Your content is your best salesman.
In order to be successful at content marketing, you have to create good quality content and give your audience a reason to read it. There are a lot of tools that can help you here. Ahrefs is one of them.
Ahrefs is probably the most popular SEO software that you can find on the market right now. It has many features that can help with your SEO efforts and also give you insights into what’s going on in your niche.
The tool is packed with many different features that can be useful for both beginners and experts alike. Some of them are free, while others require a paid subscription.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use some of the most popular features in Ahrefs to get more value out of the tool and improve your content workflow overall.
Ahrefs for content marketing – What is Ahrefs?
Ahrefs is a highly accurate, powerful, and versatile tool for SEO and content marketing professionals. It’s a subscription-based service that offers a range of features to help you find, track and optimize the performance of the links to your website.
It provides a comprehensive set of tools to monitor, analyze and optimize your website, including link data, keyword rankings, social media mentions, and more.
Ahrefs is also a popular backlink analysis tool because of its accuracy and extensive database of 1.5 billion pages. It also offers competitive intelligence features that allow you to see how your competitors perform in terms of traffic, ranking, and engagement metrics.
But how do you use Ahrefs to its full potential? Here are some tips to help you get started.
How to effectively use Ahrefs for content marketing?
1. Site audit
Before we start with the actual work, it is important to check if there are any technical issues with our site so that they don’t hamper our progress later on.
Ahrefs has an excellent feature called Site Audit that allows you to scan your website for any issues that may be causing you problems in search engines.
When you start to crawl your website using Ahrefs, it’ll look out for over 100 pre-defined SEO issues. This includes duplicate titles or meta descriptions, broken links, internal linking issues, and many more. This is especially helpful if you have a large site with multiple pages, as it will allow you to quickly identify the pages that need attention.
And for each issue found, you’ll also be given tips on how to fix the issue at hand.
Furthermore, you can access detailed reports on common technical aspects of running an SEO-friendly website.
2. Site explorer
Ahrefs’ Site Explorer is one of the most powerful tools in a content marketer’s arsenal. It helps you find new link opportunities by analyzing your competitor’s organic and paid SEO efforts so that you can reverse-engineer their strategies. This helps you learn and improve your site, improving your rankings.
One of the best things about Ahrefs Site Explorer is that you can search by keyword as well as a domain name. Currently, their Site Explorer is powered by the second-most powerful web crawler (the first being Google, of course)!
You can also sort by the number of referring domains (which tells you how influential each site is) or by the number of backlinks (which tells you how much trust other sites have placed in that website).
Furthermore, you can use this tool to find out if your competitors have been stealing any of your content or linking to it without giving credit where it’s due!
With Ahref’s site explorer, you can research –
- Organic traffic
- Backlinks
- Paid keywords
- Outgoing links, including linked domains, broken links, anchors
3. Keywords explorer
Having done your site audit and discovered which topics are performing well, now comes the fun part – finding out what these topics are! You can use the Keywords Explorer tool for this purpose (which is free!).
Simply enter your topic into the search box, and Ahrefs will pull data on all related terms according to their traffic potential, competition level, and difficulty to rank for.
It’s an effective tool to find out what people are actually searching for and how often they do it. You can see which keywords get more traffic than others, which have better conversion rates, and which have higher search volumes but poor performance. Also, this tool gives you an idea of what kind of content would be useful for each keyword (long-tail vs. short-tail).
4. Content explorer
Ahrefs calls it the “mini search engine made for marketers.”
Ahrefs Content Explorer allows you to easily find content ideas and filter them based on the search volume of keywords, their ranking difficulty, and more.
Content Explorer is our favorite tool in Ahrefs because it allows us to easily find content ideas by searching for popular long-tail keywords. You can also filter the results by keyword difficulty (how hard it will be for my site to rank for this keyword) and see how much competition there is for each keyword.
