Ahrefs Guide: Boosting Traffic with Organic Keywords
Boosting your website’s traffic hinges on a deep understanding of organic keywords. These are the search queries that lead users to your website through non-paid search results on platforms like Google, forming the cornerstone of your SEO strategy. They empower you to craft content that not only resonates with your audience but also draws substantial organic search traffic.
Employing tools such as Ahrefs unveils the organic keywords your competitors are capitalizing on, enabling you to refine your content to ascend the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Ahrefs transcends being merely a tool; it is a comprehensive platform that steers you through the intricate SEO landscape. Its robust features, including the Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and Organic Keywords report, provide critical insights into the keywords that funnel the most traffic to both your and your competitors’ sites.
This guide aims to navigate you through leveraging Ahrefs to discover, optimize, and utilize organic keywords to markedly enhance your website’s traffic and bolster your SEO efforts.
Understanding Organic Keywords with Ahrefs
What Are Organic Keywords?
Organic keywords are the search queries that a website ranks for in the non-paid search results of search engines like Google. These keywords are essentially the terms and phrases that users enter into a search engine, and for which your website appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
In the context of SEO, understanding organic keywords is important because they represent the direct link between what users are searching for and the content your website provides. By targeting the right organic keywords, you can increase your website’s visibility, drive more organic traffic, and ultimately boost your online presence.
Using Ahrefs to Identify High-Value Organic Keywords
Ahrefs offers a powerful suite of tools designed to help you identify and leverage high-value organic keywords.
One of the key tools for this purpose is the Site Explorer. By entering a website’s URL into the Site Explorer, you can gain a comprehensive overview of the organic keywords for which that website ranks. This includes metrics such as the current position on the SERPs, search volume, Keyword Difficulty (KD), and even the ranking history of each keyword.
The Organic Keywords report within Site Explorer is particularly useful.
It shows you the keywords that are sending the most organic traffic to your competitors’ sites, which can be invaluable for competitive analysis. You can filter these keywords by traffic volume, keyword difficulty, and other metrics to identify opportunities that align with your SEO goals. For instance, you can set the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10 to find high-potential keywords that are relatively easier to rank for.
Another powerful tool is the Keywords Explorer, which allows you to generate a list of related organic keywords based on a seed keyword.
This tool also provides insights into keyword difficulty, search volume, and traffic potential, helping you to select the most promising keywords for your content strategy. Additionally, the keyword difficulty metric, which is based on the number of backlinks to the top-ranking pages, gives you a clear idea of how challenging it will be to rank for a particular keyword.
By leveraging these tools, you can uncover hidden opportunities, understand your competitors’ strategies, and make informed decisions to optimize your content and improve your website’s ranking in the search results.
This detailed analysis ensures that you are targeting the right keywords to maximize your organic traffic and achieve your SEO goals.
Optimizing Your Content Strategy with Ahrefs Data
Analyzing Keyword Difficulty and Search Volume
When optimizing your content strategy, understanding the nuances of the keywords you’re targeting is essential. Ahrefs provides valuable insights into keyword difficulty and search volume, aiding in making informed decisions about which keywords to pursue.
Keyword difficulty, as measured by Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty (KD) metric, indicates the challenge of ranking for a particular keyword. This metric, based on the number of backlinks to the top-ranking pages, offers a clear view of the competition. By focusing on keywords with a lower KD score, your chances of ranking higher in search results improve, without the need for an excessive number of backlinks.
Search volume is another critical metric. While it shows the number of searches for a keyword, it doesn’t always reflect the actual traffic you’ll receive. Ahrefs’ Traffic Potential (TP) metric provides a more accurate estimate by summing up the traffic estimations from all keywords that the top-ranking page for your target keyword ranks for.
This insight helps you understand the potential traffic you could gain if you outrank the current top pages. By combining these metrics, you can identify high-value keywords that balance search volume with manageable competition. For instance, using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, you can filter keywords by search volume and KD to find opportunities that align with your SEO goals and resources.
Content Gap Analysis
Ahrefs’ Content Gap Analysis is a powerful tool for optimizing your content strategy by identifying gaps in your content that your competitors are exploiting. This analysis compares your site’s content with that of your competitors, revealing keywords and topics you’re missing out on.
To conduct a content gap analysis, you input your domain and those of your competitors into Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool. The tool then generates a report highlighting the keywords that your competitors rank for but you don’t. This report can be filtered based on various criteria such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and CPC, allowing you to prioritize content creation or updates based on the most promising opportunities.
By analyzing these gaps, you can expand your content strategy to cover overlooked topics and keywords, potentially driving more traffic to your site and improving your search engine rankings. For example, if you run a health and wellness blog and discover through content gap analysis that your competitors are ranking well for mental health topics, creating content around this area fills the gap and attracts more readers.
This approach not only aids in identifying new content ideas but also in refining your existing content. By comparing your content with that of your competitors, you can update and optimize your pages to better match the search intent and provide more value to your audience, thereby enhancing your overall SEO performance.
Leveraging Competitor Insights to Enhance Your Keyword Strategy
Studying Competitor Keyword Performance
To effectively leverage competitor insights, it’s essential to delve into the performance of their keywords. This involves a detailed analysis of which keywords are driving the most traffic to their sites, the search intent behind these keywords, and how well their content is optimized for these terms.
Using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or SpyFu, you can gather comprehensive data on your competitors’ keyword strategies.
For instance, you can use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to see the top organic keywords that your competitors are ranking for, along with metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and the number of referring domains. This data helps you understand what makes their content successful and where you can improve or differentiate your own strategy.
Analyzing the search intent behind your competitors’ keywords is also essential. Are users searching for informational content, looking to make a purchase, or comparing products?
