AHREFs : The Ultimate tool for SEM

Marketing tools are important for digital marketers, you cannot rely just on google tools to measure your website's performance. Knowing about marketing tools helps you devise strategies that your competitors may not be using, giving you an edge.

Tools like SEM Rush and Moz are excellent marketing tools, they are powerful, they compliment google tools (Ads and Analytics), excellent for measuring your sites strength. However, over the last few months of my professional experience, I happened to use AHREFs, a tool very similar to SEM Rush and Moz, but extremely handy when you are a content driven website.

I use AHREFs mainly for SEO, keyword optimization and content analysis, however, the features I have listed highlights how powerful AHREFs can be for your SEO strategy. Did you know? Outside google, AHREFs has the largest database for keywords (Search queries), allows you to make better and more targeted keyword lists.

Features of AHREFs:

1. Site explorer: As the name suggests, site explorer helps the marketer examine how the website is functioning and performing on google, it allows you to analyse your backlinks and internal links, and also gives you an insight into whether these links add value to the overall traffic.

One valuable feature of the site explorer is, competitor analysis. This feature helps you identify pages/domains on the search page can you easily outperform. These are websites which use similar keywords and structure their blog/site the same way you do. Hence, its important you keep an eye on the content and keywords incorporated in the content. You can create a report of the competing domains on AHREFs which gives you an insight on metrics such as position, volume of search and the number of keywords. Analyzing the keywords of the competitors is a useful strategy especially if they generate more organic traffic than your website.

Backlinks should be an important aspect of your content strategy, as your content driven website grows, a lot of backlinks get involved in it. Over time, a lot of these backlinks get broken or lost, these broken links often have an affect on your content strategy and a lot of broken links impacts your search position. Find your broken links, replace them with fresh ones, it has a positive effect on your site traffic (if the links are good).

In order to check whether the links are good enough, you use tools such as Majestic, Moz, Bulkseochecker, and Alexa. The metrics I use to measure the strength of these backlinks are the citation score and the trust flow/score. Better than trust flow and citation score, better the overall strength of the link, easier for google to measure the strength of the links. Easy? Absolutely.

You can use AHREFs website audit dashboard to analyse them. The metrics are:

• Domain Rating

• AHREF rank by URL strength

• Ahrefs Rank

• Backlinks

• Referring Pages

• Internal Links

• Nofollow & Dofollow Backlinks

Find the template by clicking here.

2. Keyword building using Keyword explorer:

This is an extremely useful feature of AHREF, not only for keyword research but also for analysis. AHREFs helps you find the best organic keywords for your website.

Keyword explorer is useful for skimming the keywords using "Keyword difficulty (KD)", these are keywords that may have high traffic/volume but are difficult keywords to incorporate and rank on. You can filter the list according to KD, volume and SERP features.

Usually any keyword which has high search volume and a keyword difficulty less than 30 seems like a decent keyword to add to your list. You can compile the list of your keywords and create an excel sheet. It's a great way to draft your keyword list for your campaigns in the future.

The categories available are pretty broad as well, with the likes of searching keywords: Search suggestions, phrase matches, exact searches etc, helps you develop a competitive list of usable keywords.

This list is useful for the next big feature that is: Rank tracker.

3. Rank tracker:

You have drafted and analysed your keywords list, now you need a way to track the progress. Rank tracker allows you track the progress of your keywords, weekly/monthly.

This tracker allows you to check your progress, and also provides you a way to check your competitors progress for the same keyword. If you want track your progress and whether your SEO strategy hit the right target, rank tracker provides a way to compare and track progress of your keyword strategy.

SEO is an extremely logical process, often complicated by using way too many tools that give you different indications and measure different metrics. Rather come up with three basic tools that would help you curate and design your strategy. AHREFs has features that allows you to target and improve your content, keywords and website, three main pillars of an effective SEO strategy, it also allows you to analyse your competition and provides you methods to beat them. If you are in the market looking for a marketing tool for your company, AHREF is the tool I would recommend.