How To Use Ahrefs - Guide + Video Tutorial For Off-Page Analysis! (2024)

One of themost important technical SEO skillsyou can learn is how toproperly analyzethe backlink profile, search traffic, organic keywords, and general health of a website (and its pages) using Ahrefs or other linking tools.

This technical SEO skill comes in useful for:

• Determining the next steps for your own SEO / link building projects
• Reverse engineering the competition (i.e. top pages in the SERPs) to try to emulate their success
• Diagnosing weak points in client sites to determine the best course of action

The following is an edited transcript from an over-the-shouldervideo tutorialon how to conduct an Ahrefs site audit and other ways to use Ahrefs tools to check your SEO and see what’s going on with a website, as wellas a few other thingswe like to do when looking at a site (and its backlinks) for the first time.

Feel free to read along, orif you’d prefer to watch the videothat walks you through every step of this technical SEO process –skip to the endof the article.

First of all, the processes and methods outlined in this tutorial are the way we like doing SEO analysis using Ahrefs. It’s obviouslynot the only way to analyze a site, it is just whatworks wellfor us and what we would like to pass on to aspiring SEO professionals like you.

Next, you have to try to look at thebig picture. There isn’t“one metric to rule them all.”We are really bringing many things together to try to understand a current SEO situation on adeeper level. We use Ahrefs as an SEO tool, among others, to help us accomplish an overall analysis of a website.

Next, to really be able to perform a site audit / SEO analysis well, you need a pretty good amount ofSEO knowledge. If you’re new to the industry, please do not stress out too much. Just try toget a feel for what we are doing, and this whole SEO stuff willslowlystart to sink in and make a little more sense to you in the long run.

You should also note that a recurring theme through the site analysis process is that we areconstantlylooking fornaturalness. If something doesn’t look natural, then chances are a few problems might be found.

A lot of SEO now and moving forward is about trying to make things appearnatural. If you are doing things that are against Google’s Webmaster Terms of Service (TOS), then you definitely need to be doing everything you can to looknatural. You want toblend in– butdo things better than they do it.

Themain takeawaysof this Ahrefs tutorial should be:

• The Ahrefs SEO tools we use and how we are using them for a side audit
• Why we are using certain Ahrefs SEO tools to accomplish specific tasks

Let’s get into it.

Before we jump into how to perform an Ahrefs site audit, let us share some of the preliminary checks we perform on the website to be analyzed.

These preliminary checks are as follows:

• check if it isindexed ✔
• check if it ispenalized ✔
• check itshistory ✔
• check its age ✔

If the website isindexed,then it is in Google’sdatabaseof pages / backlinks to be shown in the organic search results. If a website ispenalized,Google has punished the sitefor some reason (such as clearly breaking its webmaster guidelines). For thehistory, we want to make sure that itwasn’t spammed, used as aPBN, or anything else like that.

We check theageof the website because older sites tend to react a little bit differently than younger ones. You canget away with a little bit morewith older sites in terms of link building, and they tend to react a bitquickeras well.

Noneof these things are theend-allof a site audit. For example, if it looks like a website wasspammedin the past, thatdoes not meanits current problems are necessarily because of it. We need to look ateverythingto make any kind of judgement.

The site we’re looking at today is Dale Family Law. We do not have any kind of affiliation with this site – we literally just Googled “Houston family law” and picked the top website in the search results.

Let us begin the preliminary checks. Remember, we do these before using Ahrefs:

First, we check if the site isindexed.

Go to Google and type“site:domain.com” in the search bar.You can see that there are 694 search results. That means there are 694 pagesindexedin Google’s database for this website at the current point in time.

This is one example of aGoogle search operator, and these are pretty useful for doing a wide variety of research and exploratory activities using just the Google search engine. A very efficient use of time. You can learn more about these useful search operators in our article ongetting free backlinks.

You obviously want the site to be indexed. A site cannot be displayed for any organic search results in search engines if it’s not indexed. This is amajorred flag that something could be wrong.

Next, we check to see if the site is penalized.

