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Are you annoyed that your competitors are getting more website traffic than your web pages? Let's figure out what could be missing. Are you implementing any good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) strategies on your web pages? No? Then this blog post is the wake-up call you need.
SEO and SEM might sound technical, but you do not have to train for years in digital marketing to get started with your strategies and improve your web pages. You can easily direct online traffic from your competitors' web pages to your own, using Ahrefs.
Ahrefs is an online toolset available for web page owners who want to boost their web pages' ranking and improve their online marketing processes. It is widely known as one of the best SEO analysis providers that can help businesses maximize their web pages' reach. Ahrefs regularly updates their algorithms and systems to bring the latest data and trends from the world of SEM and SEO to their customers.
How to "Hack" The Content Strategy of Your Competitors Using Ahrefs
Okay, we won't be hacking anyone. It's more like riding off of the success of your competitors' high traffic web pages using Ahrefs. You can do that using these three features:
Finding, analyzing, and replicating backlinks
Finding content ideas with high search potential from your competitor's web pages
And monitoring your competitors
In this article, you will learn the step-by-step process of how to use each "hack" from Ahrefs to improve your web pages' performance.
Maximizing Backlinks and Keywords
There is no doubt that search engine optimization is widely known as the best way to get consistent and long-term online marketing results. If you want to generate more passive organic traffic to your site, you must get a high ranking in Google and other widely used search engines. This can be done by using backlinks or keywords with high search potential.
Backlinks are also referred to as inbound links, incoming links, or one-way links. When clicked, these links redirect you to another related web page. Major search engines, such as Google, consider backlinks as "votes" for the page that the user was redirected to. You can achieve higher organic search engine rankings if you have an increased number of backlinks.
Keywords, on the other hand, is the SEO term used to define what your content is about on your web pages. They are also called "search queries" by other SEO professionals. Users put these keywords on search engines, and they act as the labels similar to a grocery shop to narrow down what the customers are looking for. Imagine search engine results being a huge mall, and web pages are the stores—the keywords are the store signs that indicate where which stores are. Without those signs, you would have no idea to go without going through every single store.
Now that you are familiar with how backlinks and keywords work, you should know that Ahrefs has a tool for these two: it is called the Site Explorer. It can help you maximize the top two factors used to determine rankings on Google and other popular search engines: backlink and keyword ratings.
Backlinks
Finding relevant backlinks is easy as long as you know who your competitors are, but in the instance that you do not know who you are stacked up against, do not worry! You can easily find your competitors by using the Competing Domains under the Site Explorer tool. The Competing Domains under the Site Explorer Tool is a comprehensive report of all the websites within your domain that have better ratings or ratings closely behind your domain. To find your competitors, go to the Ahrefs page. Select Site Explorer tool, select Competing Domains at the left-hand menu, enter the domain, or the country that your websites are registered under (e.g., USA, Philippines, Canada). After that, you will get the results.
After finding out who your competitors are, you can now find the backlinks that your competitors have. By doing so, you would better understand how much traffic your competitors' webpages gain over time. Once you have that insight, you can either: replicate their backlinks or create better backlinks.
Using Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool, you can paste the URL of your competitors. You can select the "Exact URL" option from the drop-down menu if you want to check individual web pages or the "*domain/*" option for your competitors' web sites or domains. After designating the web pages or websites you want to check, you can check the Backlinks report, which should give you data about the following:
- Referrer or the page where the backlinks came from
- Anchor texts or the front-end texts that contain the HTML code of backlinks and when clicked will redirect you to another page
- Search traffic that the backlinks generate
- A log displaying where and when you last accessed the backlink using Ahrefs' Site Explorer Tool
Keep in mind that this would yield thousands of backlinks, so you have to filter and sort the backlinks useful. To determine their usefulness, check if the backlinks contain similar content to your website; if so, you can replicate these backlinks from your competitors and then use it to your advantage! If you want to build new content and construct your backlinks, you can review your competitors' top-performing backlinks to strategize on the content you would create.
Keywords
Another factor in maximizing is the keyword rating so that your web pages would generate more organic traffic. You can use the keywords that your competitors use and increase their frequencies on your web pages, or you can target new keywords with high search potential that your competitors might have overlooked.
