Want to meet other people interested in SEO offline? Give an SEO meetup a go. In my experience, it’s one of the best ways to meet like-minded people and provides a more relaxed, informal setting than a bustling SEO conference. Who knows—you could make new friends at a meetup or even land new SEO clients. But…
SEO and content marketing are different marketing channels. But you don’t have to choose between them. They’re complementary. In fact, you should combine them for greater effectiveness in your marketing. Why should you combine SEO and content marketing? Two main reasons: 1. Content marketing and SEO are like peanut butter and jelly—they work well together…
Getting to the top of Google can be quite slow. Especially so for small, new websites. And the competition can often be too strong, which makes it quite unlikely for you to outrank your rivals in the first place. Well… if you can’t win, change the rules. There’s a very simple trick for getting search traffic for…
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your pages to rank in a search engine’s organic results. Pay-per-click (PPC) is a form of online advertising where advertisers pay a fee each time someone clicks their ad. There’s no conundrum between the two types of marketing. You don’t have to choose one or the other;…
We’ve recently crossed 10k downloads for Ahrefs Podcast. And, to be honest with you, I thought this 10k would come easier. I mean, Ahrefs is a fairly mature brand in the SEO industry, and most of our channels are measured in millions: So when we reached that 10k milestone I felt both happy about it,…
Every week, we share hot SEO news, interesting reads, and new posts in our newsletter, Ahrefs’ Digest. If you’re not one of our 275,000 subscribers, you’ve missed out on some great reads! Here’s a quick summary of my personal favorites from the last month: Best of June 2024 An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API…
Healthcare SEO is the secret to helping your organization reach more patients and clients. SEO can help you rank for useful keywords, connect with patients in your local area, and share helpful information and advice with thousands of people. To write this guide to medical SEO, we interviewed five experienced healthcare SEOs and content creators.…
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a popular goal-setting framework. It helps SEOs define and measure the success of their projects, teams, and individual SEOs. The objectives should be clearly defined. Some people prefer the SMART framework to make sure their goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Key results are how you track…
Enterprise SaaS SEO is the practice of improving the visibility and rankings of an enterprise SaaS website in search engines. The goal is to attract people who are looking for solutions that your product can provide. It works like this: Let’s dive in. Benefits of SEO for SaaS companies There are many reasons SaaS companies should focus…
Recent changes to Google’s user interface have affected the volume and quality of organic website traffic. For instance, AI Overviews and the commoditized answers Google serves directly in search results mean fewer top-of-funnel clicks reach websites. There are also fewer clicks for bottom-of-funnel keywords as Google inserts itself in the conversion process. For example, if…
Enterprise link building is the process of acquiring links to a large, enterprise company’s website to improve its visibility and rankings in search engines. Enterprise companies get a lot of links naturally. While they may have some challenges with link building, these companies also have a ton of opportunities because of who they are and…
Enterprise technical SEO is the practice of optimizing a large, enterprise company’s website to help search engines find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. It helps increase visibility and rankings in search engines. Enterprise websites are where technical SEO shines. There’s so much money at stake. One mistake can keep millions of pages out of…
Has someone written something about your business online that’s misleading, inaccurate, or just downright nasty? If you’re worried this could impact your business, you’ll need to start online reputation management (ORM). But where should you start with ORM? And what the heck is it? In this beginner’s guide, I’ll explain what online reputation management is, why…
HubSpot is a publicly traded company, with over $614M in annual revenue, a legendary status among marketers, and an alleged acquisition offer from Google for just enough money to send a small team of the best of us to the Moon or solve world hunger for a couple of years. They have a special place in…
Content marketing can become complicated and effortful very quickly. Content teams need to manage ideation, writing, editing, proofing, publishing, promotion, analytics, and reporting across a team of writers, reviewers, and dozens of articles each month. Smart content leads find ways to automate some of these processes to let them focus on what really matters. So,…
This article is for anyone who wants to convince their boss to invest in SEO, or those who want to sell SEO services. SEO is a well-known and widely used marketing tactic, but convincing your boss—or a room full of skeptics—can be tough. So, to make this easier for you, I reached out to over 100…
