Building better links is essential for improving your SEO performance and driving more organic traffic to your website. But how do you find relevant and authoritative websites to link to your content, and how do you reach out to them effectively? In this article, we'll show you how Ahrefs, one of the most popular SEO tools, can help you with your link building strategy.
One of the best ways to find link opportunities is to look at what your competitors are doing. Ahrefs allows you to enter any domain or URL and see all the websites that are linking to it, along with metrics such as domain rating, URL rating, traffic, and anchor text. You can filter and sort the results by various criteria, such as link type, language, platform, and date. This way, you can identify the most relevant and valuable backlinks for your niche and target audience.
I love using Ahrefs for this purpose, which I like to refer to as a 'lazy mood strategy.' Always analyze your competitors' moves, this will consistently guide you on how to set an example in your niche. Follow at least 10 competitors' websites, regularly analyze their data, and combine all the gathered information to create superior data. Ahrefs plays an important role in displaying the most important data in this process.
Another way to use Ahrefs for link building is to find content gaps and opportunities in your industry. A content gap is a topic or keyword that your competitors are ranking for, but you are not. A content opportunity is a topic or keyword that has high search volume and low competition. Ahrefs has a feature called Content Gap that lets you compare up to 10 domains or URLs and see the keywords that they rank for, but you don't. You can also use the Content Explorer tool to search for any topic or keyword and see the top-performing pages, along with their backlinks, social shares, and traffic. By creating high-quality content around these gaps and opportunities, you can attract more links and visitors to your website.
Follow the content gap to create valuable content that ranks highly in SERPs. But you want to avoid churning out the same thing that people have already come across. Find the relevant topics and add a unique perspective to attract organic traffic and give people valuable insights. Building links will become easier.
Once you have built some links, you need to monitor your backlink profile and health regularly. Ahrefs helps you with this by providing you with a dashboard that shows you the number, quality, and growth of your backlinks, as well as the domains and pages that link to you the most. You can also see the new and lost backlinks, as well as the broken and toxic ones. Ahrefs alerts you whenever there are any changes or issues with your backlinks, so you can take action accordingly. For example, you can reach out to the webmasters who removed or changed your links, or disavow the spammy or harmful ones.
The final step in link building is outreach. This is where you contact the websites that you want to link to your content and persuade them to do so. Ahrefs can help you with this by providing you with a list of potential link partners based on your competitors' backlinks, content gaps, or content opportunities. You can also use the Email Finder tool to find the email addresses of the webmasters or editors of these websites. Ahrefs also integrates with popular email tools such as Gmail, Outlook, and Mailshake, so you can send personalized and automated emails to your prospects. You can also track the status and results of your outreach campaigns, such as the open rate, reply rate, and link rate.
Ahrefs is a powerful and versatile tool that can help you build better links and boost your SEO performance. By using its features and functions, you can analyze your competitors' backlinks, discover content gaps and opportunities, monitor your backlink profile and health, and outreach to potential link partners. If you want to learn more about how to use Ahrefs for link building, check out their blog and tutorials for more tips and tricks.