4 Ways PPC and SEO Can Work Together (And When They Can’t)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your pages to rank in a search engine’s organic results. Pay-per-click (PPC) is a form of online advertising where advertisers pay a fee each time someone clicks their ad. There’s no conundrum…
7 Strategies From Medical SEO Pros
Healthcare SEO is the secret to helping your organization reach more patients and clients. SEO can help you rank for useful keywords, connect with patients in your local area, and share helpful information and advice with thousands of people. To…
Driving Performance & Measuring Impact
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a popular goal-setting framework. It helps SEOs define and measure the success of their projects, teams, and individual SEOs. The objectives should be clearly defined. Some people prefer the SMART framework to make sure…
Unlocking Growth Through Enterprise SaaS SEO
Enterprise SaaS SEO is the practice of improving the visibility and rankings of an enterprise SaaS website in search engines. The goal is to attract people who are looking for solutions that your product can provide. It works like this: Let’s…
Online Reputation Management: A Beginner’s Guide
Has someone written something about your business online that’s misleading, inaccurate, or just downright nasty? If you’re worried this could impact your business, you’ll need to start online reputation management (ORM). But where should you start with ORM? And what…
How Mid-funnel Content Can Be Your Secret SEO Weapon
Recent changes to Google’s user interface have affected the volume and quality of organic website traffic. For instance, AI Overviews and the commoditized answers Google serves directly in search results mean fewer top-of-funnel clicks reach websites. There are also fewer…
Enterprise Link Building & The Power Of Links
Enterprise link building is the process of acquiring links to a large, enterprise company’s website to improve its visibility and rankings in search engines. Enterprise companies get a lot of links naturally. While they may have some challenges with link…
Enterprise Sites Are Where Technical SEO Shines
Enterprise technical SEO is the practice of optimizing a large, enterprise company’s website to help search engines find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. It helps increase visibility and rankings in search engines. Enterprise websites are where technical SEO shines….
9 Surprising Takeaways From Analyzing HubSpot’s SEO Strategy
HubSpot is a publicly traded company, with over $614M in annual revenue, a legendary status among marketers, and an alleged acquisition offer from Google for just enough money to send a small team of the best of us to the…
I Analyzed 52 SEO Specialist Job Listings. Here’s What They Do and How You Can Become One
SEO specialists are responsible for improving a website’s visibility in organic search results. But what exactly do they do? What skills and qualifications do they need? And how can you become one? To find out, I looked through 52 SEO…
How Do You Explain the Value of SEO? I Asked 100 Experts
This article is for anyone who wants to convince their boss to invest in SEO, or those who want to sell SEO services. SEO is a well-known and widely used marketing tactic, but convincing your boss—or a room full of…
8 Ways to Accelerate SEO Results From Months to Days
SEO can be excruciatingly slow to take effect sometimes, so if you’re under pressure to prove the value of SEO early on, how can you speed up the time it takes to get results? In this article, I’ll explain the…
Duplicate, Google Chose Different Canonical Than User. What It Is, Causes, & How to Fix
The Google Search Console status “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user” means that Google chose a different URL to index than the one the user selected. This can happen when Google finds two or more pieces of content on…
12 Field-Tested Content Marketing Tactics
In this guide, we’re diving into twelve content marketing tactics we’ve tested and continue to use with some decent results. We know they work, and we’re excited to show you the proof. 1. Target low-competition keywords to rank faster Generally speaking,…
How to Promote Your Blog (There Are Only Three Ways)
After half a decade of blogging experience, I’ve learned that when it comes to promoting your blog, there are only three ways. No matter how many listicles you browse, every tactic you see falls into one of these three categories. Imagine…
All You Need to Know
SEO tracking involves regularly checking a set of metrics to evaluate a website’s performance in search engine results. Some of the most widely adopted metrics include keyword rankings, organic traffic, conversions, and referring domain growth. Tracking the right metrics is…
14 Ways to Use AI for Better, Faster SEO
