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10 quick wins to improve your rankings using Ahrefs.pptx
The document outlines 10 effective strategies to enhance website rankings using Ahrefs. Each strategy is designed to provide quick wins for improving SEO performance. The recommendations are geared towards digital marketers and website owners looking to optimize their online presence.
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10 quick wins to improve your rankings using Ahrefs.pptx
- 1. T 10 Quick WinsTo Improve Your Rankings (Using Ahrefs) Andrei Țiț Ahrefs Slideshare.Net/Ahrefs @AndrezMarcel
Editor's Notes
- #4 How many of you took a new client onboard, only to be told this phrase? Raise your hand please. If no one raises their hand: >> Wow, nobody. To be clear, I’m referring to clients with high expectations that have little to no SEO knowledge.
- #5 In reality, the “SEO magic” is much more complex and difficult to explain to stakeholders with no clue about SEO. What they want are quick SEO fixes. But how do you know which ones to prioritize first that have the highest and most immediate impact? –
- #7 In this short presentation, I’m gonna show you 10 quick wins to improve your rankings and drive more traffic using Ahrefs. And to make things easier, I’m gonna group them into 3 categories: Content, Link Building, and Technical SEO. Let’s dive in to our first quick win, and that is to…
- #8 Update existing pages or create new ones for low hanging fruit keywords
- #9 This is any keyword for which your website doesn’t rank in Top 3 and has a decent amount of monthly organic traffic. With a little bit effort, you can bump them up 1-2 positions and benefit from the increased organic traffic. To discover them, head over to the Organic keywords report under Site Explorer - which shows all the organic keywords for which your website is ranking for. Then, we’re gonna filter out keywords that rank - say - between position #4 and #15 (those on the second half of Google’s first page, first half of the second page). And get at least 500 search visits a month.
- #10 From here, it’s just a matter of manually checking the SERP for potential marginal traffic gains. Let’s look at the keyword “affiliate marketing”, where we currently rank on position #7 and get an estimated 15k search visits a month. If we were to improve and bump it by just 4 positions, we would be able to more than double our traffic. [NOTE: perhaps too much info?]
- #11 Alright, the second use case is to find featured snippet opportunities. In fact, this is the quickest way to shortcut your way to position #1.
- #12 We’re going to use the Organic keywords report again and play with the Position filter, only this time we’re going to set it to keywords that rank in position #2 to #10. Now, I’m purposely excluding keywords that rank in positions #1, because that’s where featured SERP snippets are found.
- #13 And the reason why I chose the top 10, is because in our study of 2 million SERP snippets, we learned that 99.58% of featured snippets are owned by pages in the top 10.
- #14 Next, I’m going to also set a feature where the target doesn’t rank for the featured snippet. And we’ve now found 7.500 keywords where there’s a chance to rank with a featured snippet.
- #15 After this, you can look at multiple eligible snippets in Google to see if you can write a better one. For “how to start affiliate marketing”, we own the main snippet.
- #16 But if you append “-ahrefs.com” after the query, you’re removing Ahrefs.com from the results and see the second eligible snippet is from Hostinger.com. Rinse and repeat until you’ve covered most angles.
- #17 Moving on, our next use case is about updating pages with declining traffic in the past 6 months. Now of course, updating any old page won’t work. So we need to look not only at pages with declining traffic, but also those underperforming due to content issues.
- #18 Let’s go with your money pages— a.k.a. the pages that bring the most organic traffic to your website—via the Top pages report.
- #19 For convenience, the report also has a Performance chart where you can follow the growth of your pages ranking in the Top 100.
- #20 Now, to find pages with declining traffic, I’ve set the Traffic filter to “Declined” and clicked on the “Comparison dropdown” to compare the current ranking pages with the ones from 6 months ago. You could also use the Performance chart and click and drag on the past 6 months to achieve the same result. And we’ve found 638 pages as potential candidates.
- #21 I don’t have enough time on my hands to show you what I’d do next, but from here, it’s just a matter of updating the pages for which you don’t rank high for the primary keyword. In this example, a drop of 2 positions resulted in a loss of 6000 visits a month. So I’d further investigate that.
- #22 Which brings us to our next use case, and that is to uncover content gaps between you and your top competitors.
- #23 You might already be familiar with Ahrefs Content Gap tool. In this example, I’ve added 3 organic competitors of ours in the upper part and our own domain at the bottom. The screenshot is telling us: show us keywords from Moz, Yoast, and SEranking where at least one of them is ranking in top 10, but ahrefs.com is not ranking in top 100.
- #24 And right away, we’ve found 1,941 keywords that we might benefit from filling content gaps. Like: “google tag manager”, “google site speed”, and so on. This is cool, but old news though. We’ve got smth better, faster, stronger. [PAUSE] Meet: Content Gap 2.0 - which is a beast in itself and enables more use cases.
- #25 Through it, you can: See a heatmap of all common keywords across 10 competitors
- #26 2. See keywords where your website ranks in position 11–20 (the second page of Google) and competitors rank in top 10 (the first page). These are the so called striking distance keywords, that with a little bit of effort, can be brought in top 10.
- #27 3. Specify how many competitors must rank for a keyword
- #28 4. Exclude SERP positions - like image packs - through the “Main positions only” filter
- #29 5. The last content-related quick win has to do with updating – or should I better say – re-publishing old pages with low traffic. Why bother with them though? So you can refresh them and hopefully rank higher than your current position.
