Ahrefs is a powerful SEO toolset favored by search professionals, although many users do not explore its full potential. With numerous features available, mastering Ahrefs can be a time-consuming process. Here are some lesser-known reports within Ahrefs that can provide valuable insights to enhance your link-building efforts and content strategy.
URL Rating Distribution Report
Located in the bottom right corner of the Overview page, this report offers a quick view of a website’s backlink profile. Each link to your site is given a URL Rating between 1 and 100, with higher numbers indicating better link quality. In this report, Ahrefs categorizes a domain’s backlinks by URL Rating in 10-point increments, giving you insights into the quality of its inbound links.
This report is particularly useful for assessing competitors’ sites or evaluating potential link-building partners. Major brands might have many low-quality links due to spam, which is not typically their fault. However, if a small or medium-sized site lacks high-quality links, this could indicate poor link quality overall. Whether analyzing a competitor or working with a client, the URL Rating distribution report provides a comprehensive overview of a site’s backlink profile quality.
Best Pages by Links’ Growth
Accessible via the left-hand navigation, this report identifies content that is gaining popularity. These pages should be a focus for link building, as Google considers natural link growth in its search rankings. By concentrating on pages with increasing backlinks, you promote a natural momentum of traffic to your site. This report is also instrumental for content strategy, helping you identify trending topics for your audience and streamlining content creation in alignment with what resonates with them.
Lost Backlinks Report
While many focus on competitor or industry-related broken links on other sites, they often overlook their own lost opportunities. The Lost Backlinks report, featuring a calendar view and list of links, allows you to track sites that previously linked to you but have since removed those links. The calendar highlights gained links in green and lost ones in red. The list view provides details on where lost links originated, offering insights into their disappearance. This is invaluable for reclaiming lost backlinks that might have been removed in error.
Backlink Anchors Report
This report gives insights into the anchor text used by external sites when linking to your domain. By understanding how others refer to your site, you can better refine your link-targeting strategy and optimize existing pages with appropriate anchor text terms. This information can also inspire content ideas. For example, if several sites link to a product page using an alternate term, incorporating that term into product descriptions or blog posts can help your audience connect with your content more effectively.
These Ahrefs reports represent just a portion of the data available to enhance your link-building, SEO, and content strategy efforts. For those seeking success in SEO, leveraging this data can lead to more informed decisions for both clients and personal projects.
All screenshots were captured in January 2018.