SEO can be excruciatingly slow to take effect sometimes, so if you’re under pressure to prove the value of SEO early on, how can you speed up the time it takes to get results? In this article, I’ll explain the framework and tools I’d use to approach quick SEO and the 8 methods I’d focus…
The Google Search Console status “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user” means that Google chose a different URL to index than the one the user selected. This can happen when Google finds two or more pieces of content on a site that are very similar or identical. The issue will show in the Page…
In this guide, we’re diving into twelve content marketing tactics we’ve tested and continue to use with some decent results. We know they work, and we’re excited to show you the proof. 1. Target low-competition keywords to rank faster Generally speaking, low-competition keywords are search terms where you likely don’t need many backlinks to rank on…
SEO tracking involves regularly checking a set of metrics to evaluate a website’s performance in search engine results. Some of the most widely adopted metrics include keyword rankings, organic traffic, conversions, and referring domain growth. Tracking the right metrics is crucial for SEO (search engine optimization) success. You need them to analyze your SEO performance,…
AI can make your SEO efforts faster, better, and more fun—if you know how to use it. Here are 14 practical ways to get faster, more efficient SEO results with help from your robot overlords friends. How AI works (in <60 seconds) To use AI in the best way (and avoid the mistakes many people make),…
Get the week’s best marketing content If you’re curious about the state of Google search in 2024, look no further. Each year we pick, vet, and categorize a list of up-to-date statistics to give you insights from trusted sources on Google search trends. Top Google search statistics Google has a web index of “about 400…
When you move to a new address in the US, you set up mail forwarding with the United States Postal Service (USPS). If someone sends mail to your old address, USPS will look at their mail forwarding rules and realize… Read more ›
In this guide, I’ll cover in detail how to make the best use of keywords in three steps: Finding good keywords: keywords that are rankable and bring value to your site. Using keywords in content and meta tags: how to use the target keyword to structure and write content that will satisfy readers and send relevance signals…
It’s like death and taxes: inevitable. The bigger a company gets, the worse its content marketing becomes. HubSpot teaching you how to type the shrug emoji or buy bitcoin stock. Salesforce sharing inspiring business quotes. GoDaddy helping you use Bing AI, or Zendesk sharing catchy sales slogans. Judged by content marketing best practice, these articles…
Get the week’s best marketing content Hello everyone. It’s April again, so I’m back in Brighton for another two days of sun, sea, and SEO! Being the introvert I am, my idea of fun isn’t hanging around our booth all day explaining we’ve run out of t-shirts (seriously, you need to be fast if you want…
Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results. Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you…
If you’re a small business owner, people are searching for what you do on Google. Unless you show up, you’re missing out on customers or clients. SEO is how you do that, and the basics are quick and easy. Follow these tips to rank your small business higher in no time. 1. Claim and optimize your Google…
If you’ve invested time and effort writing an epic piece of content, don’t forget about on-page SEO. It helps google to understand what your page is about and show it to as many people as possible in the search results. Even better, many on-page improvements are super quick and easy to do. Follow this checklist for…
Content marketing reporting tools allow you to track, analyze, and present data and qualitative feedback to your boss or client. Their main purpose is to look back on performance and help make data-driven decisions. This article lists a complete tool stack that will allow you to track all the metrics that matter in content marketing,…
Most content today is arbitrage, simply moving information from one place to another. Very few blog posts create new information. Most serve to remix, curate, and copycat existing content, transferring the same core information from one website to another. If all your content does is shuffle common knowledge around, then I have bad news: the…
Not sure how to prepare your content report? I get it — too many metrics to report, and what should a report look look in the first place? I promise this will change by the end of this guide. In this guide, you’ll learn the three best practices of reporting and eight types of information that…
Keyword clustering tools group keywords with the same or similar intent. This makes it easier to take action on your keyword research because it tells you which keywords to target on the same page. Unfortunately, most keyword clustering tools aren’t exactly quick… For example, I asked a popular keyword clustering tool to group 4,703 keywords. It…
