A lot of people ask us what makes Ahrefs better than the competition?
Well, this isn't an easy question to answer.
And if you and I were to sit down, grab a cup of coffee, and compare every single feature,
every single data point, and then measure their accuracy, this would easily take weeks,
months or even years.
Now aside from having the most handsome video guy on the planet, a content creator with
the biceps of a Greek god, and a CMO with the sleekest hair taken straight from Pegasus,
we have numerous features that are unique to Ahrefs SEO toolset.
In fact, we have something very special coming that I am going to touch on in this video.
So, you are asking me: "Sam, what's your USP?"
Grab your protein shake and supplements because I've got 9 flex-worthy features for you in
this video.
Stay tuned.
[music]
What's up marketers?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research
your competitors and dominate your niche.
Now let's get straight to the 9 features in Ahrefs that you won't find anywhere else.
#1. We generate millions of keyword ideas across 170 countries.
If I type in "iPhone" in Keywords Explorer, you'll see a ton of useful information like
the monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and the number of clicks that go to organic
results vs. paid.
But if we go over to the "Having same terms" report, you'll see that there are nearly
7 million keywords that contain our search term.
Best of all, you can filter through all of these keywords within seconds.
For example, if I set the keyword difficulty score to 10, then it'll narrow our list down
quite nicely to potentially lower competition keywords.
Now, while the 7 million results come from our US data, we also maintain a separate keyword
database for 170 countries.
In total, across all countries, we have data for 7 billion keywords and growing.
So if you want to see localized keyword suggestions for your location, just hit this dropdown
and select your country.
Now as far as our research goes, none of our competitors show data for this many countries.
Next step is the "Newly discovered" keywords report, which you can access here in the left-hand
menu in Keywords Explorer.
This report shows all keywords that were recently added to our database that contain your seed
keyword as a phrase match.
We update our keywords database with fresh data every month, so by using this report
you'll be the first to know about new topics that your prospective customers are searching
for in Google.
For example, let's say that I have a website on Bitcoin.
I could type that into the text field here and run the search.
And you'll see over 31,000 new keywords that we've discovered containing our seed keyword
including this super interesting one on bitcoin blackmail emails.
Another unique feature about this report is that you can actually analyze trends in your niche.
Now, if we click on the dates filter, and select one of the drop-downs, you can see the number
of new keywords that we discovered each month.
And as you can see, the number of Bitcoin related searches have been in freefall since
December 2017.
So where does all the data in this report come from? Clickstream.
Which brings me to an important point: a search query will only appear in clickstream once
it reaches a certain level of popularity.
Alright, onto number 3, which is to see traffic estimations for all pages ranking in the Top 10.
And this is one of my favorite features in Ahrefs, and I'm surprised that it's still unique to us.
Just enter any search query into Keywords Explorer, so I'll type in "website traffic."
And you'll see that the average monthly search volume is 11,000.
Now, if I scroll down to the SERP Overview, you can see the top 10 ranking pages for this
keyword phrase along with an estimate of the total monthly organic search traffic they
each get.
You can see that all the top ranking pages get more than the suggested search volumes
each month and they all rank for thousands of keywords.
But these numbers aren't the total estimated traffic to the page.
It only shows estimated traffic for the selected country.
In this case, it's the US.
If you want to see the traffic estimate for all countries, then just hit the caret next
to the URL, and boom!
Personally, I find that the traffic numbers of the top-ranking pages is way more insightful
than just looking at search volumes for an individual keyword. Because pages, they don't rank
for just a single keyword.
Also, some keywords don't produce many clicks at all.
So if we look at the SERP overview for the keyword "Donald Trump age," you'll see that
the search volume is 51,000, but most of the pages get far less search traffic for this
keyword and other variants because of Google's answer box.
The last unique feature I want to touch on in Keywords Explorer is the ability to analyze
SERP volatility.
And I want to show you two wildly different examples to paint a crystal clear image of
the insights that you can gain from here.
First, let's look at the query "how to start a blog" and scroll down to the SERP position
history graph.
Right away, you can tell that the SERPs seem to be quite stable, which tells us that Google
has determined the search intent.
You can also see a couple new pages that are trying to penetrate the Top 10.
And it makes sense.
Anyone searching "how to start a blog" likely wants a step-by-step tutorial, right?
Now, let's look at the same graph for the keyword "blogger."
Aside from the web service Blogger.com, all of the other results have been jumping in
and out of the Top 100, which shows that the SERP is extremely volatile.
Now, the good thing about stable SERPs is that you can plan your SEO strategy in somewhat
of a predictable way.
Just analyze the content of the top 10 pages and their referring domains and outdo them
on every aspect.
The not-so-great thing is that it can take quite a bit of time to rank depending on the
competitive landscape of your keyword target.
Now, as for volatile results, you can rank pretty quickly, but the bad thing is that
you may not be able to retain your rankings as easily.
Another unique feature in Ahrefs is to see the ranking history of all of your pages for
any keyword.
Now, the feature is similar to the one that I just showed you but serves a completely different
purpose.
In fact, the feature actually lives inside Site Explorer.
So I'll enter in our blog URL here.
Next, I'll go to the "Organic Keywords" report where you can see all of the keywords that
a given website, URL or even subfolder ranks for.
Let's examine our website's ranking history for the keyword "local SEO."
You'll see that over the history of our website we've had two pages that ranked in the
Top 100 for this keyword term.
This is a great feature to identify opportunities to consolidate your content.
In this case, we actually redirected our "Local SEO 101" post to our new and up-to-date article.
You can also compare the domains of your competitors here too.
So I'll click this button and then add "moz.com."
And right away, you can see a bunch of pages on their domain that have ranked in the
Top 100 over time.
The next feature is a super powerful one.
