Besides Ahrefs’ options for a full analysis of internal links and external links on websites, the tool also features analysis of ranked organic keywords for websites, analysis of organic website traffic and its sources, as well as analysis of content pages on the site you are crawling. When you enter a URL into Ahrefs, you can see an exact list of the terms the site ranks for and in what position. This allows you to perform a quick comparison between the site you are scanning and your own site, or use the tool to review the progress your site’s ranked keywords have made over recent times. In this part of getting acquainted with the Ahrefs tool, we will cover organic keyword analysis and organic traffic analysis.
To get an in-depth understanding of the Ahrefs system, I recommend reading Ahrefs – Introduction to the SEO Tool and Glossary and Ahrefs – Backlink Analysis Tool.
Organic Keywords and Organic Traffic
The Organic Keywords and Organic Search Traffic options in Ahrefs display all the keywords the domain ranks for and how much search engine traffic arrives at the site via these keywords. In terms of work that needs to be done, there isn’t too much to do directly based on these figures, and they mainly help make a comparison of where your website stands relative to competitors. The real value comes from the complete list of keywords your competitor ranks for:
After finding the keywords relevant to your niche that your competitors already rank for, you can estimate what your difficulty will be to also gain a ranking spot for these keywords according to the competitor’s website (amount and quality of content on the page, external links, domain strength, etc.). In many ways, this shortens the entire keyword research process. Instead of typing a list of random keywords into the tool, you get the entire relevant keyword profile by researching your competitors.
Traffic Value
This feature in Ahrefs shows you the estimated value of the traffic your site receives from organic search. The higher this number, the more monetary value the traffic has. The reason this option is relevant is because traffic coming from keywords without commercial intent does not have much financial value for the website owner, unlike keywords with commercial intent or clear purchasing intent that make the traffic valuable. On websites where the volume of traffic is high, the website owner should strive to focus on the purchasing intent of the visitors in order to generate more revenue for the business.
Content Research - Content Explorer
You can conduct advanced content research using the Content Explorer feature in Ahrefs. The tool is designed to show you high-quality online content that gets a lot of social shares and is not necessarily measured by the number of backlinks pointing to it. This analysis option in Ahrefs is very reminiscent of the BuzzSumo tool, which checks web pages based on the quality of content on the page and the number of social shares. When you enter a keyword you want to search related content for across the web, you get the sites and specific web pages leading in content creation for that keyword. As in the example below, where I searched for the keyword Pipedrive, you can see that the top results are the main Pipedrive website, followed by other large websites that have previously written about the system.
Find Content That Gets Many Shares
This is the main reason people use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer. All you need to do is enter a keyword into the content analysis feature and search. You will then receive a list of pages from sites with the highest quality content according to the keyword you entered into the tool.
If it is important to you that the page is shared on a specific social network, you can apply this filter in the search options. Additionally, in the filtering options after searching for content for a specific keyword, you can filter by relevance level, site DR strength, number of referring domains, page traffic, entire website traffic, page traffic value, website traffic value, and more.
Filter Search by Traffic Value
As I mentioned in the paragraph above, within the tool for searching content across the web, you can filter the relevant content found by the estimated value of the traffic that the content generates (Traffic Value). The reason this metric is relevant is that the estimated value of the content is determined by the quality of the keywords and the commercial value of a conversion from a specific keyword multiplied by the number of visitors coming to the site via that keyword. In Ahrefs’ filtering options, you can filter both by the estimated traffic value of the page you scanned (Page traffic value) and by the estimated traffic value of the website itself – the main URL of the page you scanned (Website traffic value).
Find Republished Posts
An additional filter you can apply in Ahrefs when searching for content for a specific keyword is searching by republished posts (Republished), or in other words – content that someone recently updated. This helps us find which quality content on the web undergoes frequent updates, so we can understand what resonates with visitors, what content interests them more, and how to best present content to them.
Summary
In this part of analyzing the Ahrefs system, we covered the analysis of competitors’ ranking keywords, what position your competitors rank for in each keyword, and the amount of traffic these keywords generate for your competitors. In addition, we went over Ahrefs’ Content Explorer tool, whose goal is to help you analyze content from other websites on the internet for the keyword you entered in the search. Using Ahrefs’ content research will help you understand which content receives high rankings on Google and is more valued by the algorithm, so you can make adjustments to the content on your website to compete for rankings for a specific keyword.
About the Author
Dvir Naaman, 27, graduate of the digital marketing course at HackerU College. Experienced in WordPress website development, PPC marketing on Google, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok platforms. Specializes in organic SEO at Fialkov Digital. Extensively experienced in e-commerce and dropshipping, and owner of Merchant Center – a website aggregating information on e-commerce platforms and advanced marketing systems to increase business conversions with an emphasis on e-commerce store sales.
