How to use Ahrefs to find most popular pages of a website

Ahrefs are among the greatest SEO tools that digital marketers often use. There are literally thousands of positive Ahrefs reviews from B2C and B2B marketers. If you’re an SEO specialist, SEO content writer, or a business owner, you cannot grow a high-ranking website successfully without Ahrefs assisting you.

Today, I’m going to reveal everything about using Ahrefs effectively. You’re going to learn how to use them to increase the website traffic and improve the SEO. In a nutshell, this is going to be a comprehensive review of this marketing technique.

Of course, as you optimize a site for search engines, Google becomes more likely to rank your content. And surely, using Ahrefs alone isn’t enough; you need to create content that automatically attracts backlinks.

For now, let’s jump into how to use Ahrefs to increase the website traffic and start our comprehensive analysis.

How to Use Ahrefs to Increase Your Website Traffic

It’s time to grow the search traffic, research the competitors and dominate your niche. Each marketer has his/her own way of using Ahrefs, but, it’s worth sharing our powerful guide to use Ahrefs efficiently.

1. Site Explorer:

1. Site Explorer:

This is one of my favorite ways of implementing Ahrefs. Basically, Ahrefs helps you find content opportunities based on the popular pages that get the most search engine traffic.
By knowing which pages drive the most traffic and interest the audience the most, you’ll know the types of content to focus on the website.
SEO specialists use Site Explorer to find which pages of their competitors’ are ranking for and generating more traffic.

How to use Site Explorer?

• Type in a domain URL of the competitor and click search.
• Then, go to the “Top Pages Report” on the left navigation menu.
• Finally, it ranks a website’s pages depending on the estimated organic search traffic it gets.

How to know which country visits the competitors’ site?

Site Explorer, by default, will select the country that drives the most organic traffic. This is very helpful to get to know which country is the most interested in your niche.

Moreover, you can choose “all countries” from the dropdown menu to discover the worldwide search traffic these pages get.

If you’re searching for low competition topics, then focus on the total global organic traffic vs the number of referring domains.

Pro-tip: Aim for topics with the least referring domains yet good monthly searches.

What about “Top Subfolders”?

They’re exactly like “Site Explorer”, but give you some more insight. This feature reveals the pages and subfolders of a website that get the most organic traffic.

Bottom line:

• You can learn new topics to create valuable SEO content.
• You’ll know the site structure of a broader topic you select.

This is one of the best free, online ways for competitive rankings analysis. With this method, you minimize your efforts and definitely improve your internal SEO strategies.

2. Backlink Checker

This feature allows you to research the quality of the competitor’s backlinks and understand how they got them.

Now, we’ve previously discussed how to create content that automatically generates high-quality backlinks. It’s time to know how Ahrefs can help you get some, too.

Let’s take a look at the “Top Pages Report” once more. We’re going to check one of the top health websites, healthline.com

As you can see there are more than 1,000 unique websites linking back to HealthLine. As you click on it, you can immediately see the quality websites, for instance, NY Times, CNBC, WikiHow, and so on.

How to know if the backlinks of a competitor are valuable or not?

Click on “Link Type” to see a dropdown menu clarifying the quality of the backlinks. These can be:

• Dofollow
• Redirect
• Governmental
• Educational

How to get a deeper report on backlinks?

On the left navigation menu > backlinks page, you’ll see “Backlinks”. Here, you can learn where the link is coming from, metrics on the linking page, and the context of the backlink.

What if you’re looking for a specific type of backlink?

Always use the filter to narrow down on a specific type of links. For example, if you’re looking for all linking pages from other blogs, set the “Link type” filter to “Content”.

That way you can only see the pages that backlink to the competitor within their content.

Choose the “DoFollow” filter if you want to discover only the followed and value-passing links.

What’s the catch?

Ideally, you can find link building opportunities. Let’s say you’re looking for websites that are “resources”.

Type “resources” in the search box and then go to the “Any Target” dropdown menu to select where you want “resources” to be found from.

Usually, it’s best to check the first two options only, since it’s where the word you’re searching for is usually found.