This techniquedoesn’t tell you 100%for sureif the site has a penalty, but it is a cool trick that can give you agood idea. Google“domain com”– the domain name without the period.

You can see that the site is showing right at thetop(which is avery good sign). If the domain had a penalty, it might not appear for a few pages because it will not rank in the top of the SERP anymore.

If the domain hascompetitive keywordsin it, it is possible that it might not show up until thesecondorthirdpage. You will have to try to make that judgment yourself – but in general, you want your site to be showing on page 1 (maybe page 2 if it is a competitive name going after difficult keywords).

Need to find easier keywords?Check out ourguide to KGR SEO.

If you think the site has a penalty, thebestplace to check is inGoogle Search Console (the main platform that notifies webmasters of manual penalties and what to do about them). However,not all siteswill be hooked up to Search Console (or you may not have access to it). This trick is for those situations (and foralgorithmic penalties).

You can see that it looks like thesamecompany, it looks like arealsite, and it doesn’t look like it was used for anythingbad.

It’s a good idea to search around looking through some dates atrandomthroughout the years to make sure it wasn’tspammedor used for anythingsuspicious (like sneaky redirects).

If you find something that looks troubling or unnatural in the domain’s history,do not worry, it’s not the end of the world! You will just have to take any potential issues into consideration when making an overall judgmentabout the site.

Lastly, go towhois.comto check theageof the domain.

You can see that this site was registered on February 11th, 2011. We’re in 2019 now, so it’s about 8 years old. It’s apretty old sitewhich we generally like to see. Older sites have had ample time to naturally acquire backlinks, grow their content, and establish Trust Flow with Google compared to newer domains.

We have now arrived at the juicy meat of this guide on using Ahrefs. The preliminary checks are complete and everything looks good so far. This is when we log into our Ahrefs account and prepare to analyze the current SEO situation and health of the website in question.

Indeed, thereareotherbacklinks analysis toolsyou can use to analyze sites and explore link profiles. We use Ahrefs becausewe think it is the best SEO tool for conducting a site audit. There are other SEO tools out there that do similar things, but none of them do itquite as wellas Ahrefs, in our experience.

If you are using anAhrefs alternative, most of what we will be doing is still accessible to you – you just might have to go about it a little differently. Even though user interfaces can be vastly different, most of the Ahrefs alternatives have numerous overlapping features/tools that are essentially alike.

When we get into Ahrefs, thefirst thingthat we usually do is to make sure that we are looking at the rightversionof the site.

We need to check if theWWWversionor theNon-WWWversionhas morereferring domains going to it, and in general, we want to be looking at whichever one has more.

We’ve got 322 referring domains on theWWW version, and we’ve also got 322 referring domains going to theNon-WWW version. For this site,it doesn’t really matterwhich one we are looking at.

I know that theWWW versionis the one that isindexedright now, so I am going to be using this one. While checking which has more referring domainsmost oftengives you the answer, it is a good idea tomake surethat you are looking at the indexed version(Google the website and see which version it displays).

It can be good to look atboth versionsin some cases. Even the version that is not in use could end up having somespamsent to it, and that could negatively affect the site. Beneficial links on thenon-indexed versiontend to still have some effects as well – althoughnot quite as much.

After the index check in Ahrefs, the first things that we really look at are theURL Rating(UR)andDomain Rating(DR) located in the metrics bar at the top of the Overview page.

Like we said before, there isno single metricthat can really tell youeverything you need to know about a site, but we do think that Ahrefs’metrics/scores tend to be a little bit better than some of the other SEO tools(but still – take these things with a grain of salt).

First we haveUR.The URL Ratingbasically tells you thepowerof the page that you are currently looking at. We are currently viewing thehomepageof the domain, so the UR is telling us thepower of the homepage. Ahrefs defines UR as “the strength of a target page’s link profile on a 100-point scale.”

Next we have theDR.You can think about the Ahrefs Domain Rating as the authority or power of the domain as a whole – including all of the pages on the website. Ahrefs defines DR as “the strength of a website’s backlink profile compared to the others in our database on a 100-point scale.”

