Latest SEO News & Tips From Ahrefs Blog

PageRank was created by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1997 when they were at Stanford University, and the name is a reference to both Larry Page and…

Let’s take a look at each pricing model in more detail. 34.8% of respondents price some or all of their work by the hour. We found that $75–$100 per hour…

Here’s how they started their agencies—and you can too. Choosing what your agency focuses on should be a mix of what people want, what you know how to do (and…

In this article, I’ll show you three different methods that make it easier to find your perfect affiliate niche—and as a bonus—I’ll throw in some examples of tried and tested…

However, the problem is that “traditional” competitive analysis is overkill for most businesses — it requires impractical data and takes too long to complete (and it’s very expensive if you…

Let’s get the criticism out of the way. There are bad actors in SEO, people who seek to extract money from the internet regardless of the cost to others. There…

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that…

Learn how to create one in three simple steps. Anything can be an SEO campaign goal, but here are a few common ones: For example, we recently had a goal…

The benefit of having a keyword map is that it tells you: Let’s look at how to create one. Download the keyword mapping template to follow along. If you have…

There are many ways to do this; some take longer than others. In this post, I’ll share how I’d go from zero to SEO pro if I had to do…

85.19% of all blog traffic comes from organic search. (Animalz) On average, engagement starts to drop after 7 minutes of reading. (Medium) People rarely read online — a pattern that…

Even if these techniques make an impact, it’s often for a short time, and Google can easily devalue them down the line. Here are four tactics for building high-quality links…

  Here are the top takeaways: There were also a few surprises: Overview Here’s how annual salaries broke down across our respondents: According to the SEOs we polled, most of…

Don’t worry. Below is a list of 17 tips that’ll improve your content marketing and help you get more visitors, leads, and sales. If you rank for topics that people…

I spoke with two influencers—Wes Kao and Matt Diggity—for their best tips on establishing a name for yourself online. A personal brand is how people perceive you and what you’re…

With so much ground to cover, we did some serious digging to showcase the city’s best SEO speakers, conferences, and meet-ups. London’s search community was nascent but sizable from the…

It helps you: In this guide, you’ll learn how to use our content gap analysis template to find and fill missing gaps in your content strategy. Make a copy of…

Content ideation is the process of generating article ideas. A solid ideation process makes it easy to brainstorm dozens of blog post topics, hit a regular publishing cadence, and consistently…

Links are a major Google ranking factor. Even if they weren’t, a link from a popular website back to yours would send visitors to your site—and make your company and…

  In this guide, we’ll go through twelve tools that will help you identify your best-performing tactics, and content, enabling you to do more of what works.  Google Analytics 4…

In this guide, you’ll learn how to optimize content for SEO, conversions, and social shares. But first, let’s make sure we’re on the same page… Content optimization dramatically improves your…

This tutorial will walk you through the most practical, repeatable, and actionable Ahrefs use cases from our six core tools that will help improve your SEO. Site Explorer is our…

But how do you build an SEO team? Is it worth the investment? Where do you find the people you need? Today, we answer all these questions and more.  Is…

Getting these right can lead to higher rankings, increased visibility, and more organic traffic to your website—so they’re worth doing. Let’s take a look at the top on-page SEO factors…

Content briefs are simple documents that tell a writer… what to write about. They provide the information and context writers need to understand the goal of each article, ensure they…

Here’s an example of what a cluster might look like: These keywords all have the same or similar meaning—so they form a cluster. Let’s explore how to do it. Keyword…

In the most recent edition, 270 SEOs voted for the link-building techniques they still use today. Let’s look at how to do these seven tactics. Also known as creating link…

  In this article, you will find 15 tried and tested marketing tactics that don’t require experience in marketing. Organic traffic from Google is one of the best kinds. It’s…

It provides a way for companies to create thousands of website pages targeted at thousands of keywords—without having to design, write, and publish pages manually. Companies like Zapier, Zillow, and…

You can see the current content for these pages on the blog (top Bing searches, top YouTube searches). Both have 1-2K words and tons of data. Here’s how they looked…

