How to Conduct a Quick 5-Min SEO Analysis with Ahrefs

Hey everyone, so in this video I'm gonna show you how to do a quick SEO analysis to show you how you are doing versus your competitors. It's always good to take a look at competitors to see how much better they're doing than you and what they're doing exactly. So this one's gonna be quick. We're gonna use 2 different tools here. There should be a free trial for both. This one, the first one we're looking at on the screen right here is called Ahrefs. So let's go ahead and what we want to look at right here is Let's go ahead and look at a site that we like. What's a site that I like? So let's go ahead and take a look at quicksprout.com and let's see what they're doing. So Quick Sprout's an online marketing blog from Neil Patel, and there's a lot of great information around there. So right here we can see a lot of different metrics, and it can get pretty overwhelming, but what we want to look at right now is the number of new backlinks that this site is acquiring. So what we need to do right here is once we put in the site, let's go to the backlinks section. Let's click on new. And right now you can see the number of new links being acquired each and every day. So these are the number of overall links. And what we wanna do is we wanna also take a look at one link per domain as well. Because one site can be sending, you know, hundreds of links from the navigation, right? So we wanna be looking at the, you know, each link per domain. So you're basically seeing, if it's like a college linking to you, you only really wanna see that one link coming in. So that's how you wanna really count the number of, you know, root domains linking to you. So, right here you can see, Quick Sprout, each and every day it's acquiring 22, 13, 12, 10, 16, 7, 14, 9, 15. So, now the thing, you know, we would probably wanna compare this with a larger, you know, internet marketing site like Search Engine Land. So, let's just say I'm Quick Sprout. So, right now, let's say give or take, I'm acquiring 20 new links per day. So, let's go ahead and take a look at Search Engine Land and see what's happening exactly. And by the way, if you're showing this to, you know, your internal team, you can make the case that, hey, because this competitor acquiring a lot more links, we need to do something about this. So you can see right here, Search Engine Land, let's go ahead and click on new backlinks and see what the heck is going on right here. So Ahrefs does take a little time to load. There's a lot more that it can do. And for whatever reason, it seems like Search Engine Land is not pulling up enough links right here. So let's go ahead and try another one. Let's try, let's go ahead and try Marketing Land, see what that, pulls up for us. 'Cause some of these sites are really big and a tool like this sometimes, Ahrefs, might not be able to, might get overloaded by these sites sometimes. So, that's what tends to happen and this one seems to have the same issue right here. So, hopefully the third one's a charm. You know, we'll try using a site like Search Engine Watch. So, let's give that a shot. Okay, so Search Engine Watch, this looks like we're in business right here. Let's go ahead and click on new. Alright, so with Search Engine Land, you can see it's acquiring significantly more links overall per day. It's going up to 1,400 per day. Again, we need to click the one link per domain tab right here, or not tab, let's just call it a link. And so keep in mind, Quick Sprout is at about 20 links per day, let's remember that, and then we can, you know, give a, get a rough estimate of the average right here for Search Engine Watch. So, again, if I'm Quick Sprout, and I'm going to, let's say I'm a marketing manager, I'm an SEO manager, and I'm going to my VPs, or my CMO, here's how I'm gonna make the case that they're doing a lot better. So, right here we can see Search Engine Watch, the rough number of links per day, it's looking like about 35. So, that is a pretty significant jump. I think that's a 75% jump from the, you know, what Quick Sprout is getting per day. You can make that case right there, and that's why you know Quick Sprout is getting you know significantly less traffic than Search Engine Watch. You know this is how you make the case, and then if you want to layer on even more, you know if you want to do another competitive analysis right here, what you want to do is you want to go to Open Site Explorer. So let's again let's use the same example quicksprout.com, and we can take a look at the link metrics. So let's go ahead and click Compare Link Metrics. We don't need this section yet, and we want to add a bunch of URLs right here. So let's go ahead and add. Searchengineland. Let's go ahead and add marketingland. Let's go ahead and add searchenginewatch.com. And let's go ahead and add another one just for, just for good measure. And now we're gonna be able to see the competitive metrics. And keep in mind, this is where you want to ideally be screencasting, or you want to be creating a Word document and then making it a PDF to make it look like a nice presentation. So, right here, you can see Search Engine Journal has the highest page authority on the site. And Quick Sprout is actually doing pretty well. Now, you can look at the followed linking root domains. This is what we wanna look at right here. And we can see that Search Engine Journal, basically, Quick Sprout is ahead of almost everyone except for Search Engine Watch, I believe. Yep, Search Engine Watch. So, Search Engine Watch has 600 more followed linking root domains, and, you know, they're getting significantly more keywords going to their site. So, again, let's go back to the overview right here for Search Engine Watch. Let's see, they have 558K organic keywords. If we look at Quick Sprout right now, let's take a look at that. It has 341K keywords. So, that's something to take a look at. You know, you can use a tool like this to also look at the top performing pages and look at why these pages are performing so well. So, there's a lot that can be done with both Ahrefs and Moz. So make sure you check out these tools. This is how you can do a quick competitive analysis and take it to your superiors, or, you know, even make use of it on your own stuff and then figure out what you want to do from a strategic standpoint. So hope this helps, and we'll see you in the next video.