This is an easy win. The actionable insights will help you prioritise improvement efforts on your website and design successful campaigns – for free! Insights like:
- website.xyz is now ranking in the top 3 for “your keyword or service” in Google
- website.xyz has over 2000 instances of broken links across website.xyz
I recommend anyone managing a website creates an ahrefs account (at no charge) and configures a weekly scan on their site. The free tools produce a whole bunch of useful data. First, on the health status of your site: with data on broken code, bad links, config errors and content issues. Secondly, some very valuable insight on search keyword performance (more on that later).
Why is this important? Fixing page errors and building a good user experience continues to be important for search engine rankings. It’s a good signal to google that you are focused in delivering a good visitor experience and therefore have a site that is more worthy of being shown first to people searching in Google.
So, the (potentially) bad bit: the broken links report for a website:
2000 broken links across about 1,000 pages. Sh1t. That sounds like a lot of work, right? I recently found myself in this situation.
However, after downloading the csv file from ahrefs, it quickly became apparent that there were only about 15 link addresses causing the issue!
Fixing a small number of the links solved 95% of the broken link errors – because most of them were in the site template (header or footer) and thus appeared on almost every page. Small effort, big reward and easy to use this insight to improve your website.
This data is easy to see because each week you get a site health report (scored out of 100) that drops into your inbox.
The good bit: design successful campaigns: e.g. now ranking in the top three for “your keyword or service”
With ahrefs you also get a monthly keywords performance report in your inbox.
This is a monthly view (configurable by country) of the keywords that your site is ranking for in Google, and how they are changing. i.e What search results you appear in. – i.e. Good news that website.xyz.com is now ranking in the top 4 for “your search term”.
If you are launching a new proposition, or running any campaign, or just publishing content, then you can use this to help measure your impact on search. BUT – you should be using this insight to design successful campaigns…
Designing successful campaigns: Start with your objectives, but be guided by the insight
If more traffic is an objective of your marketing campaign, then insight from ahref’s reports will guide the development of your plan. Where should you focus your effort?
The insight from the keywords report gives you a steer on how you are going to reach your audience in future campaign design. Which new keywords will bring you traffic? These are your focus keywords for your campaign (or, nowadays – “keyphrases”!). But: how competitive are the keywords? What is the estimated traffic for each keyword? How difficult has it proved to rank for these in the past? All this is available and should be considered in your planning.
If you can’t get to the top of the key natural search results for your focus keyphrases then, as far as the web goes, you may need to up your PR game. Failing that, place more effort on paid advertising, partnership opportunities or social media activity instead to design a successful campaign and get results you need.
Tip 1: Consider estimated search volumes for a keyword when planning – no point getting to no.1 in Google for a search term that almost no one is searching for (well, unless it’s just the key decision makers from your most important target customers… which may not be likely!).
Tip 2: combine with data from GA to understand user experience on the page that is ranking well for “your service or keyword” – does it have a high bounce rate (dose the content need improving?). Should a better call to action be added to encourage clicks to other content and keep people on site – or encourage a contact us form submission? What about adding a mailing list sign up form?
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