AI can make your SEO efforts faster, better, and more fun—if you know how to use it. Here are 14 practical ways to get faster, more efficient SEO results with help from your robot overlords friends. How AI works (in <60…
56 Google Search Statistics to Bookmark for 2024
Get the week’s best marketing content If you’re curious about the state of Google search in 2024, look no further. Each year we pick, vet, and categorize a list of up-to-date statistics to give you insights from trusted sources on…
What Are Redirects? Types, SEO Impact, & More
When you move to a new address in the US, you set up mail forwarding with the United States Postal Service (USPS). If someone sends mail to your old address, USPS will look at their mail forwarding rules and realize……
Why Big Companies Make Bad Content
It’s like death and taxes: inevitable. The bigger a company gets, the worse its content marketing becomes. HubSpot teaching you how to type the shrug emoji or buy bitcoin stock. Salesforce sharing inspiring business quotes. GoDaddy helping you use Bing…
brightonSEO Live Blog
Get the week’s best marketing content Hello everyone. It’s April again, so I’m back in Brighton for another two days of sun, sea, and SEO! Being the introvert I am, my idea of fun isn’t hanging around our booth all day…
How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords
Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results. Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If…
7 Easy SEO Tips for Small Businesses
If you’re a small business owner, people are searching for what you do on Google. Unless you show up, you’re missing out on customers or clients. SEO is how you do that, and the basics are quick and easy. Follow these…
A Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist for 2024
If you’ve invested time and effort writing an epic piece of content, don’t forget about on-page SEO. It helps google to understand what your page is about and show it to as many people as possible in the search results….
What Is Enterprise Content Marketing? Strategies You Need To Be Successful
Enterprise content marketing involves creating and sharing relevant content to attract, engage, and retain an organization’s target audience. When enterprise content marketing is done well, it can drive tons of leads, conversions, and, ultimately, revenue. In addition, it can help…
7 Content Marketing Reporting Tools for Data That Matters
Content marketing reporting tools allow you to track, analyze, and present data and qualitative feedback to your boss or client. Their main purpose is to look back on performance and help make data-driven decisions. This article lists a complete tool…
Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing Reporting
Not sure how to prepare your content report? I get it — too many metrics to report, and what should a report look look in the first place? I promise this will change by the end of this guide. In this…
How To Stand Out in an Ocean of AI Content
Most content today is arbitrage, simply moving information from one place to another. Very few blog posts create new information. Most serve to remix, curate, and copycat existing content, transferring the same core information from one website to another. If…
Save Time With Keywords Explorer Tool
Keyword clustering tools group keywords with the same or similar intent. This makes it easier to take action on your keyword research because it tells you which keywords to target on the same page. Unfortunately, most keyword clustering tools aren’t exactly…
The Role of SEO in Mergers and Acquisitions
SEOs have a lot to offer companies during the merger and acquisition (M&A) process. They can help identify acquisition targets, do due diligence and help with valuation and risk identification, identify future opportunities, work with teams on website migrations, monitor…
Website Traffic Down? Maybe It’s Not Your Fault
If your site has lost traffic, it’s natural to wonder what you’re doing wrong. But what if it’s not your fault? Let’s be real. Most of the time, it’s likely that it is your fault in some way. You may have…
How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign
It’s too easy to break your SEO during a website redesign. Here’s a foretaste of what can go wrong: Loss of rankings and traffic. Loses of link equity. Broken pages. Sluggish page loading. Bad mobile experience. Broken internal links. Duplicate content….
There’s No Such Thing as “Accurate” Search Volume
I often post my favorite new Ahrefs features on X. And last time I announced our newest addition to Keywords Explorer, someone replied with this: I mean it is good for seasonal keywords but to be honest it would be great…
100 Blog Post Ideas to Get Traffic
It’s easy to come up with blog post ideas, but writing about random topics won’t get you traffic to your blog. You need to write about topics with traffic potential. How to find blog post ideas with traffic potential The proverb…
Yes. Affiliate Marketing Is Legit. But Is It Worth Your Time?