This site has aUR of 31and aDR of 22. These are definitely not the highest metrics we have ever seen, but the site is rankingverywell in a competitive niche given these relatively low scores.

Although higher URs and DRs generally indicate the domain or page has ahigher quality backlink profile, these metrics are mostly for makinga quick observation / domain comparison. There is a lot more happening under the hood, and the only‘metric’that truly counts is still yourorganic ranking.

Referring domains (RD) are the number ofwebsitesthat are linking to your site, andbacklinksare the number ofindividual backlinkscoming to your site (one referring domain could be linking from multiple pages). Ahrefs defines RD as “the total number of unique domains linking to your target.”

Having said that, we generally putmore emphasisonreferring domains. As a website sends more and more links to you, each successive backlink is not valued the sameas thatfirst initial linkfrom the domain.

Looking back at the Site Explorer (Ahrefs) metrics dashboard, you will notice the site has322 referring domains. You might think that’slow, or you might think that’shigh– but youcan’t reallyjudge a book by its cover. You can’t just look at the number of referring domains or the number of backlinks and say,

“Oh, my God, this site has over 2,000 backlinks, I can’t ever compete with them!”

First of all, even though it has 322 referring domains, we still do not know thequalityof the backlinks. The number of links or referring domains that it’s going to take to rank your site couldvary greatlydepending on thequality of your competition’s links, not just thenumber.

A site that only has20 referring domainscould easily outrank a site that has322 referring domainsif the former site’s links are of a higherquality. Quality means that they have morerelevance,authority, orpower (we refer to these three ranking factors as The Holy Trinity).

Under the largest number, you can see two more values –liveandrecent.

It looks like they havelost some links recentlyashistoricallythey had over 300 referring domains – now they only have108 Live. Just as a site is alwaysgettingnew links, they are constantlylosinglinks as well. This iscompletely natural.

We do think that the“live”number is the most important, but it seems like websitesdon’t lose all the juicewhen they lose a backlink. Some of that link juice tends tolinger,but havinglivereferring domains orlivebacklinks will be ofmore benefitto you.

If you’re new to all this, it would be a good idea to check out our article onhow many backlinks a site should have.

Of course, you want to seehighernumbers of traffic and keywords. Sites with high amounts of traffic and keywords areusually healthy.

We look at these specific metrics at the beginning of an Ahrefs site audit to compare the amount oftraffic and the keywordsthat the site has to the amount ofreferring domains or linksthat the site has.

If you see that a site has 400 backlinks and almost no search traffic,there’s probably some kind of problem. Maybe they are over-optimized, have a penalty, or spammy link profile – it is something you need tolook into a little bit more.

Lastly, we have theTraffic value.This is not a terribly useful metric to us, and we do not really pay much attention to it. Traffic value is basically an estimation of theAdwords budgetyou would need in order to get thesame amount of organic trafficfrom a site’s organic rankings in the search engine results pages. This particular site has a Traffic value over $20K. This is a respectable figure but just remember that Traffic value is a somewhat unreliable metric.

These two graphs give you an idea of thelink building(or thenaturallinks a site has accumulated) over time.

When you seebig jumpslike this, it could be from a marketing push, a lot more press at the time, or maybe their SEO link building was in high gear and bringing in a lot of backlinks.

What we are looking for is just a graph thatdoesn’t look too crazy. If you see a bunch of bigspikeswhere they’re getting large amounts of links in a short amount time, it could be one of the things we mentioned above or asign of spammy link building. Just like everything else, you need to look deeper into these things.

This particular referring domains graph lookspretty steady(referring pages graphs tend to look more dramatic)– it doesn’t look too crazy, and it looks prettynatural. In general, you would like to see both of these graphssteadily trending upwards.

On the right side of the page, we have thereferring domains breakdownand thebacklinks breakdown.

You can see the referring domains by theirTLDs(.gov, .edu, .com, .net, .org), and you can see the links broken down by nofollow/dofollow, text, images, etc.

