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5 Types of Blogs That Make Money

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5 Types of Blogs That Make Money

Looking for the best type of blog to make money? Let’s look at some data first:
  • About 15% of bloggers make a full-time income from blogging ($30K a year). 
  • About 31% of bloggers make a decent side income from blogging ($6K a year).
  • 6%–10% of bloggers make over $10K a month. 
  • You can realistically make $25K–$50K in your first year of blogging. 
  • The most successful blogs make over $100K a month.

Looks like professional blogging may actually be a good idea. You can make a full-time income or a decent side income. You can even own several blogs, hire copywriters, and multiply your earnings. 

But like in every other business, nobody can guarantee your blogging business will work out. It usually takes years to be financially independent through blogging. Your first step is deciding on the type of blog you want to run. 

With that said, here are the five types proven to make money. 

Probably the most popular type of blog created with the purpose of making money. This kind of blog will take a deep dive into a particular niche or theme to cover as many topics as possible (to maximize traffic) or just the ones that are fit for the blog’s angle. 

Topics are usually picked by the criteria of:

  • Traffic potential (mostly organic traffic from search engines).
  • The ability to monetize traffic (for instance, some topics will earn only from ads while others will also be a good fit for product placement).
  • Popular requests from readers. 
  • Trends.  

Here are some profitable blog niches with a list of typical content and blog examples: 

Niche Typical content Blog example Last monthly income report Pageviews (from last income report)
Food and cooking Recipes categorized by type of meal and diet, cookware reviews, tips and tricks, listicles Pinch of Yum $95,196 (source) 4.245M
Health and wellness Food, relationships, fitness, beauty, psychology Hot Beauty Health $9,655 (source) 208.6K
Parenting Pregnancy, child raising advice, product reviews, food recipes, stay-at-home parent jobs, kid activities, household tips The Soccer Mom Blog  $11,288 (source) 500K
News Anything newsworthy in one niche or multiple niches (also gossip) HuffPost Acquired by AOL in 2011 for $315M, then acquired by BuzzFeed (source). According to this source, it generates $14M/mo. 5.8M (monthly organic traffic March 2023, via Ahrefs)
Tech Software and hardware reviews, exclusive deals, how to use software tools, comparisons, listicles, making money online, tech news, buying guides, gaming 99signals $5,242 (source) 18K (monthly organic traffic on the date of the report, via Ahrefs)
Personal development Life hacks, financial freedom, wellness, psychology, motivation, spirituality, fitness Let’s Reach Success $6,652 (source) 115.5K
Pets Pet health, product reviews, activities for pets, traveling with pets, pet adoption, training, tips, listicles You Did What With Your Weiner $7,720 (includes income outside of the content, source) 40K (monthly organic traffic on the date of the report, via Ahrefs)
Entrepreneurship Making money online, starting a business, interviews, complete courses, how-tos, inspiration Smart Passive Income $166,559 (source) 68K (monthly organic traffic on the date of the report, all blogs, via Ahrefs)
Finance Investing, saving money, retirement, financial product reviews, buying guides, family finance, mortgages, gig economy, debt, career advice, entrepreneurship, financial freedom Millennial Money $33,473 on average (source) 1.5M visits in 2017
Fashion Outfit ideas, home decor, beauty, style tips, gift ideas, listicles, buyer guides Chic Pursuit $11,376 (source) 135.3K
Lifestyle Anything related to solving life’s problems and living a happier life Abby Organizes $41.7K (source) Over 400K
Travel City guides, listicles, traveling tips, gear and location reviews, life on the road, digital nomadism Local Adventurer $41K (source) 541.8K
DIY/crafts DIY decorations, DIY weekend projects, handcraft tutorials, life hacks, product reviews, food recipes, DIY repairs, renovations Jennifer Maker $15,158 (source) 125.4K

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If you’re serious about blogging, take some time to read through the income reports linked above. At least a few of them. You’ll find some unique and inspiring stories and often great business tips.

The above list most probably doesn’t show all possible lucrative niches. But here’s a quick tip to check if a niche is profitable: search for affiliate programs in that niche. 

Look for affiliate programs in a niche to see if it's potentially profitable

Type 2. Affiliate/review blogs 

While practically every niche blog will review products to earn commissions, there are blogs that focus only on that (and turn it into art). 

But why reviews? There are two reasons.

Number #1 is the demand. People turn to in-depth reviews made by people with first-hand experience to help them make a choice. Especially if the product is expensive or there are a lot of alternatives. 

