush = Primarily PPC with SEO components.

BuzzSumo = Primarily Social with SEO components.

Majestic = Exclusively SEO with focus on penalty analysis. Great complement

w/ Ahrefs.

SpyFu = Primarily PPC with SEO components.

Raven Tools = Primarily Analytics with SEO and Social components.

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