Likeeverything else,here we are looking fornaturalness. If a site has99% do-follow links, that isn’t exactlynatural. All sites havesomeno-follow links. Likewise, if they have all image links or all .edu links, that’s going to look pretty suspicious.

This site has67% .coms,59% dofollow links, and99% text links. This looks pretty natural.

Theorganic trafficandorganic keywords graphsare similar to the organic traffic and keywords metrics at thetopof the page, but here they are plotted overtime. This lets us get a better idea of the history of the metrics and how they aretrending.

These graphs are averygood indicator of the site’soverall health. You want to seesteady upward trendson these graphs as well. You don’t want to seelargelosses of organic search traffic or keywords – that would be a very clear indicator that Google isunhappywith your site.

The organic search traffic lookspretty steadyfor this particular site – there is nothing really crazy going on. These look likenaturalorganic traffic and organic keywords graphs. It looks like they peaked and slowly had some losses of keywords and search traffic (but nothingtooextreme).

On the right side of the page, there is acountry breakdownfor their keywords and traffic as well as a list of theirtop 10 competing domains.

We do not usually look at these things too much, but the top 10 competing domains list could be pretty useful if you want to do a quick domain comparison, or if you’re trying toreverse engineerthe competition. You generally want to see keywords/traffic for the countries the site isactually targeting.

That brings us to the end of how we use Ahrefs Site Explorer Overview page to begin a site audit. Let us continue using Ahrefs Site Explorer tool for another one of its built-in features: the Backlink profile > Anchors overview page:

Under the Backlink profile section of the left panel menu, click“Anchors”to get to theAnchors Report page.

The anchors page isveryimportant, and it is one of the pages where you can very easily see thetacticsthat the people who are doing SEO on this website were using.

First, we like to see a good amount ofnaturalanchor text –naked,branded, andgenericanchors.

Naked:www.dalefamilylaw.com
Branded:Laura Dale & Associates
Generic:Click Here

These types of anchor text are the mostcommonandnaturalforreal sitesto accumulate (they do not target a specific keyword). You generally want to see a pretty good amount of website anchors falling into these categories, which they do for this site.

Some things that wedo not like to seeon this page are:

• A bunch of foreign language anchor text
• Anchors like “Viagra” and other spam from shady niches
• Too much exact match anchor text

We have seen sites with all of these things still able to rank well, however they can always lead to problems. Remember to try to take all the factors in at once to make a judgment – just because a website has a little spam does not mean the end of the world.

Exact matchanchor text is anchor text that exactly matches a specific keyword(s) the site is trying to rank for – the target / main keyword(s).

Exact Match:Houston family law lawyer

This site has about2% of its do-follow links with this anchor text which is not ahugeamount. However, if youadd up all the exact match anchorsa site has, it will often make up themajority of its anchors. Having too many “keyword-rich” exact match anchors targeting a specific keyword you’re trying to rank for is one of thebiggestproblems we see with sites that are brought to us that are experiencing difficulties.

This site looks like it has agood amountof those natural types of anchors. We generally like to see alittle morethan this, but this definitely is not theworstexample we’ve seen – and you will often see sites withmuchworse anchor ratiosdoing very well in the SERPs.

Likewise, you need to see at leastsomeexact match anchors – and to see them done in asmartway.They helptremendouslyfor ranking when done correctly – which is by havingvariationsof a main keyword that you’re trying to rank for, instead of always hitting the same onerepeatedly. Anchor text diversification involves using keyword variations.

Under the Ref. domains and Links to target columns, there are boxes you can click to access pop-up tab data snippets of thereferring domainsand backlinksof the sites that havelinked to your target with the given anchor text you selected. These snippers provide additional information you can use to really dive deep into your anchor text/backlink profile and see what kind of sites are pointing to you.

Here is a referring domains snippet for the anchor text that has the highest number of unique domains linking to the target site (using that anchor text):

Next, we head over to theBacklinks Report page by clicking“Backlinks”on the left panel menu under the Backlink profile section. This is where you can conduct yourbacklink analysisorbacklink audit.