SEOs have a lot to offer companies during the merger and acquisition (M&A) process. They can help identify acquisition targets, do due diligence and help with valuation and risk identification, identify future opportunities, work with teams on website migrations, monitor migration progress, and train new teams in best practices. Acquisitions can have a dramatic impact…
It’s too easy to break your SEO during a website redesign. Here’s a foretaste of what can go wrong: Loss of rankings and traffic. Loses of link equity. Broken pages. Sluggish page loading. Bad mobile experience. Broken internal links. Duplicate content. For example, this site deleted about 15% of organic pages (yellow line) during the redesign,…
I often post my favorite new Ahrefs features on X. And last time I announced our newest addition to Keywords Explorer, someone replied with this: I mean it is good for seasonal keywords but to be honest it would be great if the search volume in general would be more accurate… — Kim von Däniken (@KimvonDaniken)…
We already do a great job with internal linking on the Ahrefs blog. But we wondered if adding a related posts section would help us and whether users would use it. Our marketing team was fairly split on whether we should have a section like this and whether it would help. I’ve had great results with…
It’s easy to come up with blog post ideas, but writing about random topics won’t get you traffic to your blog. You need to write about topics with traffic potential. How to find blog post ideas with traffic potential The proverb goes, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a…
Affiliate marketing is where you promote another company’s product or service in exchange for a commission. When people click your link and buy the product or service, you make money. It is absolutely not a scam. It is legal, as long as you comply with relevant laws and regulations in your country. For example, here are FTC’s…
I was scrolling through X last year when I saw this tweet from the CEO of Shopify: It made me pause and think: Can you really replace Google with something else, like AI? I grew up with Google after all; it had never crossed my mind that one day I would stop using the search…
Google knows about 300T pages on the web. It’s doubtful they crawl all of those, and at least according to some documents from their antitrust trial we learned they only indexed 400B. That’s around .133% of the pages they know about, roughly 1 out of every 752 pages. For Ahrefs, we choose to store about 340B…
Get the week’s best marketing content Ahrefs Site Audit, also available as part of the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, allows you to search through the raw HTML code or the JS-rendered code across all crawled pages of the website. This feature is particularly useful when you need to verify analytics tags, identify pages that call…
There are too many content marketing metrics out there. But we know which ones are actually used (we asked on LinkedIn and X). To organize things a bit, we’ve organized the metrics into eight categories. Just the names themselves will give you a good idea of what’s important in content marketing. Let’s get to it. This…
For many SEOs in agency, in-house, or enterprise roles, 20% of their job is actually doing SEO, the other 80% is about soft skills like getting buy-in. I always say that 20% of my job is actually doing the SEO, and 80% of communicating, getting buy-in, and moving the boulder so that [stakeholders] can succeed…
Learning SEO doesn’t have to break the bank. There are plenty of quality free SEO courses teaching everything from the basics to keyword research to link building. Here are ten that won’t cost a dime. 1. SEO Course for Beginners Course provider: Ahrefs Duration: 2 hours Instructor(s): Sam Oh Level: Beginner Link: SEO Course for Beginners What you’ll…
People use mental models to comprehend reality, solve problems, and make decisions in everyday life. SEO is not an exception here, yet it’s not a topic you often hear about in this industry. The thing is, you need to be careful with mental models because they’re sneaky. We tend to develop them during our lives,…
I’ve used Ahrefs since 2016. I thought I was a power user, but since joining the team, I’ve discovered a bunch more use cases that I can’t imagine living without. Here are five of my favorite ways to use Ahrefs for content marketing: 1. Reverse-engineer your competitor’s entire content strategy Let’s be honest: we all…
Let me guess: You’re here because you’ve published an article and want to know how to get more eyeballs on it. But doing that is akin to the underground inventor who has made something and is looking for someone to buy it: They have no idea if anyone actually wants their thing They now have to force it…
At Ahrefs.com we’ve got 9.7k cases of multiple rankings. It’s when a site ranks for a keyword with more than one page. Now, classic SEO theory says that if you rank with more than one page for a keyword, it’s a cannibalization issue, and you should fix it. But when I spent a day carefully reviewing a…
SEOs have access to so much data that sometimes, it’s hard to know what to do with it all. I’ve been experimenting with visualizing Ahrefs data using GPT-4, so I thought I’d share the results with you all. We’ve already launched some AI-enhanced features like search intent, but we made it even better by adding the…