Pro tip on backlinks:

It’s hard to analyze the backlinks of an entire domain, so it’s best to analyze the backlinks of a specific page on the competitors’ website and work your way from there.

3. Content Explorer:

This feature finds low competition topics with high organic traffic potential. It’s a database owned by Ahrefs with over one billion pages.

1. Just type a keyword related to your niche. I’ll type in “Backpacks”. Now, we all know backlinks are one of the main factors to help the page rank on Google.
2. Set the maximum number of referring domains to 0 to find low competition topics.
3. Set the organic traffic filter to a minimum value of 1,000. This combination of filters shows all the pages that have …

• The word “Backpacks”.
• Zero backlinks.
• +1,000 organic traffic searches.

Now comes the fun part where you can guess the keyword these pages are ranking for and create valuable content about those keywords.

By clicking on the “Details” button, then “Organic keywords” tab, you’ll see the keywords they rank for, their ranking position and the amount of traffic they get from each keyword.

Compared to other tactics, this might be more difficult but it’s very rewarding. Instead of adding fresh content on your hunch, try utilizing the internet’s access to your competitors and become the master of strategy with ease.

How to find low competition keywords with Content Explorer?

Type in a broad keyword related to your niche, and following the steps above you can get a really good list of organic keywords to build your SEO content around.

4. Keywords Explorer:

Use it to find keyword data from 10 different search engines. This is Ahref’s keyword research tool and it’s super simple to use.

Simply, choose a search engine (Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and more), then type in the keyword.

I’ll type in “How to make slime”. Since I chose Google as my search platform, I’ll get some helpful metrics like:

• Keyword Difficulty
• Search volume
• Clicks data and more.

How to find related keywords?

You can find more keyword ideas from the reports on the sidebar or scroll down and analyze the position history and the top 10 ranking results.

5. Guest Blogging Sites

Here, you can find many relevant guest blogging sites. It’s time to quit searching through Google operators.

Why QUIT searching for guest posting blogs on Google?

1. You don’t have any SEO metrics for blogs you find this way. So, there’s no knowing if you’ll get any benefit when writing for these.
2. You’ll waste time filtering through irrelevant results.
3. You’re limiting yourself to websites that have “write for us” or “contribute” pages. It will be hard to get traffic from here; especially if you’re focusing on a small niche.

Do all websites that accept guest posts have a “write for us” page?

No! There are many websites that welcome guest posts but don’t have a page that invites writers. This is largely done to cut down on spam requests.

Content Explorer will find these websites. How? I’ll show you …

1. Type a keyword in the Content Explorer search bar like “Camping”.
2. Click on the “One article per domain” filter, since we don’t need to pitch the same website more than once.
3. Finally, filter the results even more by “Domain Rating Filter”. So, if you’re new to guest blogging, set it from 30 to 40. It’s the perfect way to find smaller sites to get some practice pitching, writing and building the portfolio.
4. If you’re a seasoned guest blogger then set the “Domain Rating” from 50 to 70. It will show you more authoritative blogs.

Also, make sure you read the content on the websites you target to get a better feel of the nature of the content that will work. It’s easy to monitor this content, just see the latest posts and pay more attention to the competing content as well as content that’s generally great.

I cannot stress this enough: it’s extremely beneficial and important to determine what content already wins on the website you’ll be guest posting on. If you create content that won’t get the eyeballs over there, then there’s little to no point in doing it. You’re writing for their users and it’s a key factor to intersect your own content with what users prefer over there.

What’s the “Domain Rating Filter”?

It’s an Ahrefs metric which represents the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile.

6. Backlink Alerts:

Find new link building opportunities on complete autopilot. In Ahref’s backlink study, they found that high-ranking pages get more backlinks.

Why?

Because higher-ranking pages are found easily and get more exposure. Use Ahref’s Backlinks Alert to know where these top-ranking pages are getting their links from in real-time.

In a nutshell, high-ranking pages get more backlinks because they rank high and at the same time, because these pages rank high, they get more backlinks.

Ahrefs blog writer Tim Soulo dubs it the “vicious circle of SEO”.

How to use Ahrefs Backlink Alerts?

