Content Explorer 2.0 is live, and there are some seriously cool things you can do in there.
Trends data.
Data-driven content research.
Broken link building by topic.
If you want to see all of these things in action, then 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.
If you’re new to Content Explorer, it’s a searchable database
of over a billion pages of content and growing.
Best of all, you can see the social and SEO metrics for every single page,
which is super helpful when it comes to anything marketing-related.
Now let’s dive into some of the game-changing features of the all-new Content Explorer
and actionable ways you can use them in your SEO and marketing efforts.
First up are the new trends charts.
Just enter a topic you want to research, and you’ll see a graph with the number of published
and republished pages over time.
The exciting thing about this is that you can see the trends for both
newly published content in light blue,
and pages that have been republished in the darker blue bars.
You can isolate the view for each page type by clicking the filter here
and choosing either "published once" or "republished."
A great way to use this is to see a brand’s popularity over time.
For example, if I search for "ahrefs" and exclude mentions from our own site,
you can see that our monthly brand mentions are gradually increasing.
You can also do this on your competitors' sites too.
For example, if we look at mentions of "Nike,"
you’ll see that something happened in February 2019.
So we can analyze the trends for that date range by setting a custom date filter.
And you’ll see that there seems to have been some positive
and negative buzz around these "self-tying" shoes.
Now, while Nike is a massive brand and probably won’t be your competitor,
analyzing your competitor’s spikes will help you reverse-engineer PR
and link building campaigns, so you can learn what’s working for them and try it for yourself.
You can also use these graphs to analyze your competitor’s content marketing strategy.
Just search for something like site: and then your competitor’s domain.
Right away, you’ll see things like post frequency,
and you’ll know whether they’re publishing new content or updating existing content.
As you can see, we’re big fans of keeping our posts up to date,
and a lot of that was done at the beginning of the year.
And if you want to see the exact pages that were updated, just set the filter to "republished,"
and you’ll see all of the pages in the table below.
For each result, you’ll be able to see both the first published and republished dates.
Another feature we’ve added is the ability to search for broken link building opportunities by topic.
As far as I know, there is no other tool that can do this.
Now, with traditional prospecting for broken link building,
you’re generally limited to a single website or web page to find prospects.
Then you have to find out whether the broken page actually has links.
This can be time consuming and frustrating.
Here’s how to do it in Content Explorer with ease.
Let’s say I have a website in the employment niche.
I can find some super-relevant results by searching for something like "how AND jobs."
Then, I’ll set it to only search with In titles.
Now, the reason why I’m searching for the word "how" is because it’s going to limit
the search results to mostly informational content.
This will weed out a lot of the "news" type content,
which won’t apply to most of us.
Next, I’ll switch on this filter, which will show us all pages that return a 404 or 410 response code
and pages that returned a no-domain error.
Finally, I’ll set a filter for pages that have at least 20 unique websites linking to it.
And you now have a list of broken link building opportunities to tackle.
One additional filter I highly recommend setting is the Trends filter in the search results.
By setting this to the past 3 years, you can instantly see whether the page once had traffic.
And this is important because it can tell you a little bit about the quality of the link profile
and save you some time from going after backlinks that may not move the needle.
All you have to do now is look at the Organic traffic column,
and you can just eyeball which pages likely had good-quality backlinks at some point.
For example, this post from Medium shows that it had some nice organic traffic once upon a time.
If we click on the Details button, you’ll see the organic traffic trend,
which tells us that the links were likely helping the page rank when it was live.
The graphs are also interactive, so you can hover over it to find the approximate
date that the page became broken.
Another game-changing thing you can do is find outdated content.
And this is perfect if you’re doing any kind of "skyscraper" link building.
If you’re unfamiliar with the skyscraper technique, you search for out-of-date content that has links,
create something that's better,
and then reach out to people who are linking to the outdated page.
Here’s how it’s done.
First, I’ll search for a topic related to my niche.
So let’s say I review "backpacks."
Next, I’ll set the Publish filter to only show pages that were published once.
Then, I’ll set a Custom date range filter to show pages that were published a long time ago.
So let’s say somewhere in 2010 to 2016.
This covers the outdated content part.
Now, I’ll set a filter to show pages that have at least 50 unique websites linking to it.
This covers the part about the content having links.
Finally, I’ll set the Trends data in the search results to show the past 3 years within the table,
which again, will act as a good eyeball metric to quickly spot opportunities worth pursuing.
Right away, you can see that this one would be an interesting one to investigate.
You can see it had quite a bit of traffic and more recently, the traffic has been fading.
And it seems like they did change the title to include the current year,
but upon investigating the page version from 2016, not much has changed.
This seems like a great "skyscraper" opportunity to build links from.
The last couple of features that I want to show you are more for workflow and efficiency.
Let’s say that you’re researching the topic of fitness.
And as you start working through the list, you notice that there are quite a few results
coming from a specific domain.
In this case, shape.com.
If you hover over the domain in one of the results,
just click it, and it’ll automatically set a filter to only show pages from that domain.
From here, you can analyze the domain’s pages and set all sorts of filter combinations.
For example, let’s find some low-competition topics from Shape that are getting search traffic.
Since we know that backlinks help a page rank in Google,
we’ll set the maximum number of referring domains to something low like 5.
And then a minimum Organic traffic filter to something high like 1000.
This is going to show you potentially low-competition topics with high search traffic potential
from a single domain that you know and trust.
Another thing you can do is find authors to network with.
Let’s go back to our fitness example.
Let’s say that you read this article on Cosmopolitan by this author,
and you really liked her work.
Just click on the author’s name, and you’ll now see all posts that have been authored by her.
And if you want to know all of the sites that she’s written for,
you can click on the "One page per domain" filter,
and you’ll see all of the websites with her byline.
You can use this to hire new freelance writers or find guest posting opportunities for yourself.
There are literally an endless number of ways to use Content Explorer,
and we haven’t even discovered them all.
So I’d love to hear from you, smart SEOs out there, and perhaps feature your tips in a future video.
So keep grinding away, try out the new Content Explorer, and I’ll see you in the next tutorial.