Use our free SEO audit template to find SEO issues that need fixing. Our SEO audit template focuses on finding SEO issues that move the needle—not everything that can go…

But can you go too far? Can you over-optimize? Google says “yes”, in two ways. Harmful over-optimization is, as Google’s Gary Ilyes puts it, “literally optimizing so much that eventually…

These eight tools will allow you to do things like:  And more!  Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset that provides best-in-class data about your competitors’ content, backlinks, keywords, PPC ads,…

Having lived in this city-state for a good three decades, I’ve gathered that SEO remains a niche here—but the people within it are welcoming and always happy to exchange ideas….

If you want to get more organic traffic fast, you need to squeeze more juice out of what you already have. These seven tactics will show you how. If people…

I sacrificed my email inbox to bring you a carefully chosen selection of favorites. Every newsletter included here does four things: The 10 newsletters featured here cover every corner of…

Coined by HubSpot’s founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the goal of inbound marketing is creating content to: Together, they work like a flywheel. How to do inbound marketing Inbound…

We’ve pulled the top 100 most visited sites by organic traffic from our database. YouTube is the most visited website, with an estimated ~4.5 billion monthly organic visits. Most other…

Here’s an example of how the code looks: And here’s how it looks on social media: … in the browser tab: … and (sometimes) in Google’s search results: For SEO,…

That list is on this page. Try these blogging tips to become a better blogger and attract the loyal following you deserve. Establishing a niche is important because it helps…

New technical terms. Endless tasks to complete. And worst of all, SEOs can’t seem to agree with each other. It was frustrating for me when I started, and it must…

Never do that. It won’t be accurate because Google personalizes search results by things like your location, language, and device. Even using an incognito or private tab doesn’t fully solve…

If you’re not familiar with BrightonSEO, it’s a search marketing conference created by Kelvin Newman. It’s pretty much the U.K.’s “must attend” search conference. It’s been running since 2010 and…

You can also download the full spreadsheet of SEO conferences in 2023/24 at this link. Here’s a quick rundown of how to use it: 1. In the setup sheet, filter…

The reality of the current web is that JavaScript is everywhere. Most websites use some kind of JavaScript to add interactivity and improve user experience. Yet most of the JavaScript…

  This often includes their name, email address, and phone number—but it can also include things like how much money they make, where they live, and more. While an entire…

Even if you pour your heart and soul into your content, it’ll often fail to rank, convert, or do anything for your business. It’s frustrating. But you don’t have to…

In this guide, we’ll explore the principles it encompasses and how you can incorporate them into your business.  This depends on your principles and what you define as ethical—but to…

  Monitoring key aspects of SEO is important because it allows you to react to things that can impact your visibility in search engines, such as declining keyword rankings.  This…

  A buyer’s journey consists of the steps that a customer takes in order to purchase a product or a service. It’s everything from discovering the brand to comparing with…

  For content to be evergreen, it needs to match two criteria: It needs to target an evergreen topic Evergreen topics are topics with consistent interest over time.  For example,…

From broader discussions on SEO to more technical deep dives, these 15 podcasts are ideal for every kind of marketer. So listen closely, and vote for your favorites. 1. The…

Here are the results. 1. Google Search Console Google Search Console (GSC) is an SEO tool that helps you to: GSC’s popularity among SEOs and marketers is just one of…

  I could give you some generic advice like “make a website” and “post on social media.” But you probably already thought of that—and likely haven’t had any luck with…

To find out, I went meta and asked 39 AI writing tools to recommend their top 10 AI writing tools. I then tallied the votes. Here are the 10 most…

To answer this question, we’ve put our Content Explorer to work. These seven examples came from filtering over 6.2B live pages in English by organic traffic and referring domains.  We…

We go through seven reasons why. If Billy wants to drive more traffic to his site, he doesn’t search for “Ahrefs” and buy our toolset right away. That’s because he…

  In this guide, I’ll explain what internal links are, how to set up an internal linking structure, and how to strategically use them in SEO.  Internal links take visitors…

