Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Nov 24, 2021 17 tweets 6 min read Read on X
New to @ahrefs ?

Check out these 11 simple (yet actionable) use cases, which will help you get instant value from our SEO platform.
(1) See how much search traffic your competitors get

Every business owner wants to know how their competitors are doing.

Compare your website against your competitors and see which one of you gets more search traffic.
(2) Learn which pages bring search traffic to your competitors

For example, 33.3% of all search traffic to Ahrefs' own blog comes from just 5 articles:
(3) Study what people are searching for in Google

One of the keys to growing your traffic from Google is to study the popular searches in your industry.

This is to ensure you’ll be creating content about things that many people are searching for.
Keywords Explorer helps you discover hundreds of thousands of valuable search queries.

For example, the "Matching terms" report gives you a whopping 558,968 search queries that contain the word “bitcoin” in them:
(4) Gauge the full search traffic potential of a topic

The search volume of an individual keyword can be rather misleading. This is because webpages never rank for just one keyword.

To address that misconseption we have developed a new SEO metric called "Traffic potential."
Traffic potential metric is very simple to understand.

It shows you how much traffic the #1 ranking page for your search query gets in total from all the keywords that it ranks for.

Many seasoned SEOs were doing this manually for quite a while now:
(5) Find critical SEO issues that hurt your website’s performance in Google

Our Site Audit tool will scan your website for over 120 common SEO issues and provide detailed recommendations on how to fix them.
You can also set up recurring website audits and monitor your "SEO Health score" over time.

This is especially useful when there are many people in your company who can make changes to your website and, in doing so, may accidentally break things.
(6) Estimate the ranking difficulty of any keyword

Some keywords are incredibly easy to rank for, while others are pretty much unattainable—even for big, authoritative websites.

But how do you know which is which?

Use our Keyword Difficulty score!
IMPORTANT NOTE!

We don’t advise our customers to make important SEO decisions based on this simple two-digit number ALONE.

The real ranking difficulty of a keyword is much more complex and nuanced than that.

Learn more about it from this post of mine:
ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-d…
(7) Find out where your competitors got their backlinks

One of the most common jobs of an SEO professional is to figure out where the top-ranking pages got their backlinks (and how to get the same backlinks for their own page).

Ahrefs is known as an absolute leader in that 😎
(8) Discover your competitors’ “linkable assets”

Study your top competitors and see which of their pages have attracted the most links.

You can do that using the "Best by links" report in Site Explorer.
(9) Monitor your ranking progress for thousands of keywords

The "Organic keywords" report in Site Explorer will show you nearly all of the keywords that your website is ranking for in Google.

Even my long-abandoned personal blog still ranks #1 for a bunch of keywords it seems:
(10) Find gaps in your content strategy

A “gap” in content strategy is when your competitors are all ranking for important keywords that bring lots of valuable traffic to them while your own website doesn’t target those keywords.

Use "Content Gap" report to study that:
(11) Find hundreds of quality link prospects in seconds

Let’s say you’re doing SEO for a productivity app.

Wouldn’t it be useful for you to get a list of all websites that mentioned the words “productivity app” somewhere in the content?

You can do that in Content Explorer:
That's it! :)

11 simplest and most actionable use cases of Ahrefs that were selected with the SEO newbies in mind.

If you would like to see a more detailed version of this list with a few extra tips and use cases, check out this post on our blog:

ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-us…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Tim Soulo 🇺🇦

Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @timsoulo

Apr 21, 2023
How do you create "OG images" for your blog?

- Grab a random image from an article?
- Find a relevant stock photo & slap some text on it?
- Use Canva?
- Order a custom illustration for each article?

Here at @ahrefs we just switched from custom design to auto-generating them.🙂 Image
There's actually an entire story behind our blog's "featured images," which I shared a few years ago.

Check it out here:
That story ends with us developing a recognisable style and hiring an in-house illustrator to draw a custom image for every single article we publish.

And we were quite happy with this setup for a while...

..up until we started scaling our content output. 😅
Read 10 tweets
Nov 23, 2022
Since the topic of traffic estimations is top of mind again, let me throw my 2 cents in.

"How accurate are the traffic estimates in @ahrefs ?"

It depends 🤷‍♂️

Does the website get lots of traffic from:
- long tails?
- branded searches?
- seasonal queries?
- news/trends?
^ each of these types of search queries have their own caveats.

@ahrefs might not have enough long tails, or underreport the branded searches or lag behind some seasonal trends...

Those things might seem straightforward, but in reality they're super challenging to get right.
That is why the accuracy of organic search traffic estimations in Ahrefs can differ quite substantially for different kinds of websites.

[see the attached graph]

For some websites, we are off by less than 5%. For others, we can be off by more than 500%.
Read 8 tweets
Aug 3, 2022
Zero-Volume Keywords

^ they seem like one of the latest hot trends in SEO.

But I honestly don't get what all the hype is about. 🙂
So an SEO tool like @ahrefs shows that there's little to no searches for a given keyword.

Then you rank for it and look it up in GSC..

And there's actually a bunch more clicks than Ahrefs has promised.

So..? :)
I imagine it is rather well known that Search volumes in Ahrefs won't perfectly match your impressions in GSC.

There are many reasons for it, but here's a super simple one:

- Ahrefs gives you annual average (past 12 months).
- GSC shows you last 3 months data by default.

🤷‍♂️🙂
Read 9 tweets
Aug 2, 2022
5 useful things you can do with @ahrefs SEO toolbar.

( 4 of them are FREE )
I'm sure most of you folks are aware of the "original" functionality of Ahrefs' SEO toolbar:

• Show Ahrefs' metrics of a visited URL
• Show Ahrefs' metrics of every page in a SERP
But in the past few years we've expanded the functionality of our toolbar quite a bit & added many useful features to it.

(we've also re-designed it from scratch and made it a lot prettier)

So here are 5 useful features of @ahrefs SEO Toolbar which you likely didn't know about:
Read 9 tweets
May 12, 2022
Keyword Difficulty...

- How much can you trust this 2-digit number?
- How is it even calculated?
- Is KD enough for gauging your chances to rank?

^ I answred all of these questions (& more) in my latest article on the Ahrefs Blog:

ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-d…

TL;DR thread below 👇 Image
Let's start from the last Q:

"Is KD metric enough for gauging your chances to rank?"

NO!

Ask any professional SEO to MANUALLY gauge your chances to rank for a given keyword & I'm sure they will refrain from making any specific promises (if they're a true professional ofc).
Many people erroneously expect the Keyword Difficulty metric to boil down the entire sophisticated Google ranking algorithm to a simple 2-digit number.

Like 42.
(did you catch the reference?)

That is obviously not possible.
Read 12 tweets
Apr 6, 2022
9 "interesting" marketing stunts that we did at @ahrefs
Let's face it, most of digital marketing is rather "unexciting:"

- Create "SEO content" & grow traffic
- Run ads on BOFU keywords
- Retarget visitors with FB ads
- Build an email list & setup automation
- Optimise your landing pages
- Start a community
- etc

🥱
I'm not the most creative marketer on the planet, but I'm always looking for ways to break this routine and do something outside of that box.

So here's a list of 9 "interesting" marketing stunts that we've carried out at Ahrefs in the past few years:
Read 25 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(