In December, 2017, Chrome launched an update, that broke Ahrefs' SEO toolbar...
Well... its back - faster, stronger, and better than ever.
And in this video, I'm going to show you how to use Ahrefs' SEO toolbar for more effective
content research, prospecting, and more.
Stay tuned.
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What's up SEOs, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic,
research your competitors and dominate your niche.
Now, if you haven't used our toolbar, the first thing you're going to have to do is
install it.
The toolbar is available as a Google Chrome extension and Firefox add-on.
So you can install it on whichever browser you prefer.
Now, there are two main places where you can use Ahrefs' Toolbar.
First is in the Google SERPs and second is on individual pages that you're browsing.
So let's go to Google and type in a search query.
Right away, you'll see an inline view of the keyword metrics for your search query in your
selected country.
And by default, you'll see the US search metrics, but you can change this by clicking on the
gear icon, then click on the SERP overlay tab and select the country you would like
keyword data from.
So if I choose Canada and click out of the options menu, you'll see the updated keyword
metrics for the selected country.
Now, our toolbar is obviously integrated with our SEO tools, so all relevant reports are
just one click away.
For example, if you want to get detailed search metrics for the keyword in question, you can
click on the Ahrefs logo here, and it will open up the query in Keywords Explorer where
you can generate more keyword ideas using the various reports.
But you can go way beyond keyword metrics right here on the Google search results page.
If we scroll down, you can see the SEO metrics for each individual page.
The left side shows data at the page level.
So you'll see the URL rating, which represents the strength of the page's backlink profile,
the total number of backlinks and referring domains pointing at the page, its estimated
monthly search traffic and the total number of keywords that the page ranks for.
Now, it's important to note that the traffic metric is based on the sum of all search traffic
from all countries.
And the same goes for keywords.
Now, by analyzing search traffic and keywords of the top 10 Google ranking pages, you should
be able to instantly get an understanding of the full traffic potential of a topic.
So in this case, you can see that our search query, "bumps on skin" has an average monthly
search volume of around 8,000 in the US, but you'll see that the top ranking pages get tens of
thousands or even over a hundred thousand search visitors each month.
On top of that, they rank for tons of keywords.
Now, on the right side of the toolbar, you can see the domain level metrics.
And these are really helpful to get an idea of how the domain is performing overall.
For example, if we look at the search results for a common guest post query like: "write
for us" + "your topic", then the domain level metrics become particularly helpful.
By scanning through these results, you can instantly see which websites would be worthwhile
to pitch without even clicking through to the page.
Now, my recommendation is to look at the search traffic a domain receives as a whole and the
domain rating also, which represents the strength of a backlink profile of a target website.
And they'll often go hand-in-hand and make prospecting much faster.
You can also customize the search metrics that you see in the toolbar.
Just click on the gear icon, and in this case, if we wanted to see just the metrics for organic
traffic and domain rating, we can just uncheck all of the other options here.
And you'll see that it's much cleaner and easier to scan through.
The other place you'll see Ahrefs toolbar is when you're browsing through pages.
Now I can see this fitting into your workflow more organically when you're using search
engines that are not Google or Bing.
So let's say I'm reading through Reader's Digest and I use the search function to look
for hairstyles because I normally like the advice they have on this topic.
Now, this one seems perfect for me, so I'll click through to it.
And as you're reading through this page, you might notice something interesting.
If you look at the toolbar, you'll see that this page gets over 40,000 search visitors
each month and ranks for nearly 32,000 keywords.
And best of all, it looks like they only have 22 referring domains linking to this page.
You can then click on the number to analyze the backlinks report for this page.
And there are only 29 backlinks with nearly 40,000 search visitors, so it seems to be
somewhat of a low to medium competition topic.
Or if you're wondering which keywords the page ranks for, you could click on the number
beside the keywords to open up the organic keywords report.
And you'll see that this page ranks at the top for the keyword, "hairstyles," as well
as a ton of other long tail variations.
You'll also discover that the keyword phrase, "hairstyles for women over 40" actually has
8300 monthly searches, which is news to me.
Other sites you may find interesting data from in your regular browsing are Amazon,
Wikipedia, Medium, maybe Quora or any of your other favorite blogs in your bookmarks.
Also, any links that you click from social media networks will ensure that you don't
miss out on potential opportunities that would normally just pass you by.
So as you browse the web, pay attention to the toolbar, and you may find some interesting
topics.
So for example, you might find that some pages have generated a ton of links organically,
or that a topic ranks for thousands of keywords, despite having a low individual search volume.
Now, there may be times that you don't want to see the toolbar on every page.
You can simply click on the icon in your extensions bar, and it'll put Ahrefs toolbar in standby
mode.
By changing to standby mode, no credits will be used, but you'll still be able to see the
domain rating for each website you browse, which you can see here.
This way, you'll always have a general idea on the strength of a website's backlink profile
and if you want to further investigate the page or website, then you can just click on
the icon again, to see all metrics.
Now, we want to continue to innovate and make this toolbar awesome for you.
So make sure to leave a comment and let us know how we can make this toolbar even better.
So keep grinding away, play around with the SEO toolbar, and I'll see you in the next video.