And that's to find "content gap" opportunities.
Now imagine that you could see every keyword that two websites rank for, where
yours doesn't.
These would probably be good topics to write about, right?
Now stop imagining because this can all be done within Content Gap.
But I'm going to be honest.
The ability to find content gaps between domains isn't unique to Ahrefs.
But, doing the same thing at the page or subfolder level definitely is.
Let me show you two game-changing things that you can do in Content Gap.
First, we're going to use this tool to find new topics to write about.
So I'll enter in backlinko.com using the domain mode since his website is basically all blog
posts that fall on the root domain.
Next, I'll enter in moz.com/blog using the prefix mode, since all of their blog posts
fall under the "blog" subfolder.
Finally, where it says "But the following target doesn't rank for," we'll leave this
as Ahrefs blog URL using the prefix mode.
And now I'll run the search.
And right away, you can see all of the keywords that these sites rank for in the Top 100,
where one of the sites ranks in the Top 10, but ours doesn't at all.
Now, 6,300 targets is pretty overwhelming so we can make one small adjustment here to
narrow it on more relevant topics.
If we change this drop-down to "all of the below targets" and run the search, it'll
only show the keywords where both of these sites rank for the keyword and ours doesn't.
And now we can easily cherry-pick the ideas that we should go after.
Now, our Content Gap tool isn't just great for finding new topics, but it's amazing to
find sub-topics you should cover at the page level.
For example, if we decide to create a post that targets "SEO checklist," then I can
click this button to see the top 10 ranking pages for this keyword.
Next, I'll put the top 3 ranking pages into the top section of our tool, which I've already
pre-populated for you here.
And to keep things relevant, I'll set the dropdown to only show keywords where at least
two of the pages rank.
Finally, I'll leave the bottom section blank and run the search.
And from here, we can pluck out some things that stand out like adding the year to our
title and adding subtopics about SEO best practices, and sections on on-page SEO and
technical SEO.
Content Gap by far is one of my most used tools within Ahrefs because of the crazy insights
you can get in literally no time at all.
The next feature is no feature at all.
It's actually a tool that compares to none other.
And that's Content Explorer.
Content Explorer is like a mini search engine made for SEOs and marketers.
You can use it to search over a billion pages that mention your keyword target and get a
ton of SEO and marketing metrics for each page like referring domains, search traffic,
social metrics, and more.
Let's say that you want to run a guest posting campaign.
Just start off by typing in your topic, so let's say "weight loss" and run the search.
And there are over a million pages that contain this keyword, but a bunch of these are probably
from the same website.
So we can hit the "One article per domain" filter, which cuts our results set down quite a bit.
Still too many results?
Then you can use the "Domain Rating" filter to bring it down to a range of something like
from 30 to 50, which will weed out a lot of websites that may not be worth pursuing, and
also the more popular websites that you might not feel comfortable writing for yet.
Which brings us down to around 18,000 websites to pitch, which is still quite a bit, but
you could continue to filter the results if you wanted to.
Here's another simple but super cool hack that only Content Explorer can do with consistency.
First, I'll clear all the filters and we're going to set up some new ones.
So I'll set this filter to pages that get at least 500 organic search visitors per month.
Next, I'll set the maximum number of referring domains to something low like 5.
And now you can see some cool topics that don't really have many links, yet still get
a ton of organic traffic.
For example, if I click on "Details" and then "Organic keywords" for this result, you'll
see that they get nearly 3,000 search visitors per month, only have 5 referring domains,
yet they rank for over a thousand keywords, which may be a worthwhile topic for you to сover.
The next unique feature is the ability to monitor your website's outbound links.
Let's go back to Site Explorer's Overview page for our blog URL.
Next, I'll go to the "Linked domains" report.
And this report shows all of the unique websites that our target website is linking to and
the number of times they've linked out.
This report is super useful for auditing your website for toxic outbound links.
Just click on the "First seen" column to sort the backlinks that Ahrefs found most recently.
And if you see links to websites that you don't recognize, then it may be the cause
of link injection or possibly guest bloggers selling links on your website.
Let's also take a look at the "Outgoing broken links" report.
This report shows all of the pages you're linking to that no longer exist.
And you can see that we have a few of these on the Ahrefs blog, which leads to a poor
user experience.
No other tool has this kind of report and it's a really easy way to make your blog better
for your readers.
The final unique Ahrefs feature for this video is to see the historical referring domains
for any website or page.
Just enter any website, URL or sub-folder in Site Explorer, and you'll see a graph like this.
This graph is interactive so you can see the cumulative growth or decline of referring
domains to the page or site from as early as 2013.
So for the Ahrefs blog, things have been growing pretty steadily.
And if you click over to the organic search tab, you can see that our traffic has been
growing with it.
But not all websites look the same.
For example, this site has had some crazy cliffs of referring domains linking to their pages.
And if you actually dig deeper into the backlinks reports, you'll learn that they were acquiring new
websites and redirecting pages back to this domain.
Then there are other websites that have completely flatlined like this.
But if we look at the "Organic search traffic" tab, you'll see that they've had a massive spike in traffic.
So whether it be from algorithmic updates, technical SEO fixes, or whatever, each site
is worth analyzing on both the referring domains and search traffic levels.
These graphs act as a great way to quickly compare and visualize your link profile against
your competitors.
So these are some of the most prominent features that set Ahrefs apart from the competition.
But this is far from everything.
Ahrefs has way more unique features and data points.
For example, I haven't even mentioned anything from our Rank Tracker and Site Audit tools,
where both have quite a few unique features that other tools don't.
And the newest feature that we're working on involves our new YouTube database.
Excited? So am I.
So keep grinding away, dig into our tools, and I'll see you in the next tutorial.