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For instance, a single page on the best headphones for 2023 can generate over 12K in organic visits each month, ranking for hundreds of keywords related to headphone reviews. You can get a sense of the demand for this kind of service when you look at the search volume of some keywords in the U.S. alone:

Search volume of keywords
Data via Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

In fact, the entire #1 page on Google for “headphones” shows commercial search intent with reviews showing up as well. 

SERP overview for "headphones"

Secondly, affiliate programs are typically a substantial part of a blogger’s earnings. For example, the Smart Passive Income blog generated approximately 63.4% (over $100K) of its income from affiliate deals. 

SPI's income report

Some blogs review all kinds of products that offer commission, while others focus on a particular niche such as tech gadgets or parenting products. As long as there’s an affiliate program for the product or the merchant (seller) can offer you a deal, any product niche can be profitable. 

If you’re curious about the ingredients of success for this type of blog, check out our case studies: 

Tip

Getting free traffic from Google to your reviews is definitely possible, but it’s not easy. For Google, pages with product reviews are of special interest, so make sure you’re following Google’s guidelines.

Starting a personal blog is probably the easiest thing. You can write just about anything—it’s your blog. But a personal blog designed to make money is something a bit different. 

Of course, it has that unique, personal tone. It’s written from a personal point of view, but it does need to have a strategy to monetize “something.”

That something can be:

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Or it can be something no one has ever done before. I mean, before I discovered Gala Darling’s blog, I wouldn’t dare to think you could monetize EFT tapping sessions (a real thing, look it up). 

In terms of topics and content formats, there are no rules for personal topics. They can talk about everything and anything. What’s typical for these blogs, though, is that they offer some kind of content upgrade or a product, such as a book or a course. 

A blog selling author's books

Type 4. Personal brand blogs

Personal brand blogs are blogs with the sole purpose of making one’s name in the business. What sets them apart from personal blogs is that their content is a lot more focused on the industry the brand is set in. 

Here are some typical content formats you will find on such blogs: 

  • How-to guides
  • Tutorials and courses 
  • Definition posts
  • Original research 
  • Feature release notes
  • Opinion pieces 
  • Case studies 
  • Listicles 
  • Product reviews 
  • Podcasts
  • Videos 
  • Products and/or services
  • Free resources: tools, cheat sheets, checklists, templates, etc

An example of such a blog is Charli Marie. It’s run by a designer whose personal mission is “to help anyone else who falls in love with design to succeed in their careers.” Charli uses various educational content (articles, videos, podcasts) to cater to an audience of over 250K people.

As you can imagine, that kind of audience helps Charli grow her brand in the design business. But on top of that, she monetizes her recognition by offering paid speaking engagements, mentoring, site audits, and an original hand-made font. 

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Personal brand blog selling services and products

Type 5. Business/corporate blogs 

The purpose of business and corporate blogs is to promote products, services, and brands owned by the business. 

This is usually achieved by creating educational content around the product or service in order to attract and retain customers. Typical content formats you will find on such blogs include these: 

  • How-to guides
  • Definition posts
  • Original research 
  • Interviews 
  • Feature release notes
  • Opinion pieces 
  • Case studies 
  • Listicles 
  • Company news 
  • Free resources: cheat sheets, checklists, templates, etc

The blog you’re reading right now is an example of this type. By regularly publishing and updating SEO content, we generate an estimated 641K visits from search engines each month. We’d need to spend about $838K each month to get similar traffic from ads. 

Organic traffic to the Ahrefs Blog

Blogs owned by big corporations tend to be less about acquiring customers and more about providing an outlet for the company to communicate with the audience. For instance, Apple calls its blog the Newsroom. The type of stuff it writes about is releasing a new iPhone color or a story about how the company supports sustainable farming. 

By the way, a corporate blog like that can be a good idea for catching branded keywords that are hard to cover anywhere else. 

Branded keywords

How to find proven blog post topics

Writing what you want and how you want can be very satisfying. It’s one of the best things about having a blog. But if you want your blog to make money, a good portion of your content should be based on existing demand for information, products, and services. 

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One of the best ways to gauge that demand is to learn what people search for online. And the best part about it is that once you rank for relevant search queries, you can get a free, passive, and compounding source of traffic. 

Here are three basic methods. They can give you topic ideas even if you’re not an expert in the topic or niche.

