When it comes to SEO, do you know what keywords your competitors are indexing
for that you aren't? There's a website that does! I'm Olivia with Whole Whale
and today we're going to do a walk-through of the content gap feature
on Ahrefs. Okay, but what is Ahrefs, apart from a mouthful to say? It is
a data-driven SEO tool that allows you to track things like backlinks, organic
traffic, indexing keywords, and non- indexing keywords. You can sample it for
seven days for seven dollars and from there the fees start at ninety-nine
dollars a month for a subscription, and in the seven day trial one of the first
things you should play around with is the content gap. This is a tool that
tells you what keywords other websites index for that your site does not—you
can try this against competitors, you can try it against sites that you're
interested in being more like, you can even try it against wholewhale.com and
see what happens... So once we've logged into Ahrefs we
can enter in any domain in the upper search bar, let's go with Whole Whale, and
once we get onto the overview page we can go into the left-hand menu and click
on content gap. We'll see that our website wholewhale.com has already populated
at the bottom, and then we can add any number of websites up top that we want
to check against for keyword gaps. So let's enter in ssir.org which is the
Stanford Social Innovation Review, a Whole Whale client and one of our
favorite publications when it comes to the social impact space.
And we can click 'show keywords' here to get a sense of how we stack up against
one another. Now by default this list will focus on the United States, it will
give us a sense and sort automatically by volume (the monthly search volume of
any given keyword). It will also look at the difficulty, which is how hard it
would be to break into the top 10 Google search results for a keyword. And then we
can also sort by cost per click, which is an estimate of how much it would cost to
rank for that given keyword, and get clickthroughs on it. We also get a sense
of how these keywords look in search engine results pages and we can also see
the highest position that ssir.org has achieved for each of these keywords,
as well as how they look in Search Indexing, because of course it is way
more than just landing in the top 10 search results. We can also change the
sorting—so for instance I've just clicked on the volume to sort from the
lowest number of searches per month up to the highest, if we want to get a sense
of what some of the dark horses are in this in this competitive keyword
gap. And we can export, but exporting will only give you the first
50 line so you want to make sure that you're probably getting the more
valuable keywords. We can export this for Excel, Open Office,
(we generally just default to Excel) and the reason that we focus on one website
at a time is because since we only get 50 keywords it's very easy for any
number of websites to compete against one another and still only get really
data for one website. So generally we tend to look at it one at a time, but for
instance let's look at how the nonprofit Times and The Chronicle of Philanthropy
in conjunction with SSIR stack up against Whole Whale just so you can sort
of see how we would do this with more than one website at a time.
Once the keywords have sorted here for instance, we see that there actually
is a fairly good balance between the Chronicle of Philanthropy and SSIR
but Nonprofit Times is getting a little lost in the mix here. We're also starting
to see more branded keywords come in so these are obviously less important for
us as Whole Whale to rank for. We may also see keywords like 'wicked problems'
up here, which you know being a New England native I should have a soft spot
for that, but probably in terms of Whole Whale's overall content strategy not
important. Once again we click export, and we can start that export and then open
it up we like to open it up in Google Drive, so that we can share these sheets
internally as a team. So we'll just open that and then open with Google sheets
and once you export these CSVs from Ahrefs.com you'll see that they give you
the keyword, volume description, keyword difficulty, cost per click, and
whether you're using one or multiple domains they'll give you that domain so
you can track. We like to delete the ranking column right away, and then also
under data sort enable the first row for sorting so that we can sort by
difficulty, if we want,we could also sort by cost per click, volume, or even if we
have multiple domains sort by those rankings as well just to see what some
of the top keywords are for, say, SSIR, the Chronicle Philanthropy, and the
Nonprofit Times. We can also go through and start to delete some of the keywords
that we don't find as relevant for us, and then we could take these keywords
and what we like to do actually is enter them into a keyword tool on Moz
to get a deeper sense of what to prioritize first. And then comes the
million dollar question: what do we do with all of these insights? The big
picture with Ahrefs is to take a look at the keywords and start to make
prioritization. You may look at some of these keywords and say, "But wait a second
we have a page that is written around this exact keyword, what gives? Why aren't
we indexing for it?" That's a good chance to go back to the content you already
have and see how you can optimize it against best practices of writing for
the robots of Google while engaging the humans using Google. You can also start
to prioritize new content pieces around keywords that you have no content for
and should be considering. And then there going to be some keywords, like branded
keywords or keywords for a topic completely tangential to what you cover,
that you can just ignore. These are just prescriptive data-driven suggestions
coming out from a very robotic function on a website, these are not the do-these
10-articles-and-you-will-start-to-reach- SEO-nirvana. This is just information
that we take weekly insights from the information, we learn and act and we
measure from there. I'm Olivia with Whole Whale, and if you want to take your SEO
game one step deeper we have a full course for that. You can check it out at
wholewhale.com/university. It's hosted by myself
and our Chief Whaler George Weiner, we may even have a cameo from our french
bulldog Turtle in there, and you can access it at a special discount using
the code: WWVIDEO. Be sure to comment below to let us know what other
functions of Ahrefs you want us to cover next, and if you like this video
give it a thumbs up, help us with our own YouTube SEO!