- #30 To demonstrate this, I’m going to use Content Explorer – our content discovery tool- and look for pages from our blog that have only been published ONCE, AND get few monthly organic search visits - say up to 50. There’s no point republishing posts that were published recently, so as a rule of thumb, aim at those older than 12 months. And there you have it: close to 1k pages that we could potentially revisit and refresh in the hopes of increasing our rankings.
- #31 Ok, off to our link building quick wins. Let’s start with the the first one: redirect links from your website’s most linked-to broken pages. This is useful, because if you have broken pages with a ton of backlinks, you are potentially losing link equity. And should aim to fix them.
- #32 To find such pages on your website, go to the BBL report which will show your website’s most linked to pages. Then apply a 404 HTTP status code to surface the broken ones. And it looks like we have 749 links from 361 domains pointing to our blog post on competitive analysis. We could revive it or redirect the links to a similar existing blog post, like the one on competitive intelligence.
- #33 To find such pages on your website, go to the BBL report which will show your website’s most linked to pages. Then apply a 404 HTTP status code to surface the broken ones. And it looks like we have 749 links from 361 domains pointing to our blog post on competitive analysis. To preserve link equity, we could revive it or redirect the links to a similar existing blog post, like the one on “competitor analysis tools”.
- #34 Moving on to our next quick win: getting internal linking suggestions. Internal links are crucial to SEO, as they help Google discover new content on your website and pass link equity from high-authority pages to low-authority ones. But let’s face it: building internal links is time consuming.
- #35 Not if you’re using Ahrefs’ Site Audit. Our Internal link opportunities report makes internal linking suggestions by taking the top 10 keywords for your ranking pages—then finding mentions of them on your other crawled pages. So what this screenshot is telling us, is: which page to link from, which page to link to, along with the target keyword and its context. And as far as I know, Ahrefs is the only tool that’s able to do this. How cool is that?
- #39 With the next quick win, you can uncover link gaps between you and your top competitors. The goal here is to build new links from domains that are linking to your organic competitors, but not to you.
- #40 To find such domains, go to the Link Intersect tool under Site Explorer. This one is similar to the Content Gap tool. But instead of untapped keywords, it’s showing you untapped link opportunities you could potentially benefit from. Just paste your top organic competitors in the upper section and leave your domain at the bottom. Then hit “Show link opportunities”.
- #41 And right away, we’ve got 366K referring domains that are linking to one or more of our competitors.
- #42 From here, we could further refine the results to only high-relevant ones, by using the “All Intersection” dropdown. This will show only ref domains that are linking to multiple or all competitors. In this case, I went for all 3 intersections.
- #43 Another low-hanging fruit use case is to find domains that mention your brand, but don’t link yet to it. The battle here is half won, since the webmaster or SEO of the referring domain already knows about your brand. They just need a friendly nudge.
- #44 For this, I’m going to use Web Explorer: our latest core tool that allows us to scour our search engine - yep.com’s - entire database of 500B pages.
- #45 The beauty here is that you can really see the web like search engines do. AND we really mean it. Google doesn’t know how many results there are for a query until it reaches the last page. Which is totally different than its initial estimation. Unlike Google, we show you ALL pages that mention your keyword.
- #46 To find unlinked brand mentions, we could use search parameters. But an even easier way is to type in our branded keyword, which will prefill the domain with a set of predefined filters under the Examples tab. Then hit “Search”.
- #47 And right away, we’ve got close to 2 million groups of pages that you could potentially reach out to. To further filter it down, you could click on the settings dropdown and check all the options. Which should bring down our list to a more manageable one.
- #49 The last use case is about finding critical SEO issues that are holding your website back from ranking in Google.
- #50 In fact, our Site Audit tool scans your website for well over 140+ technical issues related to links, site performance, sitemaps, and more. This is essentially what the tool is all about. Once you’ve completed running a crawl, you can access the All issues report in the left sidebar.
- #51 If you set up scheduled audits, we’ll also show changes we found in subsequent crawls as deltas. So if you happen to do some fixes, the numbers should go down. If you’ve made a new release, the numbers might go up.
- #52 From here, you can go two ways [show 2 sign with finders]: You can go BROAD and click on an issue to find all pages affected by it. Then export it so your developers can further fix it.
- #53 Or you can go GRANULAR and click on a page to open its URL details panel. Here, you’ll find all issues affecting a page, hence can fix them all at once.
- #54 Btw, we have the most complete URL details panel in the industry, with information about a page’s inlinks, outlinks, hreflangs, structured data, you name it. You can even go one step further and analyze the HTML and text changes in between crawls. This should help both technical SEOs (to pinpoint issues with more accuracy) and marketers (who want to study changes in the copy of a landing page for example).
- #55 And that’s a wrap! I hope it’s clearer now what quick actions to prioritize to improve your rankings, instead of having to rewrite 800 meta descriptions.
- #56 But wait, that’s not all! To ease your job, we’ve made these pre-defined use cases available under a new report called: Opportunities. Which is available on all plans. Just click on the use case and you’ll get similar one like the ones I’ve spoken so far. This is just version #1, so expect more new cases to follow-up.