25 Ways To Increase Your Search Traffic Using Ahrefs

Backlink Health Check

Look for dodgy links in the backlinks and referring domain reports

Enter your website domain into Site Explorer, then navigate to the referring domains tabs. This will show you all referring domains ordered by Domain Rating (DR) – and can be filtered from highest to lowest.

Look For Unnatural Anchor Text Issues

Anchor texts helps to tell Google (and potential visitors) what your website is about – but unnatural/irrelevant or even over-optimised anchor texts will damage your rankings. Try to aim for a mix of branded,

A solid tactic is to aim somewhere in terms of the average in terms of keyword rich links as to what your top performing competitors have.

Keyword Discovery

Check “Seed” Keywords into Keywords Explorer

Keywords Explorer is the first place I turn when I want to discover keywords for a new (or existing) website. All you neeed is a few “seed” keywords and it’ll give you thousands of ideas.

See Other Keyword Ideas (Based on Your Seed Keywords)

Keyword Explorer will also show you large number of other keyword ideas based on your Seed keywords.

Find Your Competitors Top Keywords and Topics

Enter a competitor’s domain into Site Explorer, then go to Organic Search > Top Pages. Here you will see which of your competitors pages are attracting the most organic search traffic.

Analyse your Competitors to Find Keyword “Content Gaps”

Content Gaps exists when your competitors rank for keywords that you don’t rank for. Content Gaps can give you a solid idea on new content to add to your site. It could be that your competitor is picking up on easy traffic just because they have targeted lower competition keywords which you were not even aware of. Not anymore.

Keyword Prioritisation

Find Keywords That You’re Ranking For in Mid Level Positions

If you’re already ranking in position 4-6 for a number of high-volume keywords – these are good keywords to focus your efforts for some quick wins. With a few thought out changes you could potentially box of top 3 positions in a very short period of time.

Find Keywords And Topics With High Traffic Potential

How do you figure out the true ranking potential of a topic? Easy… Check how much traffic the top ranking pages for that keyword are getting. If it’s a lot, the topic has a high traffic potential.

Content Research Category

Find Unique, Easily Beatable Content Ideas Using Content Explorer

What benefit does this have? You can enter (almost) any keyword into Content Explorer and it’ll kick back an absolute ton of content ideas. Ahrefs has an index of 800+ million pieces of content on a multitude of topics.

Find Keywords And Topics with High Traffic Potentials

Ahrefs add 5+ million new pieces of content to this index every 24 hours (which is Insanely useful), this means that you can enter (almost) any keyword into Content Explorer and it’ll provide you with a ton of content ideas.

Link Building

Use Branded Alerts To Reclaim Backlinks

Just because someone has mentioned your name in a piece of content doesn’t neccessarily mean that they also remembered to link back to you. If you know where you’re being mentioned; you can contact the relevant parties to ensure you get your precious backlink alongside your mention.

Monitor Topical Keyword Alerts

Monitoring branded keywords is great, but you can also monitor the mentions of any keyword. Perhaps your competitors are getting reviewed by a company; maybe they can review you at the same time.

Monitor Competitor Links And Brand Mentions

Monitoring your competitors can be a quality source of link prospects. Using Ahrefs you can identify where your competitors are getting their best links; and emulate their efforts yourself. Do this for a few of your top performing competitors and you end up with the sum of all their best links.

Find Skyscraper Link Building Opportunities

Perhaps one of the most famous link-building techniques there is: It’s super powerful too.

Broken Back-link Building

Broken Links are a Link-Builders Dream. If you can find a broken link with a large amount of back links – you can requisition it for your own gains.

Using the top page and 404 report you can spot broken links on not only your own site; but competitors ones as well.

If broken links point to something you can replicate’ you can contact webmasters to point their dead links to your content instead.

Find Decent Guest Post Prospects

This is a great way to cut down your list and ensure that you’re only writing for website that actually get traffic.

Site Auditing

Find Slow Loading Pages

Using the performance report feature you can pin point bottlenecks in your site’s performance and see which pages are responding slowly.

If you spot a slow loading pages that is receiving a lot of traffic, I recommend prioritising the speeding-up of that page. It will attract even more traffic if you improve the visitor experience.

Find HTML Tag Issues

Using the HTML tags reprot you can find and identify HTML issues for example: Rogue “Noindex” tags. Whilst not all HTML tag errors are potentially catastrophic, they’re always worth fixing. Ahrefs’ Site Audit Tool makes this process super easy, as it uncovers all the errors for you.

Find Incoming And Outgoing Link Issues

There are other link-based issues that can impact the performance of your website. Luckily, the Site Audit tool will help you to uncover and fix these issues.

Summary

As a quick recap of how to increase traffic with Ahrefs:

1. Maje sure your website is healthy
2. Find some keywords
3. Prioritise your keywords and find quick-win opportunities
4. Research and create some Awesome contet
5. Build Links to your Awesome content
6. Keep an eye on your progress and make sure you’re on the right track.

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