1. Do keyword research

Keyword research is the process of discovering valuable search queries that your target customers type into search engines like Google to look for products, services, and information. 

There are many techniques to do keyword research, so I’ll link to some at the end of this section. The basic process goes like this:

  1. Get a tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Enter seed keywords related to your niche, e.g., seo, digital marketing, online marketing, online business
  3. Use filters to refine the results and find the best keywords for your website 
Basic keyword research

How do you know which keywords will be the best for your website?

  • Your keywords should have traffic potential.
  • You can match the search intent behind your keywords.
  • Your keywords can bring valuable traffic (i.e., traffic you can monetize). 
  • You can rank for those keywords.

For instance, you can look for low-competition keywords that could get your blog ranking relatively fast. For this, you can use the Keyword Difficulty filter (KD), Lowest DR filter, and Traffic Potential minimum of 100. In this case, you’ll get nearly 3K potential keyword ideas.

Looking for low-competition keywords

2. Analyze other blogs in the niche 

Having organic competitors has its good sides. You can get keyword ideas from someone else’s website.

In Ahrefs, there are two handy tools you can use for that. 

The first is Site Explorer. You can paste any URL and discover organic (and paid) keywords that the URL is ranking for. 

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Organic keywords report in Ahrefs

The second is our Content Gap tool. It shows you keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t. It’s a shortcut to discovering good keyword ideas that you haven’t targeted already. 

Content Gap tool in Ahrefs

3. Discover high-performing content in your niche 

You can also come up with good topics by researching already existing content instead of keywords. You can do that using Content Explorer

The first technique is to look for pages that get high organic traffic without many backlinks (a key ranking factor, but they’re hard to get). 

  1. Enter a topic and set the mode to “In title”
  2. Set the filters: Referring domains up to 10, Page traffic min. 500, and set the language you want the results in 
High organic traffic without many backlinks—research in Ahrefs' Content Explorer

The second technique is to look for content ideas that generate links. They won’t necessarily bring you a lot of traffic, but the links they can generate can boost your overall SEO. 

  1. Enter a topic and set the mode to “In title” 
  2. Set filters: Referring domains from 200, the language of the page 
Content that gets links—research in Ahrefs' Content Explorer

If you’re looking for content that did well on Twitter and Pinterest, there are filters for that too. 

You can opt to show only pages with a minimum share number or sort the results by shares.

Filtering results by social shares in Ahrefs' Content Explorer
Sorting results by social shares in Ahrefs' Content Explorer

How to monetize a blog 

So how is money made in the blogging industry, actually? There are at least nine ways, and you can use most of them simultaneously. 

1. Advertising

Advertising monetizes your traffic directly in the simplest way possible. The more traffic, the more you earn. 

On average, bloggers make $0.1 to $0.5 per pageview from ad networks (source). 

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You can sign up with an ad network like Google AdSense directly or use an ad management platform (which seems to be the common solution). Some of the popular ad management platforms are AdThrive, Mediavine, and Ezoic.  

To illustrate, Pinch of Yum generated around 55% ($52,313.13) of its income from ads in November 2017. You can’t miss the ads on the website. 

Advertising on blog example

2. Affiliate programs 

Affiliate programs allow bloggers to earn a commission whenever their visitors buy a product after clicking on an affiliate link. It’s earning money by recommending things. 

With ads, you get paid based on the number of people that visited the page with the ad. But the bar is higher with affiliate programs—your content has to entice somebody to make a purchase decision. But you can potentially earn more through affiliates. 

Plus, this method doesn’t clutter your blog with ads. Of course, you can use both methods. 

Here’s an example. We visit Jennifer Maker where we see a guide on how to make a heart-shaped explosion box. Everything looks great, so we want to make that decoration. Here’s a shopping list with links to Amazon. 

Affiliate links example

Each one has an affiliate program tag. So if we buy, Jennifer earns a percentage of that (which she discloses on her blog). Everyone’s happy. 

Jennifer earned only 1.73% ($261.91) from affiliate programs in her last income report. But as we’ve seen earlier with the Smart Passive Income blog, affiliate programs can earn you a hefty sum and become the pillar of your income. 

