How to use AHrefs for SEO analysis

Hey everyone, Eric Siu here, CEO of digital marketing agency Single Grain and the co-host of the Marketing School Podcast and the host of the Growth Everywhere Podcast where we interview cool entrepreneurs every single week. So today we are going to talk about how you can do a quick SEO competitive analysis using my favorite SEO tool called Ahrefs, or you call it Ahrefs, whatever you want to call it. Okay. So it's A-H-R-E-F-S as in sugar. We'll leave that link in the show notes if you want to get access to it. But basically with Ahrefs, it has a lot of SEO data that you can take a look at, right? So you can take a look at how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword, how many links you need to get to a top 10 position. Also, at the same time, you can see the top pages for a specific domain, what the link velocity rate looks like, how their traffic is trending over time, and you can track keyword rankings over time too. So it is more or less a complete SEO suite. It is a go-to tool that I look at every single day, and it is a tool that Neil and I talk about on the Marketing School Podcast. We talk about it quite frequently because we're both SEO nerds. So let's take a look at the screen really quick. So with Ahrefs, basically you can see that we are in the Site Explorer section. So there's a lot of different options right here. You don't want to take a look at everything because you're going to bog yourself down. The learning curve is scary. You're just going to end up taking no action at all. It's like when you see a menu that has a lot of food in it, you're not going to do anything because there's so much food. Or you're probably gonna make a bad decision. Anyway, so, to make the decision easier for you, just go to the organic keyword section. So all I do right here, I type in a domain in the Site Explorer section, and I go to organic keywords right here. So SingleGrain.com is ranking for about 22,000 organic keywords, which is not bad for a digital marketing agency. Most agencies aren't ranking for a lot of different keywords. So, not to toot my own horn, but anyway, so what I like to look at when I'm looking at the keywords I'm ranking for is, it shows me, right, Oh, I rank number 11 for Twitter ads. For marketing funnel, we rank number 5 for it, okay? For marketing school podcast, we're number 1, more or less. We wrote an article about ad networks, we're number 5 for it, right? So, what you can do here, especially if you're an agency, you wanna see what we're doing or what other competitive agencies are doing, is take a look at the keywords and then take a look at the pages, what their content strategy is, right? So, what I might do is, oh, okay, so if Single Grain is ranking for a keyword like Twitter ads, well, let's go ahead and click in and see what that looks like. We can go even further. So we rank for keywords like, uh, let's see what else, SEO techniques, right? So you got to think about what's relevant to you. If you're a video agency, what kind of video keywords make sense? Or if you are a social media influencer agency, right, what makes sense? So right here, this is the, this is the, this is the post that ranks for Twitter ads. And you can see that it's a super epic piece of content. You know, it's a couple thousand words, probably 3,000 to 4,000 words. And basically, I mean, for us, people generally stay on our site for more than 3 minutes because our content is generally longer. So think about that, right? If you see, okay, well, Single Grain is doing this and we're trying to emulate what Single Grain is doing, well, from a competitive standpoint, maybe there's something strategically that we can copy, right? So that's one thing. Now the other thing is I also like to look at what keywords they're within striking distance for. If you're ranking number 5 to number 30 in Google, to me, you're within striking distance of a top 5 ranking. With the top 5 ranking, you're going to get more clicks ultimately. If you're number 5 and beyond, your click-through rate is much lower. So to give you an example of what that means, if a search term is getting about 100,000 searches a month, if you're number 7 or number 8, you might be getting a 1% click-through rate. But if you're number 1, you might be getting a 20 to 40% click-through rate, which means you might be getting 20,000 to 40,000 clicks a month from that keyword if you're in the number 1 position. Number 2, it might go up to 20% or so. Number 3 might go up to 10% or 15% or so, right? Depends on the industry itself. So you got to do the math yourself and figure out, you know, these keywords, what's relevant, what is— what's gonna convert for us, and, you know, does it have a good amount of volume, right? And also what the keyword difficulty is. So what I mean by that, so if we look at, let's just say, you know, SEO techniques, okay? SEO techniques right here drives about 1,900 searches a month, and the keyword difficulty is about 47. Keyword difficulty is scaled on a scale of 1 to 100, 100 being the most difficult. And you can see that the CPC for this is $10. If you're, if you're running Google Ads for this, it's really expensive, and your current position is number 9 for it. So that tells me I just need to make a list of this, export it, sort it through in Excel, and then from there I can decide what I want to do to tactically. So these are just a couple of things that you can do from a competitive analysis kind of overview from Ahrefs. Again, just look at the organic keywords, look at the top pages that they're ranking for, and then also think about how you can emulate other people from a content perspective. And I can go much deeper, I just want to keep this high level right now. We'll probably do some more videos on competitive analysis. So if you like videos on entrepreneurship, you like videos on marketing, just go ahead and hit subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.