N ways to use Ahrefs when conducting a search audit

Introduction

- What is he reading? - the traveler asked the neighbor.
- Entry for your book. We are going here every
sunday and show sketches.
- Are you a writer?
- We begin.
Maria Farisa. Aventurine

Service Ahrefs is an indispensable tool in the work of SEO-specialist. Therefore, it is not surprising that a number of reviews are devoted to the description of its functional. But, unfortunately, most articles are limited to listing the main functions of the service, which are available in the help, without going into details. And then a dialogue from “Alice in Wonderland” comes to mind: “Meet! Alice, this is pudding! Pudding is Alice! ”, Which can be rephrased as:“ Meet! Reader, this is Ahrefs! Ahrefs, this is Reader! ”. But as Alice wanted to cut off a piece of pudding and try it, so the service wants to “try it out”.

Agree, it is always more interesting to read not the instructions, even if retold in your own words, to a blender / drill / MozBar / AutoCad / Ahrefs, etc. ( choose what is closer ), and specific "recipes" of using the equipment / service / program. For example, "8 dishes for a child that can be prepared using a blender."

In this review, we want to share the experience of using Ahrefs in Ukrkontext to conduct an audit of the sites, both at the start of working with projects and for scheduled repeated inspections. As examples, we cited the characteristics of sites that are not promoted by the agency. We use this service for the following search audit sections:
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• picking the initial parameters of the site;
  
• verification of reference parameters;
  
• selection of semantic core;
  
• competitor analysis.
  

Removal of the initial parameters of the site

I, on the contrary, are more interested in the beginning - in the beginning there are always so many hopes. The finale has no virtues, except one - to show how wrong those hopes were .
Minette Walters. Bridle for the Grumpy

At the stage of removal of the initial parameters of the site using the service, we usually fix ( Fig. 1 ):

• Number of links (URL) - this characteristic is taken as a reference point and further allows you to evaluate the progress in building up the reference mass in the promotion process ( Fig. 1, position 3 );
  
  
• The ratio of donor domains to the number of backlinks - there are no clear recommendations on the maximum allowable value of this parameter. Since it is not recommended to receive many references from one donor, this ratio should ideally strive for a unit ( Fig. 1, Pos. 4: Pos. 3 ).
  
  
• The rating of the Ahrefs domain and the main pages of the site should grow in the process of promotion, besides, the rating of more significant pages for promotion should be higher than that of others ( Fig. 1, pos. 1-2 ).
  

Fig. 1 - Site parameters recorded during the audit (for example, interflora.co.uk)


A number of the points described above may seem obvious or insignificant, but, as the creator of "Lolita" wrote, Vladimir Nabokov: " Honor the details, the divine details . " And a good specialist in any field is precisely the attention to detail.

Reference audit

Everything is one thing commonplace.
Link to link to link.
- The main question that people are now asking themselves
it is not "What is the meaning of existence?". - say lips.
- The main question is “Where does this quote come from?”.
Chuck Palahniuk. Survivor

Conducting a full-fledged reference audit without Ahrefs will take quite a lot of time. The service helps to save time, allowing you to quickly and with a high degree of accuracy to determine the reference characteristics, namely:

• Keywords in the links to the site (Fig. 2) . Conveniently, this data is available, as in the form of an anchor cloud, and you can immediately see which requests prevail: selling (with the words “buy”, “price”), branded (company name), without anchor (no text)
  

Fig. 2 - Cloud of anchors of the site, shown by the Ahrefs service (for example, seicosecurity.com)

It also provides a detailed report on all anchor text with the ability to sort by the number of keywords, the type of links and other characteristics ( Fig. 3 ).


Fig. 3 - Distribution of anchors backlinks with filtering link types (for example, seicosecurity.com)

• Are there links from sites of similar / related topics - this parameter is determined by viewing the list of donor sites (current index or live index) and, if necessary, switching to them. It is logical that the site selling ship pumps has links from sites of the marine theme ( Fig. 4 ).
  

Fig. 4 - Characteristics of donor domains (for example pumpvendor.com)

• Broken links are backlinks that lead to the deleted pages of the site ( Fig. 5 ). It’s good when after clicking on the Broken links link there is a message “At this point there are no broken backlinks for the requested domain / URL in our index” ( Fig. 5a ). These parameters are recommended to be monitored regularly, since after the next check you can see a completely different result ( Fig. 5b ).
  

but


b

Fig. 5 - Check for broken links in different periods of time (for example pumpvendor.com):
a - no broken links; b - broken links detected

To get rid of broken links, you should configure a 301 or 302 redirect from pages that are deleted and backlinks lead to (if possible). With this solution, the resource will not lose links, and the reference weight will be transmitted to other URLs of the site ( Fig. 6 ).


Fig. 6 - Redirect backlinks to other pages on the site interflora.co.uk)

• Links from trust sites with a rating of Ahrefs higher than that of the checked site are a good signal, both for the SEO specialist and for the search engines. However, even with such donors, we check the number of outgoing links to make sure that they are not spammed.
  

• Social signals , as is known, are taken into account by search engines when ranking sites. For content sites (especially news sites) this factor is quite significant. Ahrefs in a convenient form shows statistics on a resource as a whole and in a section on pages ( fig. 7 ).
  

but


b

Fig. 7 - Social signals from 4 social networks (for example, nytimes.com):
a - for the entire site; b - for individual pages

• The absence / presence of a “reference explosion” on the site is determined using a summary schedule of changes in the number of referring pages and domains. As can be seen on the checked site for the last 30 days ( Fig. 8a ) and 12 months ( Fig. 8b ) there was no sharp fluctuation in the number of links.
  

