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In this blog we are going to explore how to use a couple of different tools within the Ahref’s platform to assist in determining good keywords to use for your SEO efforts. The first one is the keyword research section in Ahrefs called “Keyword Explorer” and the second is a position tracking tool called “Position Tracker”. Both sections can be found in the blue navigation bar found on the home page of ahrefs.com.
The keyword research tool portion of the software is very easy to use and gives you a bunch of different data points that can help you identify new variations of keywords that can help you in your White hat SEO efforts. To start using keywords explorer simply click on the navigation button, enter a keyword you’d like to find information on and h. For this example we are going to utilize the keyword “Plastic Surgeon SEO” and analyze the results that are given us from this Query.
Ahrefs then will give you a list of the keywords it has identified of having relevancy to that particular query and will list all of them on a page for your review. In addition to the keywords that it has identified it will also give you the search volumes on these keywords. We find this highly valuable for multiple reasons. A lot of times marketers or companies aren’t spending their content marketing efforts in the right areas and are wasting their efforts on keywords that have little or zero search volumes. Also, Keyword explorer many times produces variations of keywords that would not have been thought of otherwise. In review, the keyword research tool provided by Ahrefs is as simply as one, two and three.
1) Click on that menu item in the navigation bar.
2) Enter the keyword you want to research on in the search area and hit search.
3) Enjoy Results.
There are some extra benefits that you’ll want to take notice of when using the keywords explorer tool such as its ability to export data to either a CSV, PDF or excel spreadsheet and Google Docs. Therefore you can better organize your data after it has created file for you. A lot of times we like to use this to do bulk uploads to our sponsored campaigns on Adwords or Bing. It’s very helpful with adding additional variations to your already created ad groups. Just remember to refresh you landing page with the new keywords to achieve good quality scores. In addition to the export feature there is the filter function, adjustable results tab, search volumes and option to choose groupings of keywords. With the Filter function you can type in a word that is unwanted and remove it from your list. When you are given the results you’ll notice on the left side that Ahrefs will group the keywords according to similarities between the keywords. This way you can easily manipulate your list to get precisely what your looking for. We have noticed a lot of time keyword explorer will get us additional results we never would have thought of on our own.
Using the position tracking tool in Ahref’s
The position tracking tool inside of the Ahref’s platform call “Positions Explorer”. Positions Explorer can be located in the blue navigation section of the Ahref’s Platform. To get information on position’s about your company’s, client’s or competitors websites simply hit the positions explorer navigation button, enter a website url into the search area and then hit search. In this case the keyword positioning tool is going to give you a lot of different data points about the particular website that you have entered into the search box. The tool is very robust and delivers many different data point’s including Top 10 Competitors, Organic Traffic, Organic Keywords, Positions Heat Map, Top 5 organic keywords, Top 5 pages and a section to measure paid advertising as well. In addition to the main data functions position explorer will take you directly to main features of ahrefs to easily check backlinks, anchor text and link authority. Here’s a list of the sections and their uses.
Top competitors section: In this section you’ll notice that 10 competitors are listed according to similarities found between your website and theirs or based of similar organic keywords. also, in this section you can easily convert over to your competitor to see what links they have and how their website is functioning in comparison to your own.
Organic Traffic Section: In this section a line graph is available to show how much traffic is coming to the website on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. It’s a valuable graph that gives the ability to notice whether you traffic is having an upward or downward trend as well.
Organic Keywords Section: In this case, there is much more functionality available than the other sections. For instance, the graph is readily available to display how you organic keyword totals are fluctuating but, in addition to fluctuation the actual keywords, search volumes, page associated with keyword and the traffic totals from that keyword are available. A lot of times we like to check out the individual pages our competition is ranking for and then use the backlink comparison tool to see if there are some additional authoritative links we could earn to help with our website authority.
Positions Heatmap Section: At first glance this can be a little overwhelming especially if you don’t know where what to look at. Nevertheless, by hovering over any section you can determine the amount of keywords that are in a specific position. The position rankings are listed on the left from position #100 to position #1. It’s also sectioned off by date as well so, you are able to see when your keyword is rising in position or falling.
Top 5 Organic Keywords: Displays which 5 keywords are the best five performing keywords. There is a learn more section that you can click on. It becomes more valuable when evaluating your competition. Like on the other sections the site explorer is easily available for further exploration to those individual pages.
The other sections are mainly dedicated to paid advertisements through Google Adwords and other networks. There is some very useful data that can be picked up here if your competition is running paid campaigns.