To use this feature, go to Content Explorer in the left menu and type in a topic or keyword in the search box. The search results will show you not only pages that rank for those terms but also pages that link to them. These pages are excellent prospects for new links from authoritative sites.
This will help you determine what kind of topics would be most relevant for your audience, as well as what kind of content performs best for other companies in your industry.
Here are some of the many things you can do using this powerful feature –
- Find low-competition topics
- Find the best guest blogging opportunities
- Find topics that generate links
- Monitor your competitors’ publishing frequency
- Filter content using metrics like
- Page traffic
- Website Traffic
- Traffic value
- Domain rating
- Referring domains
- Social shares
- Language
- Word count
- Platform
- Publication date
- Page status
4. Rank tracker
The most important thing to realize is that Ahrefs isn’t just a tool for finding keywords to target but also a platform to monitor the performance of your content.
This feature lets you see how your page ranks for keywords related to your website or blog posts. You can also see how other pages rank for those same keywords so that you can see what strategies are working for them and which ones aren’t performing as well as expected.
Easily track your content’s visibility, average position & traffic, and position distribution.
You can also track and analyze if your website ranks in SERP features like –
- Featured snippet
- Sitelinks
- Top stories
- Image pack
- Thumbnails
- Top ads
- Bottom ads
- Shopping Results
- Knowledge card
- Knowledge panel
- Videos
- Tweet box
- People also ask
With Ahrefs Rank Tracker, you can also opt to receive performance reports right in your inbox so you can stay informed about your website’s health and SEO-friendliness at all times.
5. Find “content gap” opportunities
Content gap analysis helps you find topics that are missing from your website and create new articles based on them. You can also use it to find gaps in your existing content to fill with new content ideas.
You can also use this tool to find opportunities where people don’t know enough about a particular topic. For example, if there’s only one article on “how to lose weight naturally” but 100,000 searches per month for that phrase, it means there’s room for more content about weight loss!
Ahrefs features and pricing
Ahrefs offers 4 plans –
Lite Plan
The Ahrefs Lite Plan costs $99/month when billed monthly and $83/month when billed annually.
With this plan, you can get access to –
- SEO Dashboard
- Site Explorer
- Keywords Explorer
- Site Audit
- Rank Tracker
- Alerts
Standard Plan
The Ahrefs Standard Plan costs $199/month when billed monthly and $166/month when billed annually.
It includes everything in the Lite Plan. In addition, get access to –
- Position history chart
- SERP updates
- SERP comparison
- Content gap
- Broken backlinks
- Broken links
- Outgoing links
- Link intersect
- Calendar view
- Content Explorer
- Mentions
- Domain Comparison
- Batch Analysis
Advanced Plan
The Ahrefs Advanced Plan costs $399/month when billed monthly and $333/month when billed annually.
It includes everything in the Standard Plan. In addition, get access to –
- 2 years of history
- Site Structure
- HTTP authentication
- Google Data Studio
- Dashboard folders
Enterprise Plan
The Ahrefs Enterprise Plan costs $999/month when billed monthly and $833/month when billed annually.
It includes everything in the Advanced Plan. In addition, get access to –
- Unlimited history
- Access management
- Pay by invoice
- Directory Listing
- Audit log
- API
Should your brand use Ahrefs for content marketing?
It really does depend on the size of your brand and what your expectations are, but more than anything, you should have a clear idea of how you’re going to use any tool before investing time and effort into it.
Ahrefs can be a powerful tool for helping your brand effectively spread its content. It also can be used for finding direct competitors’ content to see what is working for them and why. While it is a powerful tool for content marketers, it can be tricky to use.
Choosing whether or not to use a tool like Ahrefs for your content marketing depends on a combination of factors: budget, personal preferences, and available time are all important. But once you’re sure it’s an option you’d like to pursue, it’s important to get the most out of the tool.
If you’re looking for expert guidance on how to leverage content marketing to grow your business, you can reach out to us at Contensify. We’ll help you go from selling your business to attracting more business with content marketing!