But I wasn’t an overnight success. I had to go through many iterations before finding a niche that worked for me. I tried everything from e-commerce and dropshipping, to making…

  Backlinks are important for SEO because of two main reasons:  There are two ways to check a website or webpage’s backlinks.  The first method only works for sites that…

Let’s look at the most common issues you should actually care about. Setting an x-default is not required. But it is recommended if you need a fallback page for users…

In this article, we will discuss 10 popular methods bloggers use to cash in on their passion, along with the pros and cons of each approach. Although many people claim…

If you aspire to become an SEO pro or want to take your SEO career to the next level, there are specific competencies you need to master. If you want…

  Having technical errors on your website can significantly impact how your site performs on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Therefore, you’ll want to ensure your site gets the…

Not only is guest blogging well and alive, it’s still highly effective. In this post, you’ll learn everything you need to know about guest blogging.  But first, let’s make sure…

Raleigh, North Carolina, is where I’ve called home for more than a decade. It’s a community that I know and love, so I’m featuring it first. It also has one…

In this guide, we’ll answer just that and share some top tips for implementing a continuous SEO strategy. The answer, in short, is almost always no. SEO, in nature, is…

In the world of SEO, links are a crucial ranking factor. With that comes a temptation for many website owners and marketers to resort to manipulative tactics to acquire links,…

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any low-hanging opportunities to improve your SEO. Not only will the tactics below improve your rankings, but they also don’t need you to create…

Fortunately, there are tools available that can help simplify the process and improve your results. One such tool is Yoast SEO, a WordPress SEO plugin. In this article, we will…

I was trying to see the impact on rankings and traffic that the removal of content would have. My theory was that if we blocked the pages from being crawled,…

  Rather than giving you unnecessary details, this article aims to teach you how to build a simple and effective full-funnel marketing strategy so you can target potential buyers at…

When it comes to writing the introduction, keep it simple, concise, and tailored to your audience. If you want a defined approach for formatting your introduction, you can use the…

   Hence, marketers use keyword monitoring tools for two purposes: In this article, I’ll go through three tools you’ll need to get both jobs done (and even a bit more)….

In this post, you’ll learn how to create digital content that people want to see. The online world is made up of content. Whether you’re searching on Google or scrolling…

Below are a few simple SEO tips to help you do that.  Many things affect ranking difficulty. But if you see pages from similar caliber sites in the top five…

  I’ve tested many different AI tools. And in my opinion, there are some that can help increase the efficiency of your copywriting. But before we get to the list,…

Let’s start with the basics: Who are you writing for? Do you know your audience? There may be a difference in who you think you are writing for vs. who…

PageSpeed Insights works by analyzing a webpage’s HTML, CSS, fonts, and JavaScript, and provides suggestions to optimize the performance of the page. This includes things like compressing images, minifying code,…

In my experience, identifying a good blog niche is usually determined by three things: If you can find a niche with these elements, it’s likely a good blog niche. Using…

Example interactions include: Some events like scrolling or zooming are not counted. Let’s look at how fast your FID should be and how to improve it. A good FID value…

The first impression users have of your site is how fast it appears to be loaded. The largest element is usually going to be a featured image or maybe the…

CLS is calculated during the five-second window where the most shifting occurs. Here’s how it’s measured: layout shift score = impact fraction x distance fraction Or said in a more…

This means that, in theory, signals to the original URL are permanently passed to the new one after a year. If the redirect is removed and the original page is…

  There are more website analytics tools than you’ll ever require. So here’s a list of the only six tools you’ll need based on the type of data you should…

But with so many KPIs, knowing exactly which ones you should be benchmarking can be challenging. In this article, we will look at which SEO benchmarks matter and why.  Many…

  Of course, the idea of learning any new craft is daunting. For many looking in from the outside, SEO can seem like some Hogwarts-level digital wizardry. However, in an…

But there are a lot of tools out there—and not all of them are worth it. Well, I’ve been blogging for over a decade and have used hundreds of tools…