Ahrefs.com SEO Competitor Research
If you’re starting a new small business online or already have one and want to get rid of losing to your competitors in the landscape of organic search, then you need to perform SEO analysis of your competitors. One of the best platforms that you can use for that purpose is Ahrefs that acts as a goldmine of information. Not only does it allow you to analyze your competitors comprehensively, but it also helps you to improve every possible aspect of your SEO strategy. In this article, you’ll learn how to perform competitor research for SEO using Ahrefs. So, let’s dive into it.
Getting Started On Ahrefs
Improving your SEO strategy to get more organic traffic is critical because it brings highly qualified leads to your business. According to Ahrefs stats, 53.3 percent of all the internet traffic visiting websites is generated through organic search. Performing competitor research allows you to improve your SEO strategy to rank higher in Google search results.
In order to perform competitor research, you’ll need to equip yourself with the following tools.
- Google Sheets (you can also use the template by Ahrefs)
- Ahrefs Account (you can access Ahrefs’ free trial account)
After that, you can follow the steps mentioned below to perform comprehensive and detailed research.
Identification of Your Competitors
It’s obvious that you first need to identify your competitors in order to analyze them. For that matter, you’ll need to perform extensive market research. You can check online community forums and social media communities, solicit customer feedback, analyze google search engine results to compile a list of your top competitors. Your competitors will be targeting the desired keywords for your business in organic search.
It’s important to note if you own an e-commerce site or a blog then searching for your competitors by using a single keyword won’t be a suitable option. That’s because such platforms usually target tens of hundreds of topics and keywords and have multiple pages as well. In such a scenario, we recommend you use the Ahrefs Site Explorer’s competing domains report where you’ll need to enter your domain and click on the organic search. Here the system will show you competing domains as shown in the image below.
Source: Ahrefs Official
Analysis of the Competition
After identifying your competitors, you’ll need to analyze the landscape of your competition. For that, you’ll need to use the Ahrefs Batch Analysis tool that allows you to analyze all of your competitors simultaneously. You can access this tool by going to the “Batch Analysis” option after logging in to your Ahrefs account. Here the system will ask you to enter the domain names of your competitors and clicking on the “Analyze” button after that will show you the desired results.
Source: Ahrefs Official
This tool brings up a plethora of useful information such as:
- DR (Domain Rating): It shows that the website of your competitor has strong backlinking.
- Referring domains’ number: The higher the number of high-quality referring domains, the better the site ranking.
- AR (Ahrefs Rank): The lower the AR number the stronger the site.
- Organic search traffic and keyword rankings’ number estimation: As the name suggests, the higher the result, the more organic traffic the site is generating.
Find Competitors’ Broken Pages
Finding the broker pages of your competitors can help your business a great deal. You can achieve it by using the following information.
You’ll need to open the competitor’s domain results page again and click on the “Best by links”. Here, you’ll also need to select the “404 not found” filter as shown in the image below.
After finding the broken pages, consider creating new pages on your websites with the same topic but with better content. Not only will it improve the integrity of your website, but it’ll also rank better than your competitors.
Search for the Most Valuable Keywords
At this point, you need to find out all the keywords that are working the best for your competitors to generate organic traffic. In order to do that, you’ll again need to open the domain results page and click on the “Organic search” option. Here you’ll need to click on the “Organic keywords” available in the left panel as shown in the image below.
Source: Ahrefs Official
You can select the keywords with the most volume and write them down in your spreadsheet to use them on your website. It’s important to note that each keyword has its own difficulty. The higher the difficulty number the tougher it’ll be to rank for them.
Find Content Gaps
Content gaps primarily contain the keywords that you’re not targeting but your competitors are. It’s obvious and needless to say that you need to create new attractive content that incorporates those keywords. In order to find the content gap, you’ll need to go to Ahrefs “Site Explorer”, enter your website’s domain and click on the “Content Gap”, as shown in the image below.
Source: Ahrefs Official
After noting all the keywords your website is missing, start creating content with the keywords that have the lowest difficulty level.
Find Out Competitors’ Content Generating Most Organic Traffic
Finding the top pages of your competitors allow you to answer the following:
- Which of their content pieces/articles is raking for the most valuable keywords?
- What pages are generating loads of traffic?
You can again go back to the “Ahrefs Site Explorer” and click on the “Top Pages”.
Identify Most Linked Content of Your Competitors
Links are basically referrals that allow you to generate more organic traffic. You can go to the “Best by links” report from the “Site Explorer” of Ahrefs to find the most linked content. Once you have found the links, consider creating similar articles using a better SEO approach. You’ll also need to contact the websites you’re linking to swap out links.
Bear in mind that the tips and tricks mentioned above for your website’s SEO are just the tip of the iceberg. You can watch this detailed video by Socialty Pro to learn how to perform competitor research for SEO using Ahrefs for better understanding.
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