1. Go to Google and type the keyword that you wish to rank for.
2. Take the URL of the top-ranking pages.
3. Go to “Alerts” and create a new backlink alert by pasting the URL.
4. Finally, set the “scope” to “new backlinks”.

As soon as this URL gets a new backlink, you’ll be notified through the email provided. When you see an opportunity to pitch the page, you’ve saved time. Of course, saving time is a critical component for successful outreach.

Pro Tip:

Don’t limit yourself to the top-ranking page; it’s best to create alerts for the top 3-5 pages to increase your opportunities.

7. Content Gap Tool

Simply put, this tool shows the keywords the competitors are ranking for but your website isn’t.

Think about it.

If one or more of the competitors are ranking for these keywords, then there’s a good chance you could get organic traffic from these keywords, too. It essentially means that you’re missing out on something new or undiscovered and the quicker you join the club, the better.

How to use Content Gap tool?

1. Enter YOUR domain into Site Explorer.
2. Click on the “Content Gap Tool” on the left navigation bar.
3. Enter some of the competitors’ URLs.
4. Change the dropdown to “All of the below targets”.
   • This filter shows the most relevant results by showing only the keywords where all of these websites rank but yours doesn’t.
5. Check the box that says “at least one of the targets should rank in top 10. So, it’ll only show keywords where one of the competitors ranks in the top 10. This is to ensure you’re not getting all stressed out about missing out on something when that something is low-quality or garbage stuff.

Using this, you can easily discover some keywords to create fresh content around.

What makes the Content Gap Tool unique?

This tool actually runs its analyses at the page level.

For example, if you want to create a blog post about “YouTube SEO“, first click on the SERP button next to the keyword to see the top-ranking pages.

Now, copy the top 3 relevant results URLs and paste them in the top section of the Content Gap Tool. Don’t forget to delete your URL in the bottom.

As you run the search, you’ll find all the keywords that the top-ranking pages rank for. You can use this keyword list as an outline for the content you want to create next.

8. 404 Error Pages:

This tool will help preserve link juice from the broken pages. Having pages that return a 404 error response is not healthy for the website.

You’ll be wasting some pretty good links. Luckily, Site Explorer will help locate these pages. Just type in the domain’s URL and then go to the “Best By Links” report in the left navigation menu. Here you’ll see the pages that have the most backlinks.

To find the 404 (broken) pages, click on the “HTTP code” filter and choose the “404 not found” option. It’s easier to fix the page, or redirect it to the proper link.

Pro-tip: You can look up the competitors’ broken URLs to find link building opportunities. Just search for the competitor’s URLs and check for the “404 not found”. Ideally, you’ll have tons of new topics to create content around and reach out to the competitors for backlinking opportunities.

Pro tip:

You can look up the competitors broken URL to find link building opportunities. Just search for the competitor’s url and check for the “404 not found”.

Ideally, you’ll have tons of new topics to create content around and reach out to the competitors for backlinking opportunities.

9. Site Audit Tool:

This feature helps you scan the website for over 100 common technical SEO issues. After running the crawl, you can scroll down to the “Overview Report” and find a table near the bottom that shows you the technical issues Ahrefs has detected.

For example, click on “404 pages”, and it’ll open up “Data Explorer” and show all of the broken pages on the site.

Html Tag Reports:

It’ll show the pages that don’t have a Meta description tag. Click on that error to know which pages are affected and need to be fixed.

To save time, click on the plus button and add فاث notes on Ahrefs directly. After that, go to the “To-Do” report where you can export the results and send it to the developer to add the Meta description.

10. Rank Tracker:

With the Rank Tracker, you can measure your ranking performance. It shows where your pages rank on Google for any keyword on mobile and desktop across 170 countries.

Uniquely, Ahrefs has its own features within Rank Tracker to take ranking performance to the next level.

SERP Feature Tracking:

Ahrefs tracks 13 SERP features for all the keywords. Not only will you see the visible SERP features, but also the history of the tracked feature which you may have owned.

Competitors Report:

Track up to 5 of the competitors and see how to match up against them on the graphs for different categories.

Now, you finally know how to use Ahrefs to improve SEO and increase website traffic.

.