Affiliate marketing is where you promote another company’s product or service in exchange for a commission. When people click your link and buy the product or service, you make money. It is absolutely not a scam. It is legal, as long as…
You Can’t Compare Backlink Counts in SEO Tools: Here’s Why
Google knows about 300T pages on the web. It’s doubtful they crawl all of those, and at least according to some documents from their antitrust trial we learned they only indexed 400B. That’s around .133% of the pages they know…
I Replaced Google with AI For a Week. Here’s What I Learned
I was scrolling through X last year when I saw this tweet from the CEO of Shopify: It made me pause and think: Can you really replace Google with something else, like AI? I grew up with Google after all;…
Does Adding a Related Post Section Help Your Blog? We Tested It
We already do a great job with internal linking on the Ahrefs blog. But we wondered if adding a related posts section would help us and whether users would use it. Our marketing team was fairly split on whether we should…
How to Get SEO Buy-In: 7 Actionable Tips
For many SEOs in agency, in-house, or enterprise roles, 20% of their job is actually doing SEO, the other 80% is about soft skills like getting buy-in. I always say that 20% of my job is actually doing the SEO,…
10 Completely Free SEO Training Courses
Learning SEO doesn’t have to break the bank. There are plenty of quality free SEO courses teaching everything from the basics to keyword research to link building. Here are ten that won’t cost a dime. 1. SEO Course for Beginners Course…
SEOs, Are You Using These 6 Mental Models?
People use mental models to comprehend reality, solve problems, and make decisions in everyday life. SEO is not an exception here, yet it’s not a topic you often hear about in this industry. The thing is, you need to be…
My 5 Favorite Ahrefs Use Cases for Content Marketers
I’ve used Ahrefs since 2016. I thought I was a power user, but since joining the team, I’ve discovered a bunch more use cases that I can’t imagine living without. Here are five of my favorite ways to use Ahrefs…
There are Only 3 Ways to Distribute Content
Let me guess: You’re here because you’ve published an article and want to know how to get more eyeballs on it. But doing that is akin to the underground inventor who has made something and is looking for someone to buy it:…
Cannibalization’s Good Twin (SEO Study)
At Ahrefs.com we’ve got 9.7k cases of multiple rankings. It’s when a site ranks for a keyword with more than one page. Now, classic SEO theory says that if you rank with more than one page for a keyword, it’s a…
How to Visualize Ahrefs Data with ChatGPT
SEOs have access to so much data that sometimes, it’s hard to know what to do with it all. I’ve been experimenting with visualizing Ahrefs data using GPT-4, so I thought I’d share the results with you all. We’ve already launched…
AI Content Is Short-Term Arbitrage, Not Long-Term Strategy
For a few hundred bucks, you can hit the big red “publish” button and use generative AI to write every article you’ve ever wanted to write. It’s sorely tempting. But beyond the short-term dopamine hit of publishing a thousand articles…
Top 100 Most Visited Websites (US and Worldwide)
Looking for a list of the most popular websites in the US and Worldwide in 2024? We’ve pulled the top 100 most visited sites by organic traffic from our database. Top 100 most visited websites in the world # Domain Traffic 1…
SEO Data. Explained in 5 Minutes, 53 Seconds
Here’s a 5-minute(ish), beginner-friendly introduction to each of them. Organic traffic data refers to how often people visit your website through unpaid search results. Key data How to get it To get organic traffic data from Google, set up a……
30 Metrics for Every Marketing Role
Marketing is full of things that can be measured (known as metrics), but not all metrics make good key performance indicators. To choose the right KPIs: Tailor them to your role. Different marketing roles need different levels of detail in their…
The No-Nonsense Guide to Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence (CI) sounds like hogwash to some and a holy grail to others. Many organizations try it out and chalk it up to “an expensive, fruitless endeavor.” Truth is, they’re doing it wrong. In this no-nonsense guide, we’ll go beyond…
How to Use Ahrefs and ChatGPT to Improve Your SEO
If you’re an Ahrefs user, you can combine our data with ChatGPT to improve your SEO. Here are some of the best use cases. 1. Fill missing subtopics in existing content If a page is outranking you, it could be because it…
The Anatomy of a Well-Optimized Page
Product pages are where the final decision to purchase a product is made. By optimizing them for SEO (and adding a sprinkling of UX), you’ll increase the chances of attracting more visitors and converting them into loyal customers. In this…
Free SEO Plan Template (With Video Walkthrough)
Ranking in Google is the same (or at least very similar) for everyone. That’s why it’s essential to have an SEO plan template you can use time and time again. So… we created one for you. Download the SEO plan template Looking…
How to Get Backlinks: An Honest Answer
First, we have someone offering us to pay for it: Then there’s someone else, framing their backlink request as a “guest post opportunity”: And finally, here’s the most professional one of the three. This email looks fairly well written, but……
ChatGPT for SEO? You’re Using It Wrong.