For a few hundred bucks, you can hit the big red “publish” button and use generative AI to write every article you’ve ever wanted to write. It’s sorely tempting. But beyond the short-term dopamine hit of publishing a thousand articles at once, for most businesses, the negatives of AI content will very quickly outweigh the…
Looking for a list of the most popular websites in the US and Worldwide in 2024? We’ve pulled the top 100 most visited sites by organic traffic from our database. Top 100 most visited websites in the world # Domain Traffic 1 youtube.com 4.8B 2 en.wikipedia.org 2.5B 3 facebook.com 2.1B 4 instagram.com 1.5B 5 twitter.com 1.3B 6…
Marketing is full of things that can be measured (known as metrics), but not all metrics make good key performance indicators. To choose the right KPIs: Tailor them to your role. Different marketing roles need different levels of detail in their KPIs. An SEO lead might care about monthly backlink growth, but a CMO will care…
Competitive intelligence (CI) sounds like hogwash to some and a holy grail to others. Many organizations try it out and chalk it up to “an expensive, fruitless endeavor.” Truth is, they’re doing it wrong. In this no-nonsense guide, we’ll go beyond the MBA-hyped-up textbook jargon and dive into the tactics that will actually make a difference.…
If you’re an Ahrefs user, you can combine our data with ChatGPT to improve your SEO. Here are some of the best use cases. 1. Fill missing subtopics in existing content If a page is outranking you, it could be because it covers important subtopics searchers want to see (while you don’t). Here’s how to find these subtopics:…
Product pages are where the final decision to purchase a product is made. By optimizing them for SEO (and adding a sprinkling of UX), you’ll increase the chances of attracting more visitors and converting them into loyal customers. In this beginner’s guide, I’ll share 16 elements that collectively make up the anatomy of a well-optimized…
Ranking in Google is the same (or at least very similar) for everyone. That’s why it’s essential to have an SEO plan template you can use time and time again. So… we created one for you. Download the SEO plan template Looking for a different format? Request it here. Why you should use our template It gives you…
Here’s a 5-minute, beginner-friendly introduction to each of them. Organic traffic data refers to how often people visit your website through unpaid search results. Key data How to get it To get organic traffic data from Google, set up a… Read more ›
First, we have someone offering us to pay for it: Then there’s someone else, framing their backlink request as a “guest post opportunity”: And finally, here’s the most professional one of the three. This email looks fairly well written, but… Read more ›
Everyone in SEO uses ChatGPT. But even after all these months, I still see many folks using it wrong. Let’s explore three common mistakes and how you can fix them. Mistake 1: Asking it questions it doesn’t have the answer to Believing everything ChatGPT says is never a good idea, but believing answers to questions it doesn’t…
Enterprise SEO metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Monitoring these metrics helps you prove value and shows the success of your SEO program. You’ll create a lot of different SEO reports for a lot of different people in an enterprise environment. Let’s look at some of…
Put simply, a headless content management system (CMS) separates a website’s content from its design and code. It functions differently from a traditional CMS, like WordPress, and therefore requires different considerations for SEO as well. While general SEO best practices and rules remain the same, how you go about implementing them will differ in a headless…
An enterprise SEO audit looks at large enterprise websites to find issues and opportunities that will improve rankings and visibility on search engines. The basics are the same as any other SEO audit. Yet, an audit like this is an entirely different beast because of all the complications that come from large sites and large…
For e-commerce websites, optimizing product pages is one of the most critical aspects of SEO. Optimized product pages enhance the user experience and rank better for long-tail search terms, which typically have lower competition and high commercial intent. This is vital for ecommerce because users searching for specific products are usually further down the sales funnel…
I’ve finally hit the milestone: 100 blog posts for the Ahrefs blog. So, I decided to reflect on my journey. I did two Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions to see what people wanted to know: one on Twitter X and another on LinkedIn. I was pleasantly surprised that so many people were interested, so thank…
Get the week’s best marketing content We spent ~$80 to purchase five premium ChatGPT prompts and ran a blind test among the members of our marketing team to see if they were worth it. Long story short: They aren’t. The experiment Here’s what I did: I signed up for a service selling ChatGPT prompts and selected five…
Are you wondering what people in the U.S. (and around the world) are searching for the most? Then you’re in luck! We’ve pulled four lists from our database of 20.4 billion keywords: Top 100 Google searches in the U.S. # Keyword Search Volume 1 youtube 171M 2 facebook 117M 3 wordle 80M 4 gmail 72M 5…
