My 5 favorite Ahrefs use cases for content marketers

For most websites you can use the Site structure report Site Explorer to quickly see how the website is structured and which parts generate the most organic traffic.

In the example below, we are looking at the site structure of Copy.ai. We might expect their blog to drive the majority of organic search traffic, but according to the Site structure ratio, represents only 4% of organic traffic. Instead, the /tools subfolder drives nearly 60% of their traffic:

Click deeper into the site structure and you can see the individual pages that generate the most traffic. In this case, three tools alone account for approximately 20% of the entire website’s organic search traffic:

We can also compare today’s metrics with those of the past and see how their strategy has changed. Compared to a year ago, Copy.ai has increased traffic to its /tools subfolder but REMOVED 195 pages from his blog:

But for larger blogs (ours has about 2.5 thousand indexed pages), it’s more difficult to answer questions like:

• Which authors generate the most traffic?
• How does link acquisition differ between SEO content and thought leadership content?
• Does updating our articles with an on-page SEO tool improve performance beyond just regular updating?

log into Wallets. Wallets they allow you to group a list of URLs and view their aggregated metrics. I use a portfolio to track the performance of my articles:

And another to track recent articles published by my team:

And yet another to monitor the search performance of some of the biggest “SEO parasitic” publishers (to see if Google is really doing something to combat it or not):

Either way, you can click through your portfolio and see the same detailed metrics you’re used to Site Explorer:

Wallets it has become my default way of using Ahrefs and there are tons of use cases:

• Compare articles written by freelancers, internal terms and (dare I say it) AI tools
• Find out which article topics generate the most traffic
• Analyze the performance of different types of content (useful for separating the impact of research content and thought leadership content)
• Monitor the performance of key competitor items
• Measure the impact of newly updated or rewritten articles
• Track experiments (create a portfolio as a control and another for the items you want to experiment on)

When you have a few terms to explore, it’s easy to find long-tail variations, matching terms, related terms, etc. But do those first topics come to mind? It’s not always easy, and it gets even harder once you’ve exhausted the obvious topics.

But now we can simply use some AI brainstorming power to turn a blank page into dozens and dozens of starter keywords. In Site Explorerask our little AI friend for help:

Let’s use the standard keyword “content marketing” as an example. Here you are technical and specialist terms related to content marketing:

Here you are emerging trends:

And now controversial and debate-generating keywords (“quality vs quantity” – good for more substantial topics):

With our extensive list of initial keywords, hit “Search” and we’ll see estimated search volume, keyword difficulty, and a number of other data points for our ideas. Click the Corresponding terms OR Related terms reports and our list of possibilities will grow significantly:

Not every idea will be a success in terms of significant search volume, but many will, and they may be ideas that you otherwise wouldn’t have considered.

It’s quite tricky to refine a list of 300 target keywords into a realistic selection of article ideas. Many keywords will have overlapping intent, others may be subtopics that make more sense to mention as part of another topic. Shrewd!

Here we used AI to brainstorm initial topics and used the Corresponding terms report to find even more ideas. We got 1,622 keyword ideas in about 30 seconds of searching:

Fantastic, but also absolutely overwhelming. But we can make life much easier by using the Group by main topic form.

If we wanted to target the keywords “marketing content control” and “content control definition”, we could instead target the main topic “content control”:and also the rank for “content marketing audit” and “content audit definition”.

Three keyword rankings, one article.

In the image below our 1,622 keywords are grouped by primary topic. We went from 1,622 keywords to just 162 clusters, which is much more manageable:

Only one of these clusters, content control, contains 43 keywords. So writing an article aimed at content control, we can rank for 43 of the keywords we were interested in:

When formulating your plan for updating an item, it’s helpful to see exactly how your competitors have updated their items.

Here is the organic traffic graph for Zapier’s most popular blog post, How to use ChatGPT. We can see a huge increase in organic traffic starting from November 2023:

This raises an obvious question: what happened in November? What caused the massive increase in traffic? Is this something we can learn from?

Well, good news: we can use the Page inspection report to find out.

By default, you can view the current HTML and page text for your chosen URL:

But more importantly, we can use Page inspection to compare the page text to specific points in time: like just before and after the big traffic surge in November 2023. In a couple of clicks, we can actually See if Zapier had updated the page in a way that could have triggered the increase in traffic.

In this case, we can see completely new sections of text that have been added to the article around the time that traffic has increased, like this collection of “how to” content:

There are many factors that can improve search performance, but this is an effective way to isolate the impact of changes on the page. If we were writing an article on the same topic or updating an article that Zapier had dethroned, this is exactly the kind of section I would consider adding.

I’ve been using Ahrefs forever for keyword research, link building, and reporting, but these new-to-me workflows have made my life so much easier. If you’re a content marketer, they might help you too.