Everyone in SEO uses ChatGPT. But even after all these months, I still see many folks using it wrong. Let’s explore three common mistakes and how you can fix them. Mistake 1: Asking it questions it doesn’t have the answer to Believing…
Enterprise SEO Metrics & How to Report On Your Successes
Enterprise SEO metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Monitoring these metrics helps you prove value and shows the success of your SEO program. You’ll create a lot of different SEO reports…
Headless SEO Explained + 6 Best Practices
Put simply, a headless content management system (CMS) separates a website’s content from its design and code. It functions differently from a traditional CMS, like WordPress, and therefore requires different considerations for SEO as well. While general SEO best practices and…
14 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Product Pages for SEO
For e-commerce websites, optimizing product pages is one of the most critical aspects of SEO. Optimized product pages enhance the user experience and rank better for long-tail search terms, which typically have lower competition and high commercial intent. This is vital…
How To Do an Enterprise SEO Audit
An enterprise SEO audit looks at large enterprise websites to find issues and opportunities that will improve rankings and visibility on search engines. The basics are the same as any other SEO audit. Yet, an audit like this is an…
I Wrote 100+ Blog Posts for the Ahrefs Blog. Here’s What I Learned.
I’ve finally hit the milestone: 100 blog posts for the Ahrefs blog. So, I decided to reflect on my journey. I did two Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions to see what people wanted to know: one on Twitter X and…
I Tested Premium AI Prompts To See if They’re Worth It. They’re Not.
Get the week’s best marketing content We spent ~$80 to purchase five premium ChatGPT prompts and ran a blind test among the members of our marketing team to see if they were worth it. Long story short: They aren’t. The experiment…
Top Google Searches
Are you wondering what people in the U.S. (and around the world) are searching for the most? Then you’re in luck! We’ve pulled four lists from our database of 20.4 billion keywords: Top 100 Google searches in the U.S. # Keyword…
Articles We Loved in Q4 2023
We’ve shared many great reads in our newsletter over the last quarter. I thought it would be cool to put together a list of articles that stood out—the ones that resonate with our community and spark ideas and inspiration for…
12 SEO Conferences to Attend in 2024
We’ve attended dozens of SEO conferences and some aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Here are the ones we think are worth attending in 2024. Conference When Location Sydney SEO Conference Mar. 1, 2024 Sydney, Australia WTSFest London Mar. 8, 2024 London, UK PubCon Mar 4-6, 2024…
10 International SEO Best Practices + Checklist
International SEO is the process of optimizing your website for users in different countries and speakers of different languages. Its goal is to drive more traffic from an international audience. Follow the international SEO best practices below to better target…
36 Free SEO Tools for DIY SEOs
Free SEO tools may be limited, but you can still use them to do SEO. You just need the right ones to cover your use cases. Add these 36 free SEO tools to your SEO toolkit. Monitor your website’s SEO health,…
Free Website Audit Checklist
Get the week’s best marketing content Have a feeling your website needs an audit but don’t know how to go about it? Trying to win new clients for your agency with a website audit? Check out our website audit checklist…
What is Your Graphic Design Firm’s Design Philosophy?