Understanding this intent allows you to create content that aligns with the user’s needs, increasing the likelihood of higher engagement and better rankings.
Finding Low Competition Keywords Used by Competitors
One of the most valuable insights from competitor analysis is identifying low competition keywords that your competitors are already leveraging. These keywords often present a golden opportunity to capture market share without facing intense competition.
To find these keywords, you can use the content gap analysis feature in Ahrefs or similar tools. This feature helps you identify keywords that your competitors rank for but you don’t.
By filtering these keywords based on search volume and keyword difficulty, you can pinpoint opportunities that are both valuable and relatively easy to target.
Long-tail keywords are particularly useful in this context. While they may have lower search volumes, they are often less competitive and can drive highly relevant traffic to your site.
For example, if your competitor is ranking well for a broad term like “fitness tips,” you might find that they are also ranking for long-tail keywords like “fitness tips for beginners” or “home workout fitness tips.” Targeting these long-tail keywords can help you attract targeted traffic and build authority in your niche.
Additionally, analyzing your competitors’ content structure and on-page SEO tactics can provide further insights. Look at how they use keywords in their headings, meta descriptions, and image alt texts. This can help you refine your own on-page SEO strategies and ensure that your content is optimized to rank for the identified low competition keywords.
Tracking and Adjusting Your SEO Strategy
Setting Up Alerts and Reports in Ahrefs
To effectively track and adjust your SEO strategy, setting up alerts and reports in Ahrefs is essential.
This allows you to stay informed about changes in your website’s performance and make data-driven decisions. Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker is a powerful tool for this purpose, enabling you to monitor your keyword rankings across different locations and devices.
You can set up regular email alerts through Rank Tracker to keep you updated on the progress of your tracked keywords. This includes notifications when your rankings improve or decline, helping you to quickly respond to any changes in your SEO performance.
Additionally, you can use the “Compare” feature to analyze your results over time, such as year-over-year comparisons, to identify trends and seasonal fluctuations.
Ahrefs also offers the ability to create custom reports and portfolios. The “Portfolios” feature allows you to monitor key metrics such as traffic growth and the increase in referring domains for multiple pages or competitors simultaneously.
This is particularly useful for tracking the overall SEO performance of specific sections of your website or comparing your performance against that of your competitors.
Refining Keywords and Content Over Time
As you track your SEO performance, it’s essential to refine your keywords and content strategy based on the data you gather. Ahrefs provides several tools to help you do this effectively. For instance, you can use the Rank Tracker to identify keywords where you rank in positions 2-10 and then focus on optimizing those pages to move up the rankings.
This involves ensuring that your content fully covers the topic and addresses any subtopics that your competitors might be covering better.
The “SERP features” tab in Rank Tracker is also invaluable. It shows you which keywords have SERP features like featured snippets, and whether you rank for them. If you don’t currently rank for these features, it presents an opportunity to optimize your content to capture these high-visibility spots, which can significantly boost your organic traffic.
Moreover, Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool helps you identify gaps in your content by comparing your site with your competitors.
This tool reveals keywords that your competitors are ranking for but you’re not, allowing you to create or update content to fill these gaps and attract more traffic. By regularly reviewing and refining your keyword strategy based on these insights, you can ensure your content remains relevant and competitive.
Finally, Ahrefs’ Health Score from the Site Audit tool provides a snapshot of your website’s technical SEO health.
This metric helps you identify and fix technical issues that could be hindering your SEO performance. By addressing these issues and maintaining a healthy website, you can improve your overall SEO performance and ensure that your content is optimized for maximum visibility.
Conclusion
In conclusion, boosting your website’s traffic with organic keywords requires a strategic and data-driven approach.
By leveraging tools like Ahrefs, you can identify high-value keywords, optimize your content strategy, and gain insights from competitor analysis. Remember to analyze keyword difficulty and search volume, conduct content gap analyses, and refine your keywords over time.
Set up alerts and reports to track your SEO performance and adjust your strategy accordingly. Ultimately, the key to success lies in consistently monitoring and refining your approach to ensure your content resonates with your audience and ranks higher in search engine results.
Take action today to enhance your SEO strategy and drive more organic traffic to your site.
FAQ
What are organic keywords in Ahref?
Organic keywords in Ahrefs refer to the search queries that lead to a target website appearing in the non-paid search results of search engines like Google. Essentially, they are the terms and phrases enabling a website to rank within the top 100 organic search results.
What are the organic keywords?
Organic keywords are the search terms input by users into search engines seeking information or solutions. These keywords play a pivotal role in elevating a website’s position in search engine results pages (SERPs) without resorting to paid advertising. They are indispensable for drawing organic traffic and enhancing the site’s visibility, all at no cost.
How to check organic traffic in Ahrefs?
To analyze organic traffic in Ahrefs, adhere to the ensuing steps:
1. Use Ahrefs Site Explorer: Input the URL of the website, subfolder, or specific page you wish to scrutinize.
2. View Organic Keywords: Navigate to the “Keywords” section to discover the keywords fueling organic traffic and their monthly visitation figures.
3. Check Top Pages: Access the “Traffic” section to identify the pages garnering the most organic traffic and observe its evolution over time.
4. Analyze Traffic Over Time: Employ the graph to assess estimated monthly visits from search for selected months and benchmark against competitors.
5. Compare Countries: Determine which countries are major contributors to the organic traffic and their percentage share.
What is a good number of organic keywords?
Aiming for one to four organic keywords per page, centered around a singular topic, is deemed effective. This concentrated approach facilitates content optimization and enhances the likelihood of achieving high rankings for those specific keywords.