The backlinks report isveryimportant and we use Ahrefs a lot specifically for this SEO tool. You can really analyze thequalityof a site’s links from this page.

Before we get into it, let’s talk about the layout.

At the top, we have some filtering options. It comes set on “one link per domain,”which we leave like that. For“Link Type,”Some people like to view dofollow links only, however, we usually don’t make any changes and choose to view “All” (plus nofollow links are still important).

Each row on this page represents a backlink that is pointing at your target site. Fromleft to right, you can see some information about the link/page/domain:

TheTitleof the linking page (blue text)
TheURLof the linking page (green text)
TheDR,Domain Traffic,RD’s,Linked Domains, External Links, Page Traffic of referring pages
Theanchor textof the link (blue text)
Thecontextof the link (black text – not all links will have this)
TheTarget URLon your site that’s being linked to
The First Seen / Last Seen date of backlinks to target from each referring page (seen by Ahrefs)
The# of other backlinks that also come from the same referring domain

We use all of this information to assess thequalityof a site’s links. We refer to this as the“Holy Trinity,”and that is theauthority,power, andrelevance of the links.

You can sort links byURL Ratingto list them by the linking pages’poweror byDomain Ratingto list them by the domains’ overallauthority.

As forrelevance, you are looking for keywordsrelatedto the terms you’retrying to rank forin the linking pages’ domains, URLs, titles, anchor text, and context.

To do thatquickly, you can scan through and look yourself, or you can hitCtrl+Fand search for the term. You can see that they’ve got a bunch of titles, domains, and URLs that are linking to them with“lawyer”in them, which makes their linkspretty relevant for the term.

If they were trying to rank for“family lawyer”and you noticed there wasn’t really much“family lawyer”on the page, that’s a pretty clear indication that their links arenot very relevantfor that term. And now you know that adding relevance can be one out of possibly several link opportunities.

Another thing you want to be checking out on this page islink diversity (or link building using a variety of backlink types from different sources).

You want to seemany differenttypes of linkslinking to the site because that isnatural. You don’t want to see too much or only one type of link no matter if it’sguestposts,directories,PBN links, or anything else.

Also be on the lookout forspam(foreign stuff, nonsensical pages and URLs, pharma, etc). A little spam (or even a moderate amount of spam in some cases) is usuallyfine, but keep an eye on other things like yourorganic trafficandkeywords graphsto gauge the general health of the site.

This report gives uslotsof information about a site’s backlinks and potential link opportunities, so be sure to really dig in and spend some time here. If it’s not your site, you’ll probably even find some good links to try toget for yourself!

Moving on with how to use Ahrefs Site Explorer built-in SEO tools, we pull up theOrganic Keywords report page by clicking on“Organic Keywords”in the left panel menu under the Organic search section.

Here you will see alist of keywordsthat Ahrefs hasseenthe target domain ranking for (the website we are analyzing) as well as some more useful information about those rankings and tracked keywords.

This SEO tool is pretty self-explanatory – you can see the trackedkeywords the target website is trying to rank for, an estimation of the monthlysearch volume for each keyword, an estimation of the monthly organic searchtrafficthe target website is getting from each keyword, and the topranking position of the target website (and its URL) for each keyword. SF stands for the number of SERP features that show up in the results for reach keyword. Note: this tool is not designed for keyword research.

Just like everything else when we’re looking at related tokeywordsandtraffic, this page gives us a good idea of thehealth of the siteand for how they’re doing for the keywords that they’re trying to rank for. You want to see thingsmoving upin rank (green numbers under Change) instead oflosing rankings (e.g look at how the Position number changes).

You should note thatAhrefs is not the best rank trackerout there. There are other toolsmuchbetter suited for this job, but we still look at this pageveryregularly as we’re not usually tracking keywords for sites that aren’t ours or our clients’. It’s a great overview to look for link opportunities.

Note: there is a Broken Links tracker under the backlink profile section that you can use to find and fix broken links throughout your target website. This is another useful link opportunities feature provided by using Ahrefs.

