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.
We just added a new traffic filter to our Site Explorer tool that you're gonna love
and today, I'm gonna show you 6 tactical ways to use this to get seriously actionable data
for your SEO and marketing efforts.
Let's dive right in.
So, I have one of our blog posts loaded up here within Site Explorer.
This filter here, traffic, is brand spanking new and it works in the same way as our other
numeric filters.
You can set a max and a min number.
So, for example, by setting a minimum value of a 100, you'll only see referring pages that
get at least a 100 organic search visitors per month.
By adding a traffic filter of even just 10, you can significantly clean up your prospecting
lists into manageable and targeted link prospects.
And this leads us straight into the first tip.
Use the traffic filter to find the "best" link prospects.
While we have no real evidence that backlinks from pages with traffic are worth more (from
a search engine optimization standpoint), I think it's a given that backlinks from pages
with a lot of traffic are gonna be more valuable to you for one simple reason:
they can actually send you consistent and relevant referral traffic.
You can click on the traffic column name and you'll see the linking pages that get the
most search traffic in descending order.
From here, all you need to do is analyze the context of the link and formulate your outreach
strategy to get them to link to your site.
The next tip is to find the best "lost" backlinks to pursue.
The lost backlinks report is something that you may have tried, but then quickly realized
that a lot of the results are often from scraper sites and not worth your attention.
But with the traffic sorting options, you can try to prevent losing links that are worth
fighting for.
So, I'll change the search to our entire blog to get a bigger pool of backlinks.
Then I'll go to the lost backlinks report.
Finally, I'll set the filter to the last 30 days because it'll broaden our pool and it's
still a reasonable amount of time to reclaim the link.
Now all you need to do is click on the traffic column to sort it in descending order and
you can see right away whether you lost any links that are worth pursuing.
So, this keyword research guide gets hundreds of search visitors and it looks like they
removed our link. So, I'll click over to it and verify that the link was indeed removed
by doing a find for our domain in their source code.
And you can see that it was removed.
These are the kinds of linking opportunities that you don't want to miss out on.
They've already linked to you before, so they know who you are and perhaps it could have
been a technical issue which unintentionally caused their page to return a 404 response
code or another similar activity.
The next tip is to reclaim lost referral traffic from broken backlinks.
This one is super easy and it doesn't require any outreach at all.
If I click over to the broken backlinks report, you'll see all of the broken backlinks pointing
to pages on our blog.
Again, I'll sort the pages by traffic in descending order to see the referring pages that get
the most search traffic.
And you'll see a couple here.
One links to an old author bio that was removed, which we could redirect back to our blog and
another one down here that looks like there was an extra character added to the URL by mistake.
For the one with the typo, we could create a redirect that goes directly to the blog
post with the correct URL.
Using this report you can easily prioritize which broken links need to be fixed and reclaim
lost link equity and referral traffic.
The next technique is to find topic ideas with high search traffic potential.
And you can do this quite nicely in Keywords Explorer tool.
But the thing is you would have to choose the right seed keywords, which can be somewhat
of a guessing game.
The way that you do this in Site Explorer is to enter in the domain of one of your organic
search competitors since the links that they'll be attaining will likely be relevant to the
topics you write about.
So, let's look at Healthline's backlink profile.
Next, I'll sort the traffic column in descending order.
And right here, I can see some solid blog topic ideas with high traffic potential.
So, if I had a health-related website, I could create a post about the benefits of apple
cider vinegar or even some natural ways to lower your blood pressure because both of
these topics clearly have huge traffic potential.
The next tip is to find low competition keywords by analyzing a competitor's backlink profile.
We'll use Healthline again.
Just enter in a minimum traffic number.
So, let's say a 1,000.
And then we'll sort the referring domains in ascending order.
This one here looks interesting, which is called, "What is the price of testosterone
without insurance?"
It has 0 referring domains, a domain rating of 8, and the post gets over a thousand search
visitors each month.
You can then click on the caret beside the URL and click through to the organic keywords report.
And you'll see all of the keywords that they rank for and it seems like they're ranking
for quite a few featured snippets too, which I'm sure contributes to their overall search traffic.
If you've been following my videos, then you may remember a similar hack from within Content
Explorer, but the thing with this tactic is that Site Explorer and Content Explorer run
on different databases.
So, what you find here in Site Explorer, may not be available in Content Explorer, and
vice versa.
The next tip is for global SEO Even though the use of the hreflang tag has
been around for years, translating websites and/or blog posts is still extremely underutilized.
So, you can analyze the backlink profile of one of your organic search competitors, click
on the language drop down and see which languages are getting the most links.
So, I'll select Spanish from the dropdown.
Next, I'll sort by traffic in descending order and you'll see some solid link prospects
to build up your international presence or maybe national if that's your native language.
The final hack is a great one for e-commerce stores or people who sell a product.
Enter in the domain of a competitor who sells similar products as yours.
So, let's say that we sell cooking tools.
So, I'll research oxo.com.
Then, I'll go to their backlink profile.
Next, I'll look for pages that get a good amount of traffic, so, let's say 500 search
visitors per month.
Finally, I'll type in the word "review" in the include box.
Now, these posts from The Wire Cutter would be perfect outreach prospects where we can
reach out, send some products, and hope they include us in their review.
There are a ton of things you can do with this traffic filter and sorting options.
Try some of the ones mentioned in this video, get creative with your own combinations, and
let the rest of us here in the Ahrefs community know about them.
So, keep grinding away, get results, subscribe, and I'll see you in the next tutorial.