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There are quite a few affiliate programs out there. Some pay as little as 3%, some 50%, and you can get up to 90% commission on rare occasions. A few popular affiliate platforms are Amazon Affiliate Program, ShareASale, and ClickBank

Tip

Most of the time you will be able to spot sponsored links (affiliate and others) through the “sponsored” and “nofollow” link attributes. By using a tool like Ahrefs, you can get a list of those links on any website and see if you can use the same affiliate program or get a similar deal.
How to find sponsored links on any site

3. Sponsored content 

In this monetization method, you create one or a series of content pieces (articles, social media posts, newsletters, etc.) dedicated to promoting a single brand. It usually comes in the form of a product review, guide on using the product, or product placement. 

Sponsored article example

It’s a deal based on participation. The visitor doesn’t need to buy the product, and you get rewarded per published content (and not views like with ads). 

For example, Hot Beauty Health reported earning 39.37% ($3.8K) of her monthly income by doing six sponsored post campaigns (articles + social media). 

Furthermore, she didn’t even need to reach out to the sponsors. They reached her through brand networks she signed up for. 

Indeed, there are services where content creators can sign up and wait for the sponsored post opportunity to come or choose a partnership they qualify for and negotiate a deal. A few examples are IZEA, Impact Radius, or Captiv8

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Of the monetization methods covered so far, this is the most “exclusive” one. How much you earn depends on your reputation in a particular niche, the quality of your content, and the size of your regular audience. 

Once you get Pinch-of-Yum-famous (or even slightly less famous), you practically become an online magazine and can act like one: 

Pinch of Yum has its own "work with us" page
Pinch of Yum has its own “work with us” page.
Case studies on the Pinch of Yum blog
It even posts case studies, a professional move.

4. Selling products 

Your blog can be an e-commerce platform too. You can use it to sell others’ products or even your own products. 

Well, “e-commerce” may be an overstatement here. Most bloggers don’t actually store products or even do dropshipping. They just make it look like a shop. 

For example, at Love & Lemons Shop, all the links lead to Amazon. The first three products are original; the rest are third-party products with affiliate links. 

Affiliate shop on Love & Lemons' blog

Here’s another example. The Financial Samurai used the blog to create and promote his best-selling book “Buy This Not That.” 

Financial Samurai used his blog to create and promote his book

Here’s an interesting example from Smart Passive Income. What is essentially a directory of affiliate links feels like the best shopping experience for tools for online entrepreneurs. All thanks to SPIs’ original content and reputation. 

Recommended tools with affiliate links

Can blogs sell their own physical products through their own stores? Sure, mindbodygreen supplements are a good example.

Blog selling its own physical products through a proprietary store

5. Online courses 

A very popular option among bloggers. 

Interestingly enough, one of the most popular types of courses I’ve seen so far is online entrepreneurship courses, such as making money by blogging. 

Online courses, like any other original products, are in the sky-is-the-limit category when it comes to income. To illustrate, Melyssa Griffin earned “only” $25,572 from affiliate programs while a staggering $258,108 from an online course. In one month. 

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Income report from a blogger

All you need to create an online course is your original content. There are affordable tools that will cover the tech side and payments for you, such as Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi.

6. Subscription-based membership

With this method, you’re offering access to special content or a community gathered around the blog on a recurring payment plan. 

To illustrate such a business model, let’s go back to Gala Darling. On the blog, Gala shares her life philosophy and teaches personal development techniques, self-love, and empowerment. 

She also offers two subscription packages priced at $44/mo and $99/mo. Subscribers get access to exclusive content and a community for group EFT tapping (an actual self-healing method, despite the appearance). 

Subscription-based membership

There is an entire blogging platform based on this monetization method: Substack. This is one of your options for monetizing a blog too. 

The benefits of using Substack are it is a turnkey publishing platform with built-in payments and support; you can also get subscribers within the Substack network. However, you won’t be able to run ads or add affiliate links. 

Monetization with Substack examples

Just like with ecourses, the tools for paid communities are already there. Try Patreon, Memberstack, Slack, or even Facebook

7. Events and speaking 

Some people who run personal or personal brand blogs offer others the ability to hire them for events and speaking.

But this is a monetization method with a high entry barrier. You need to be a recognizable figure in your niche. But once you’re there… 

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… you could be like Tom Bilyeu of Impact Theory and earn up to $100K in speaking fees (source).

A blogger's speaking fees

8. Coaching and mentoring 

Unlike public speaking, you don’t need to be famous to offer paid coaching. You just have to be really good at what you do—and your blog can prove it. 

Actually, your blog can prove that you’re good at blogging, and that is the value you can monetize. That’s exactly what Practical Wanderlust does: 

Example of coaching being monetized

Coaching and mentoring can be the perfect monetization option if your blog is about solving professional challenges: marketing, web design, management, SEO, and so on.

