Get my Free Digital Marketing Jumpstart Kit<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nPages<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
So after you’ve made your way through the organic search section, that leads us to the pages section in Ahrefs. And this is a great section as well because of what it tells you is which pages of mine are actually working, what in my content strategy as is, is actually getting us some meaningful organic traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what do you like to do here is you’ll want to go into the pages section. And the best thing you can do is you can either go into best buy links or top content. And what best buy links is going to show you is it’s going to show you a breakdown by both external and internal links, which of the pages on your website are getting the most people to link to it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the case where you keep it on external, that’s going to show you all of the domains that are not your own. However, if you were to search this by internal, you’re going to see the things in which you have seen the most internal linking within your website as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So in this situation, because I think that Vicki does have enough content here, we can actually put in her website again. So I’m going to go ahead and do that. The Savvy Dollar again, this way we can take a look at what’s going well for her. So I’m going to go ahead and type in her website. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So when we put in Vicki site, we should see which of our pages are most successful today. And naturally no surprise, the top one is actually our homepage, which means that a few people have linked to her. However, what you’ll notice is that in the third and fourth positions, you’ll see pages around the posts that have seen some other domains ranked into it. So you can see the frugal living tips that will save you money, are your investments tax efficient, how to reduce or avoid taxes and things like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so what I am going to do for a client or going through this for my own websites, what I’m looking for is I’m looking for specifically what sort of content is actually resonating with my reader. So what you’ll notice is that there’s a few things that are going really well for Vicki. There’s things like the list of calls, like the 14 frugal living tips, there’s informational content, which covers the who, what, where, when, why, and how content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As well as there’s the template sort of approach in which there’s free budget spreadsheet and things like that, that are also getting a handful of links here and there. When you’re looking at this best link section by external, I always recommend that you filter by do follow links. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Again, because these are the ones that actually will give you meaningful SEO juice whereas the no-follow links are not going to be all that helpful for you. So you can see here that these are actually the posts these two that have to do follow links are the posts that have seen the most so to speak traction so far for the Savvy Dollar, in which we have the 14 frugal living tips, as well as the financial planning process: what you need to know. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The biggest challenge I tell you, if you’re watching this and your site is a little bit new, is that your backlink diversity is not going to be very good at this point. There’s not going to be a ton of people that have linked to you. And so this section might not be as helpful for you, but what it might be helpful to do is to actually pop in three or four of your competitors and then sort this by their do follow links and see specifically who is linking to their content and what in their content is actually working really well for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what I’d like to do even after going through this best buy links section is I like to actually go into the top content section. And what that will do is also show me some social information too. So what you’ll see when you go into the section and you’ll see things like the posts that have gotten the most retweets or the most pins on Pinterest and things like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that can be a great alternative approach when it comes to taking a look at what content is actually working really well for me and what content is not working all that great for me and my competitors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the biggest mistakes that I think people make when it comes to using Ahrefs is not taking the data for what it is, which is it’s data for you around your niche. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So just because you don’t have that much information about yourself, doesn’t mean you can’t learn things about your niche by studying your competitors as well. Because I guarantee for you in most situations, you are not inventing your niche. It’s something in which somebody else has already carved out some sort of form of content here. And all you need to do is learn what they’re doing and do it even better. What you want to aim to do is out execute them because that’s, what’s going to get you onto page one at the very top for Google. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So just because you don’t have that much information about yourself, doesn’t mean you can’t learn things about your niche by studying your competitors as well. Because I guarantee for you in most situations, you are not inventing your niche. It’s something in which somebody else has already carved out some sort of form of content here. And all you need to do is learn what they’re doing and do it even better. What you want to aim to do is out execute them because that’s, what’s going to get you onto page one at the very top for Google. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Paid Search<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
So the last section we’re going to look at today is the paid search section. I’m not going to use the Savvy Dollar for this example because they don’t actually spend anything on paid. However, what I am going to do is I’m going to look at a competing site, like a much larger competitor, like the Nerdwallet to see exactly what the Nerdwallet is spending money on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So in this section, this is the left-hand side, very bottom, you’re going to have a section called paid search and you can go ahead and click PPC keywords. PPC stands for pay-per-click. And so these are the keywords that Nerdwallet is actually paying for placements on in terms of their ads. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And this first tab for PPC keywords, what I like to do is a very similar process to what we did in the organic search section for organic keywords. What you can do is you can filter by keyword difficulties. So for example, again, I can go by 40 or less. I can look for the ones that have maybe a little bit less in volume. And I can also look for word count of three or more. But essentially what this is going to do is going to tell me some long tail phrases that Nerdwallet is putting placements on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can see things like credit karma savings account review as clearly performed for them. So is bankrate.com, down payment assistance in Arizona, commercial auto insurance in Florida and so on. And so this will give you a lot of rich data as to what sort of keywords for paid placement are my competitors also seeing success with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So this is really helpful in the case where you’re ever exploring things like Google ads, and you need to come up with a shortlist of keywords that you yourself also want to target for your campaign. The other thing that’s helpful in this paid search section is to actually go into the ad section. What I’d like to do here is actually export all these results, because what it’s going to tell you is going to tell you which of the ads have been most perform generally speaking for this competitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So in this case, what you can see is the mortgage loan section for Nerdwallet is really effective for paid. And that’s probably because it’s high intent and so because it’s high intent, people are very likely to be clicking on it and actually applying for a home loan. So it’s probably very profitable for them to actually pay for that particular placement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, what you’ll also see is you’ll see the sorts of ways that your competitors are positioning themselves. So I like to go through the paid section sometimes in the ads because what you could see exactly how people are positioning their websites so that you can then kind of think about how you’re positioning your own website and think about whether or not you are actually using the sorts of keywords that your competitors are using in the particular niche that you are in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lastly, in the paid search section, I also liked the section called top landing pages. The reason why is because it’s going to tell which of the pages your competitors are spending the most on for their paid ads. So you can see here, the home loans are really popular for Nerdwallet. They also do some direct traffic to their homepage, as well as some things on credit cards and things like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So if I were to guess, which I’m not surprised, Nerdwallet makes a ton of money from home loan generation, as well as credit card origination. And so that is clearly what they’re spending their paid advertising on. And this is what you can learn when you go into this page search section in Ahrefs.
Overall, whether you’ve got just 15 minutes in your day or half hour in your day, Ahrefs can be a great tool for you to do a quick analysis into what’s going well for your site, as well as what your competitors are doing really well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you liked this article, be sure to\u00a0check out my YouTube channel<\/a>\u00a0to get new videos every single week. I\u2019ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how to use Ahrefs Site Explorer Tool for their own website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n