Graphic Design Firm’s Design Philosophy Graphic design is a critical element in the marketing mix, helping businesses communicate their unique value and drive action among target audiences. From a flyer to an email campaign, the right visuals can help a…
How Much Does SEO Cost in 2023? [Industry Research]
We conducted an SEO pricing survey with 400+ industry professionals to find out how much SEO costs today. Here are the key takeaways: Monthly retainers range from $500 to $1,500. Hourly rates for SEO services are often priced at $75…
6 Crucial Elements Of Local Visibility
A local landing page is a web page designed to show people and search engines where businesses operate. It can include details on the service area a business covers, directions to a physical shopfront, and information about the staff and…
12 Key Options With Pros and Cons
A marketing channel is the way through which your message reaches your audience. Some of the most popular channels are advertising, email, social media, and search engines like Google. On the one hand, marketing channels allow you to promote your…
Google Still Uses PageRank. Here’s What It Is & How They Use It
PageRank (PR) is a Google algorithm that ranks web pages in search results by evaluating the number and quality of links to a page. It operates on the principle that pages receiving more high-quality links are deemed more important and…
B2B Content Marketing Explained: Tactics From Real Teams
B2B content marketing is creating content—blog posts, ebooks, videos, case studies—to attract and persuade all the people involved in buying something for a business. That means the person that will use your product or service, but also decision-makers and potential…
How to Start a Digital Marketing Agency (Advice From 100+ Founders)
How do you start your own digital marketing agency? I asked 100+ digital marketing agency founders on X and LinkedIn to find out. Here’s how they started their agencies—and you can too. Choosing what your agency focuses on should be a mix…
3 Ways to Find a Great Affiliate Niche (With Examples)
Finding a great affiliate niche that’s both low competition and profitable can sometimes seem like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow—but it’s not impossible if you know what you’re doing. In this article, I’ll show…
SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore In 2024
Most SEO trends fade quickly. But some of them stick and deserve your attention. Let’s explore what those are and how to take advantage of them. 1. Everyone’s using ChatGPT (and other AI tools) to write content If you give ChatGPT…
Link Building Outreach for Noobs
Link outreach is the process of contacting other websites to ask for a backlink to your website. For example, here’s an outreach email we sent as part of a broken link building campaign: In this guide, you’ll learn how to…
8 Steps to Create Search-Optimized Content
SEO writing is the process of writing content to rank on search engines like Google. In this guide, you’ll learn how to create search-optimized content your readers and Google will love. 1. Find a winning keyword If no one is searching…
The Lean Guide (With Template)
A competitive analysis (or market competitive analysis) is a process where you collect information about competitors to gain an edge over them and get more customers. However, the problem is that “traditional” competitive analysis is overkill for most businesses —…
What It Really Is & How to Build One
Building a personal brand is undeniably hard work, but it isn’t as tricky as you might think. I spoke with two influencers—Wes Kao and Matt Diggity—for their best tips on establishing a name for yourself online. What is a personal brand,…
How SEOs Make the Web Better
SEOs catch flak for ruining the web, but they play a crucial role in the search ecosystem, and actually make the internet better for everyone. Let’s get the criticism out of the way. There are bad actors in SEO, people…
17 Actionable Content Marketing Tips
Struggling with your content marketing? 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 are searching for, you can get…
SEO Salary Survey 2023 [Industry Research]
How much do SEOs earn? I wanted to know, so I ran a survey at Brighton SEO and asked 111 attendees what they earned. Editor’s note We realize that this is a small sample set and not representative of all…
70 Content Marketing Statistics to Bookmark for 2024
Welcome to the 2024 edition of our curated list of content marketing statistics. Each year we pick, vet, and categorize a list of up-to-date statistics to give you insight from hundreds of marketers on trends, best practices, or simply things…
How To Become an SEO Expert in 4 Steps
With 74.1% of SEOs charging clients upwards of $500 per month for their services, there’s a clear financial incentive to get good at SEO. But with no colleges offering degrees in the topic, it’s down to you to carve your…
96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]
It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day. Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The…
How To Do It + Free Template
Keyword mapping is the process of grouping keywords into topics and assigning them to pages. Keyword mapping process The benefit of having a keyword map is that it tells you: What new pages to create What they should talk about How to optimize…
How to Launch an SEO Campaign in 3 Steps
An SEO campaign is a coordinated effort to achieve a goal, like improving your website’s rankings in Google or other search engines. Campaigns commonly involve keyword research, content optimization, and link building. Learn how to create one in three simple…
4 Tactics for High-Quality Backlinks That Move the Needle [+ Examples]
Many popular link building tactics produce low-quality links that don’t improve SEO performance. 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…
Milner Therapeutics to establish new genomics laboratory for drug discovery
The new state-of-the-art facility is set to be operational in early 2024 The University of Cambridge’s Milner Therapeutics Institute (MTI) has announced the establishment of a new world-class genomics laboratory to accelerate drug discovery. In partnership with…