The last two pages that we really check out in Site Explorer aretop pagesand thebest by linkspages which you can find on the left side again. Both can be found under the Organic search and Pages subsections of Site Explorer on the left panel menu, respectively.

The first thing you see in this report is a performance trend graph for organic pages and search volume.

We usetop pagestosort the site’s pages by some different metrics. Sorting bytrafficlets you see themost importantpages by search volume, and sorting bykeywordslets you see which pages have the mostranking keywords. You can also see thetop keywordfor each page on the right side.

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer is a powerful research tool for performing keyword research. It is probably our second favorite Ahrefs tool other than Site Explorer. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer gives the user access to multiple search engines and access to Ahrefs’ massive index database to pull up thousands of relevant keywords with metrics on search volume, Keyword Difficulty, Clicks, Return rate, and even parent topics.

You can create or upload your own list of keywords. When you enter a search query for keyword research, you get an overview report that looks like this:

You will notice a few metrics on top such as:

• Keyword Difficulty – check the keyword difficulty of any word
• Volume – an estimation of the average monthly search volume for the target keyword
• Traffic Potential – the sum of traffic that #1 ranking page gets from all its keywords
• Global volume – see the global search volume for any keyword

And a Keyword ideas tab that provides you with target-related keyword ideas (i.e. suggestions) as well as other keywords that the top pages for your target keyword are also ranking for. Understanding what the best-related keywords are is an important part of keyword research.

There is also a Positions history graph showing the SERP rank positions for a bunch of search terms that are exact or partial matches of your target keyword for other domains. You can actually do some useful domain comparison using this graph.

Finally, at the bottom is a SERP overview showing a list of the search results for the target keyword and corresponding metrics such as Ahrefs rank, domain rating, URL rating, backlinks, domains, traffic, etc.

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer is a solid tool for keyword research, looking for keyword ideas, and getting a sense of keyword difficulty. However, we tend to have our own preferred methods/tools for keyword research or finding low competition keywords, that involve SERP plugins.

Ahrefs Content Explorer allows you to use any word or phrase (i.e. topic), to pull up relevant pages (and websites) along with corresponding SEO / social metrics. For example, a search phrase could be “customer acquisition”. The results are pulled from Ahrefs’ live database of billions of pages.

The first thing you see is a trend graph of published pages over time after May 2016. Below that is a dashboard highlighting the most relevant pages/website and their SEO metrics like Domain Rating, RD’s, Page Traffic, and Page Traffic Value.

You should learn how to use the Ahrefs Content Explorer tool when you to learn what kind of topics are trending and which domains / top pages are publishing content about such topics. It’s another useful tool for competitor analysis and domain comparison.

Last, but not least, is Ahrefs Rank Tracker – a premium competitor research tool for monitoring your rankings over time and tracking your SERP performance against competitors.

Basically, you add your keywords to track in order to pull up a dashboard (with interactive graphs) for visualizing your SEO progress. You get to see metrics such as:

• Visibility – the % of clicks from organic search traffic that land on your website
• Average position – a snapshot of your progress over time
• Positions – a distribution of your ranking positions segmented in groups

You can also see if your website is ranking for any SERP features such as featured snippet, top stories, thumbnails, knowledge cards, adwords and many more.

That’s about it for how we analyze sites and this Ahrefs guide. These are all themost important thingsthat we do mainly using the Site Explorer tool.

There aremoreways to use Ahrefs to analyze sites, perform keyword research, get keyword ideas, and look at search engine optimization metrics (such as Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Rank Tracker, Ahrefs Content Explorer), but the process outlined in this guide include the activities we doevery time we look at a site/pages in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Good luck! Get out there, startanalyzing some sites, and poke around! If you’ve got any questions or comments, please let us know below.

Article by:
Chris Tzitzis

Hey I'm Chris, one of the founders here at SirLinksalot. I'm into building internet money machines (affiliate websites) and specialize in building backlinks. Find out more about me and my link building team.

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