It is not enough that you perform all vital activities on search engine optimization. You also have to be aware of what your competition (Ahrefs competitor analysis) is doing. Or how similar sites fare with regards to their SEO operations.
By knowing which sites are providing backlinks to your rivals and competitors. You will be able to make adjustments to your SEO strategies. Moreover, you can review other competitive factors as well such as comparing SEO performance in social media networks.
With this in mind, you need a tool to help you find out what your competitors are doing in terms of backlinks activities.
There are many available tools to help you monitor and analyze backlinks to a particular site. One of which is Ahrefs Site Explorer which started in 2011 as one of the many alternatives to Yahoo Site Explorer.
Initially, Ahrefs started as a site exploration tool before it expanded its services to include backlinks analysis. As well as page search engine operation analysis. Currently, it is recognizable as having the largest index on live backlinks.
How Does Ahrefs Work?
A link audit is an SEO activity that deals with link building monitoring in order to detect problems and opportunities with regards to it.
Among its important components are backlink analysis and competitor analysis, broken link strategies, anchor text distribution, guest posting, and among others. With Ahrefs, these tasks become relatively easy for you to perform.
There are several products and services this software can do for you.
- SEO Reports – With this tool, you can find defects in your meta keywords, titles, meta descriptions, headers, and many others. This tool is also helpful if you want to find broken or slow pages and duplicate contents.
- Mentions Tracker – This area helps users find out recent mentions of their brands. Or relevant mentions that are generated within the 3 months time frame.
- Backlink Reports – You can analyze links using varied parameters and options. The most amazing feature of this tool is that you can sort links by using social metrics.
- Domain Comparison – Statistics to inform you which domains are busy, backlinks, and other forms of backlinks.
- Batch Analysis – Comparing metrics up to more than a hundred domains or URLs.
- Anchor Text Distribution – A very important aspect of competitor analysis of backlinks. This tool is important if you want to know the effectiveness of your keywords, especially the longtail ones.
How Effective These Ahrefs Services Are?
With all those features, tools, products, and services Ahrefs offer, users will definitely love this competitor analysis software. Now, the question is just how effective Ahrefs is as an SEO tool for competitor analysis? Here are some important inputs.
The list of products and services are of 3 major functions –
- Site Exploration
- Backlink Reports
- Competitor Analysis
Site Exploration
This is the general overview of the site you want to explore. You will find important information on the technical and social signals of the site.
If you explore the historic area of the site, you will get the following information in the overview tab; total backlinks, IP referrals, page referrals, subnet referrals, domain referrals, and backlink types.
Domain referrals are broken into .com, .org, .net, .edu and .gov. While backlink types are broken into nofollow, dofollow, sitewide, redirect image, not sitewide, frame, form, .edu, and .gov. All of the above metrics have individual clickable numbers which you can click on if you want additional details.
Backlink Reports
This is graphic intensive but very easy to understand even at a first glance. Some of the useful information you can generate from this Ahrefs tool are:
In the overview portion, you will see domain referrals, subdomains, broken pages, anchors, and top-level domains are broken down informatively.
- Your links are listed with rank on Ahrefs, social media information, the anchor used, target page, types of link, and time of latest link update.
- You can have more brief reports and links that are ranking from highest to lowest. And you can filter it according to your own parameters.
- Pageviews also list down into the number of backlinks, a number of nofollowed links, IPs, subnets, and number of domains that are linked to your site.
Competitor Analysis
While this portion is in Beta mode, it is still a very valuable tool. Just enter a keyword, a URL, and Google version you want the tool to perform. And this tool will generate for you the following information:
- URL ranking and other vital information like the number of domain referrals, domain referrals on the root pages, and social information. Again, you receive a graphics-intensive to highlight backlinks information.
- Top 10 listing of backlinks with URL and comparative chart between your site and that of the competition.
With all of the above information, Ahrefs is effective for several reasons;
- It is so graphic intensive that it is able to help users visualize the information generated.
- It runs very fast, no hiccups, thus, you get desired information quickly. And can reconfigure SEO strategies instantly.
- Different data or parameters are linked together. So, you can find more insight with regards to your SEO and backlinks.
- Very comprehensive as everything that you need is broken into pieces. Like categorizing in terms of the top-level domain, link performances, and broken pages for example.
In general, Ahrefs is effective as it helps you find SEO techniques your competitors are strategizing and implementing. You will find in-depth analysis that can help with anchor text, the type of anchor text, and the type of site wide-distribution. The links are spread throughout the Internet.
It will also discover the type of sites your competitors are utilizing for their backlinks, which of these have dofollow or nofollow attributes. You can also immediately begin using the backlinks you discovered during the competitor analysis. Without a doubt, Ahrefs is one of the most effective tools for competitor analysis on SEO and backlink strategies.
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