To maximize your web page's keyword ratings, you must first gather as much information as you can regarding your competitors' keyword usage. You can use Competing Domains under the Site Explorer tool to get insights on this necessary information:
- List of keywords that are unique to your competitors and their frequencies
- Keywords that are unique to the target
- Frequency of common keywords that you have with your competitors
For more comprehensive research on keywords, you can instead use the Keywords Explorer tool. This tool gives you information such as which keywords are best for your web pages, search volumes of any keyword that you are curious about, and the click rates of keywords you want to look up. The Keywords Explorer tool also gives you keywords from languages of the 171 countries that Ahrefs support.
If you want to check the keyword statistics that your competitors use, select the Keywords Explorer tool in Ahrefs. You will find a search bar on the upper left side containing the following parameters: search engine, keywords, and the country or the domain. You can select from a drop-down menu of all the popular search engines on the search engine parameter. After choosing the search engine you want, enter the keyword that you want more information on, and then specify the country or your competitors' domain.
You can use this tool's information to replicate top-performing keywords from your competitors' web pages to your own and increase usage frequency. On the other hand, you can also take advantage of your competitors' list of less frequently used keywords but have high search potential.
Utilize top-performing content
Insights from your competitors' web pages may come in handy in implementing your online marketing plans. Using your competitors' top-performing content as a reference to create your own content is one of the best hacks to improve your web page's performance. You can easily gain information about your competitors' top-performing content using the Content Explorer tool from Ahrefs. You can do several things with it, such as monitoring how much online Traffic that your competitors' web pages generate, where are the sources for such Traffic, what is the performance of newly published content and republished content from your competitors, and which sites can be a good link builder for you!
To use the Content Explorer Tool, you have to enter any content within your niche you want more information on or specify the domain or the location that the web pages should be registered from. You can sort the results to see the top-performing content from the web pages of your competitors. Here is a list of the basic information that you can see after using the Content Explorer Tool:
- Domain Rating- shows the "strength" that a website gained from its content. The scale is from 0 to 100
- Ref Domain- displays how many referrers that your competitors' web pages have
- Organic Traffic- shows the Traffic that web pages have generated based on a timeline or the "Trend" that you set
- Traffic Value- the amount is based on Google's PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising the platform and its value is determined by how well the content contributes to the web pages' ranking on search engines
- Traffic Sources- lists out the websites or social media platforms that give clicks to your competitor's web pages
From this list of basic information, you can replicate the top-performing content from your competitors' web pages to your web pages and then do the following:
- Rank your competitors so you can check which content you can replicate
- Chase the referrers that your competitors currently have and get them to promote the content on your web page.
- Monitor the Organic Traffic and Traffic Value of your competitors; if it goes up, find out what content caused the rise of the Traffic and then proceed to replicate; if it goes down, then you can refine the content on your web pages to retain your online Traffic
- Assess which Traffic Sources give the least clicks to your competitors' web pages and then proceed to build upon that source to give clicks to your web pages instead.
Fill in the Content Gaps from your competitors.
Another vital piece of information that Ahrefs can give you is the Content Gap analysis from your competitors. This analysis basically tells you the content or keywords you should be targeting and putting on your web pages.
Ahrefs' Content Gap tool takes all the ranked keywords from your competitors and then subtracts it to your own ranked keywords, the difference would be the list of ranked keywords that your competitors have, but you do not. This tool can do this kind of analysis for all web content types. It can cover different levels from entire domains or websites under your niche to specific numbers of web pages or blogs from your competitors.
To use the Content Gap tool effectively, you can try running analysis at the Page-level for your and your competitors' web pages. Just paste the exact URL of the web pages, select the search engine you want, and then specify the web pages' domain. The Content Gap tool will fetch thousands of keywords from your competitors' web pages and yours but will still give you a list of ranked keywords that your competitors use, and you do not. You can also filter out the keywords that you think would be irrelevant to your web pages.
Takeaway: Do what your competitor is doing
Improving web pages' performances take time since search engines cater to millions of web pages every day. One of the easiest ways to generate high traffic for your web pages is to use your competitors' web pages as reference.
As the famous adage goes, "If you cannot beat them, join them." The same applies to your web pages. If you cannot invest vast amounts of time and resources, it is best to use your competitors' strategies until you are at their level or have gained some advantage against them.