We’ve shared many great reads in our newsletter over the last quarter. I thought it would be cool to put together a list of articles that stood out—the ones that resonate with our community and spark ideas and inspiration for what to do next. So, here’s a roundup of our newsletter’s highlights from Q4 2023. You…
We’ve attended dozens of SEO conferences and some aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Here are the ones we think are worth attending in 2024. Conference When Location Sydney SEO Conference Mar. 1, 2024 Sydney, Australia WTSFest London Mar. 8, 2024 London, UK PubCon Mar 4-6, 2024 Las Vegas, US SMX Munich Mar. 12 & 13, 2024 Munich, Germany SMX Paris Mar. 14…
International SEO is the process of optimizing your website for users in different countries and speakers of different languages. Its goal is to drive more traffic from an international audience. Follow the international SEO best practices below to better target foreign markets. Looking for an international SEO checklist? We’ve got you covered. Download the checklist…
Free SEO tools may be limited, but you can still use them to do SEO. You just need the right ones to cover your use cases. Add these 36 free SEO tools to your SEO toolkit. Monitor your website’s SEO health, see who’s linking to you, and learn what your website is ranking for on Google.…
Get the week’s best marketing content Have a feeling your website needs an audit but don’t know how to go about it? Trying to win new clients for your agency with a website audit? Check out our website audit checklist to discover the critical issues you need to fix. We’ve cut out the fluff and pinpointed…
We conducted an SEO pricing survey with 400+ industry professionals to find out how much SEO costs today. Here are the key takeaways: Monthly retainers range from $500 to $1,500. Hourly rates for SEO services are often priced at $75 to $100 per hour. Project-based fees are usually between $2,501 to $5,000. Agencies and consultants usually…
PageRank (PR) is a Google algorithm that ranks web pages in search results by evaluating the number and quality of links to a page. It operates on the principle that pages receiving more high-quality links are deemed more important and are thus ranked higher. PageRank was created by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page…
A local landing page is a web page designed to show people and search engines where businesses operate. It can include details on the service area a business covers, directions to a physical shopfront, and information about the staff and services available at that location. You may have heard that Google doesn’t like to rank…
A marketing channel is the way through which your message reaches your audience. Some of the most popular channels are advertising, email, social media, and search engines like Google. On the one hand, marketing channels allow you to promote your business so that you can get more customers. On the other, they act as places…
A competitive analysis (or market competitive analysis) is a process where you collect information about competitors to gain an edge over them and get more customers. However, the problem is that “traditional” competitive analysis is overkill for most businesses — it requires impractical data and takes too long to complete (and it’s very expensive if…
B2B content marketing is creating content—blog posts, ebooks, videos, case studies—to attract and persuade all the people involved in buying something for a business. That means the person that will use your product or service, but also decision-makers and potential blockers, like the CEO or the legal team. B2B content marketing is a bit like selling…
SEO writing is the process of writing content to rank on search engines like Google. In this guide, you’ll learn how to create search-optimized content your readers and Google will love. 1. Find a winning keyword If no one is searching for the topic you’re writing about, you won’t get search traffic no matter how high…
Link outreach is the process of contacting other websites to ask for a backlink to your website. For example, here’s an outreach email we sent as part of a broken link building campaign: In this guide, you’ll learn how to get started with link outreach and how to get better results. How to do link…
Most SEO trends fade quickly. But some of them stick and deserve your attention. Let’s explore what those are and how to take advantage of them. 1. Everyone’s using ChatGPT (and other AI tools) to write content If you give ChatGPT a title and ask it to write a blog post, it will—in seconds. This is…
Finding a great affiliate niche that’s both low competition and profitable can sometimes seem like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—but it’s not impossible if you know what you’re doing. In this article, I’ll show you three different methods that make it easier to find your perfect affiliate niche—and as…
How do you start your own digital marketing agency? I asked 100+ digital marketing agency founders on X and LinkedIn to find out. Here’s how they started their agencies—and you can too. Choosing what your agency focuses on should be a mix of what people want, what you know how to do (and are good at), and…