Of interest is also the comparison of numbers on graphs with the number of domains and referring pages. On the blue graphs it can be seen that the number of referring domains increases simultaneously with the decrease of referring pages and is 1: 4.4.


but


b

Fig. 8 - Dynamics of changes in the number of links and donor domains (for example pumpvendor.com):
a - within 30 days; b - during the year

• The distribution by type of links makes it possible to assess the quality of the existing reference mass. A good reference profile should include various groups and types of links (text, images, dofollow, nofollow, etc.) from donors with various domain names ( Fig. 9 ).
  

Resource pumpvendor.com, the data for which are shown in Fig. 9 is an example of a site with a quality reference profile that looks natural and includes dofollow / nofollow with a predominance (but not dominance) of links of the first type ( Fig. 9a ). There are text backlinks, image links, which is good for an online store with a large assortment ( Fig. 9b ). Among the reference donors, there are not only the domains * .gov and * .edu , although this is not critical for the site offering ship pumps (fig. 9c).


but


b


at

Fig. 9 - Distribution of backlinks and donor sites into various groups (for example pumpvendor.com):
a, b - by types of links; in - by domain names

If we consider such a parameter as the language diversity of backlinks, then the vast majority of anchors should be in the language of the main audience of the site (Fig. 10a ). Of course, the reference profile of well-known cited resources may include references to dozens of languages ​​without complete dominance of one of them ( Fig. 10b ).


but


b

Fig. 10 - Distribution of backlinks by used languages:
a - for pumpvendor.com; b - for nytimes.com

For example, the proportion of English-language links for pumpvendor.com is 83%, but the links in 12 other languages ​​do not exceed 0.6% (with the exception of Dutch - 2.5% of the total). The site of the authoritative edition of the New York Times has backlinks with anchors in more than 50 languages, with the distribution being as follows: almost 75% is in English, 4.2% is in Indonesian - 4.2%; 1.5% and 1.2% - in Spanish and German, respectively. Anchor texts in other languages ​​are less than 1% each.

Distribution by languages ​​like the New York Times for a regional news resource or local commercial site will look unnatural and, most likely, will lead to sanctions from the search engines.

Semantic core selection

The keywords "Pig", "Weapon" and "Safe" strained my nerves. Naf-Naf decided to rob a bank in order to pay the mortgage Nif-Nifu and Nuf-Nufu?
From "The Missing: A Search and Rescue Mystery"

When selecting the semantic core, Ahrefs allows you to see which keywords the site already shows in the search, displaying statistics on the frequency of requests (replacing the Google Adwords keyword scheduler, which now shows not specific values, but the range of the number of requests), extradition, as well as a number of other useful parameters (Fig. 11).


Fig. 11 - Keywords for which the site is shown in the TOP-100 of the search results (for example, seicosecurity.com)

In addition to standard snippets in search results, other search results are returned for the site on this request - SERP features (video, contextual advertising, an image, an extended regular snippet, etc.). For example, in fig. 12 you can see that for a number of keywords the site is shown in the search for pictures, product ads, advanced snippets, etc.


Fig. 12 - Results of the site display in search results for the query “myers pump parts” (on the example of interflora.co.uk)


When selecting search queries to a site, an effective tool is Keywords Explorer , which allows you to select query options. To do this, enter the basic requests (or download them in a file) that describe the site, set the promotion region and select from the proposed options (Fig. 13).


but


b

Fig. 13 - Query selection using the Keywords Explorer tool:
a - form of input / selection of initial data; b - query options

Competitor Analysis

- You got a competitor there near the porch.
- Competitor? My competitors feed the crayfish in the river.
Artem Stony. The strangest noob

With Ahrefs, competitors can be compared in several ways:

• the easiest is to follow the Competing domains link and see the data on the number of unique and matching keywords. If you need more detailed information on the competitor site, then it is displayed in the same window (Fig. 14).
  

Fig. 14 - Competitors in search results (for example, seicosecurity.com)

• It often happens that the list of competitors offered by the service is not satisfactory, since it does not take into account the peculiarities of the business, the range offered and a number of other nuances. In this case, after selecting the competitors, their basic parameters can be compared with the site for which the audit is carried out using the Batch Analysis tool (Fig. 15) .
  
  

Fig. 15 - Analysis of competitors in the service Ahrefs (for example pumpvendor.com)

• for a more detailed analysis of the reference mass of competitive resources, including and to identify common donors, you can use the Cross Link Analysis (Fig. 16) .
  
  

Fig. 16 - Search for common link donors for sites

If you exclude the analyzed site from the list, you can find out the list of non-overlapping reference donors for competitors' sites. It is possible that in this list will be found interesting resources, where you can get a link to your site (Fig. 17).


Fig. 17 - Exclusion of a site from the list during cross-link analysis

Conclusion

“Jeeves,” I say, “you know what?”
- No, sir.
“You know who I saw last night?”
- No, sir.
- J. Washburn Stoker and his daughter Polina.
- Really, sir?
- They must be in England.
- Such a conclusion suggests itself, sir.
Palem Greenwell Woodhouse. Jeeves, you are a genius!

As you can see, the Ahrefs service, if used correctly and as fully as possible, will help save dozens of hours of working time for a search engine optimization specialist, allowing you to check on a number of items on the search audit checklist in a fairly short time. I would also like to note that the wide range of proposed functions justifies, not the lowest price of the service, especially if we talk about the tariff for agencies. Saving time and effort to obtain high quality statistics in such a volume as in Ahrefs, will quickly recoup these costs.

In this article, we have tried to uncover some of the features of the service, useful SEO-specialist. The functionality of Ahrefs is much wider, and, in our opinion, it is of interest to specialists of different profiles in the field of Internet marketing, allowing it to be used also for PPC and SMM.