9. Selling the blog 

Last but not least, you can make money by selling the blogs you own. 

Selling the blog can be your goal from day one. Or if after some time you decide that blogging is not for you, you don’t need to bury everything. Someone may be interested in buying the blog, even if it’s for the domain and links that you earned. 

To illustrate: On Flippa, at the time of writing, there are 1,134 blogs for sale selling for as high as $4.7M.

Number of blogs for sale on Flippa

You don’t even have to start a blog from scratch to sell with profit. You can “flip” a blog: buy a blog that already makes some revenue, improve it, and then sell. Repeatedly. 

Before we wrap this section up, there may be even more ways to monetize than the mentioned nine (depending on the niche). For example, according to Pinch of Yum’s ebook, there are as many as 16 ways you can monetize a food blog. Did you know that you could make money by developing recipes and licensing them? 

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Final thoughts 

So now you know what types of blogs can generate an income, how to find traffic-generating topics even if you don’t know anything about the niche, and nine ways to monetize your blog (or blogs). 

But how about actually writing a blog post? We’ve got you covered—check out our guide to writing blog posts that people will actually want to read. 

What’s next? Learn how to promote your blog through various marketing channels and a number of tried and tested tactics: 

Got questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter or Mastodon.



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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?

In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.

Price: Free

Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.

Most common reporting use case

GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.

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As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:

  • Total Impressions
  • Average CTR
  • Average Position
gsc-performance-overviewgsc-performance-overview

Tip

If you’ve signed up for AWT using Google Search Console, you can view your GSC performance data in Ahrefs by clicking “GSC Performance” from the main dashboard.

But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.

organic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-yearorganic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-year

Favorite feature

One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.

google-search-console-indexed-pages-reportgoogle-search-console-indexed-pages-report

If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.

Price: Free

Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.

Most common reporting use case

Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.

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Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.

Such as:

  • Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
  • Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
  • Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
  • Social media platformsFacebook, Reddit, and Twitter
  • Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage

Sidenote.

If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks

google-looker-studio-partner-connectorsgoogle-looker-studio-partner-connectors

Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:

ahrefs-seo-audit-dashboardahrefs-seo-audit-dashboard
Ahrefs Google Looker Studio integration

With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.

Favorite feature

The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.

Price: Free for 500 URLs

Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.

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Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.

screaming-frog-user-interface-screenshotscreaming-frog-user-interface-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.

Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.

Favorite feature

Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs. 

If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.

screaming-frog-api-accessscreaming-frog-api-access

Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.

Price: Free

Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.

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when-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustrationwhen-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustration

For example, you could use our:

Most common reporting use case

One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.

With AWT, you can:

  • Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
  • See the performance of your website
  • Check all known backlinks for your website
ahrefs-overviewahrefs-overview

Favorite feature

Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.

If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).

Price: Free

Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.

Most common reporting use case

For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.

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ahrefs-seo-toolbar-overviewahrefs-seo-toolbar-overview

With the free version, you get the following features:

  • On-page SEO report
  • Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
  • Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
  • SERP positions
  • Country changer for SERP

The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.

If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.

severity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbarseverity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Favorite feature

The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.

indexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbarindexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.

Price: Free

Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.

google-analytics-screenshotgoogle-analytics-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.

Favorite feature

You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.

Price: Free

Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.

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Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.

google-slides-screenshotgoogle-slides-screenshot

Most common reporting use cases

The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.

Favorite feature

One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.

share-video-chat-google-slidesshare-video-chat-google-slides

This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.

Price: Free

Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.

Most common reporting use cases

Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.

Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.

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Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.

bbq-google-trends-graphbbq-google-trends-graph

Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.

Favorite feature

Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.

google-trends-comparison-examplegoogle-trends-comparison-example

Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.

You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.

regional-trends-via-google-trendsregional-trends-via-google-trends

Final thoughts

These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.

The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.

Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂

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SEO

Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.

These findings include:

  • When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
  • 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
  • Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.

Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.

As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.

High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects

The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.

The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.

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The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.

This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.

The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.

Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results

With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.

When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.

Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.

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New Competition From Unexpected Sources

The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.

On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.

An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.

Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search

The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.

Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:

“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”

Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.

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Methodology & Limitations

To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.

The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.

While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.

Why We Care

The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.

Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.

SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.

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As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.

How This Could Help You

While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.

Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:

  • As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
  • Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
  • Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
  • Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
  • Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.

Looking Ahead

While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.

By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.


Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

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