The Best SEO Tool That You Haven't Tried | Ep. #846

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today, we're going to talk about the best SEO tool that you haven't tried. What in the world is it, Neil?

The best SEO tool that you haven't tried is Ahrefs. And I know most of you guys are thinking, oh, I already use Ahrefs. I've already paid for it. I've signed up. Well, we're not just talking about Ahrefs and going and checking for links. Specifically, we're talking about a feature set in Ahrefs that you have never used that they have, they've had this feature for a long time, but no one really uses. It's called the Link Intersect, in which you can put in 3 domains of your competitors and your own URL. It'll show you all the people who link to your competition, but does not link to you.

That's an easy way to do link building.

And the reason it's easy to do link building is when you randomly reach out to a site and say, hey, can you link to me? Most people are going to ignore your email. They're not going to link to you. When someone links out to only one of your 100 competitors, the chances are they don't care to link out to other sites within your space. When someone's linking out to all of your competitors or the majority of your competitors, they're very receptive of your space and they're open to linking out to you.

Hmm.

If you provide similar value to your competition and someone's already linking to 3 or 4 or 5 of them, they're much more likely to also link to you if you ask them to.

Yeah. You know who's a good example of this? Clutch, right? Clutch is a directory that has a bunch of different agencies around the world. So they're actually pretty receptive to link to all of your competitors if you're an agency, whether you're web design, internet marketing, whatever. That's a really good example. So check that one out. If you use Ahrefs or SEMrush, you can just type in clutch.co and that's an example, right? So directories are pretty receptive to this. So I guess the other thing I'll call out here. So, you know, Neil called out the Link Intersect tool. I think, you know, if we're talking about, are we talking about unused feature sets within Ahrefs?

Yeah, I was more so talking about the Link Intersect, but there's tons of other features within Ahrefs that no one uses. You know, the tool is not that usable from a design standpoint, but they have some amazing features. Just no one sees them.

Yeah. So I think the key thing is this, when we're talking about— so the Link Intersect tool, definitely check it out from a link building standpoint. But when you're using a tool like this, you know, you don't need to use all the bells and whistles. Maybe you only— you're probably using like a top 3. I'll guarantee you that when Neil and I, we look at Ahrefs probably every day, if not every other day, we're probably only looking at a couple of things, right? So for me, you know, I'm looking at the organic traffic and sometimes I might look at the content gap, right? So I'm just giving you another feature to call out. Look, just find 2 or 3 that go well. The content gap shows keywords that your competition's ranking for, but you're not ranking for. So that's another example of a competitive intelligence way that you can use Ahrefs. Anything else?

No, that's it. Other than that, when it comes to Ahrefs is they have a ton of features. A lot of these tools do. Some of them also probably have this link intersect feature that Ahrefs does. So you can use any SEO tool that has it. But the key is to just spend time using it. Like, even if you plug in 3 URLs of your competition or 4 or 5 and then your site and you see, oh, all right, here's all the sites that are probably linked to me. If you don't do anything with that data, you're not going to do well. If you think you can just shoot them an email and get a link, you're totally in for a surprise because that will not work. Instead, you have to put in the time and energy. You have to look to see why are these sites linking to my competition? Oh, it's because they have a blog post. Oh, and they all like to link to specific types of articles such as on social media marketing. Oh cool, do I have an article on social media marketing? No. Well, if you don't, they're probably not going to link to you. But if you then write one that's better than the competition using things like Brian Dean's Skyscraper Technique, then there's a higher chance that they'll link to you. But you can't just say, oh, everyone's linking to my competition, here are the sites, they're open to links, So now let me just hit them up and ask for a link. You have to look at the context in which they're linking to your competition and create something similar so that way they're willing to link to you.

So what I'm hearing is this is going to take some work.

It's going to take some work. And if you're not willing to put it in, there's no point in using the Link Intersect tool.

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