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Link Building for SEO: The Beginner’s Guide

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Link Building for SEO: The Beginner’s Guide

What is link building?

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to pages on your website. Its purpose is to boost the “authority” of your pages in the eyes of Google so that these pages rank higher and bring more search traffic.

Why is link building important?

According to Google’s Andrey Lipattsev, links are one of the three major ranking factors in Google. So if you want your website’s pages to rank high in search, you will almost certainly need links.

Google and other search engines look at links from other sites as “votes.” These votes help them identify which page on a given topic (out of thousands of similar ones) deserves to rank at the very top of the search results.

Thus, as a general rule, pages with more backlinks tend to rank higher in search results. 

Links aren’t the answer to everything

Links are incredibly important for ranking well. And it is quite rare that you will outrank pages that have a lot of strong links—unless you get just as many. And yet, links aren’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages.

So if you build lots of links to your page and it still ranks poorly, look into other ranking factors that might prevent you from ranking well.

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Conceptually, most link building tactics and strategies fall into one of the following four buckets:

Four buckets of link building strategies

1. Adding links

If you can go to a website that doesn’t belong to you and manually place your link there, that’s called “adding” a link. The most common tactics that fit into this category are:

  • Business directory submissions.
  • Social profile creation.
  • Blog commenting.
  • Posting to forums, communities, and Q&A sites.
  • Creating job search listings.

Building links via those tactics is very easy to do. And for that exact reason, such links tend to have very low value in the eyes of Google. In some cases, they may even be flagged as spam.

Other than that, these kinds of links barely give you any competitive advantage. If you can go to a website and manually place your link there, nothing stops your competitors from doing the same.

However, you shouldn’t ignore this group of link building tactics entirely. Each of them can actually be quite beneficial for your online business for reasons other than SEO.

Let me elaborate with a couple of quick examples:

  • Business directories – If you’re doing SEO for a restaurant website, you should definitely list it in three to five major directory sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor, Allmenus, Grubhub, etc. Those links won’t be particularly strong ones, but you might get some actual customers from them.
  • Industry forums – If you know some active forums or communities where your target audience is hanging out, you should definitely be active there too. But merely spamming your links without trying to add value to conversations will quickly get you banned from these places.

As you can tell, each of these strategies can be quite meaningful. But if someone offers you to do any of the above at scale (i.e., register your site at a hundred business directories or create a hundred social media profiles)—stay away from that. These kinds of “hacks” are a waste of money at best and might even get your website penalized at worst.

Sidenote.

While looking for more ways to “add” links to other websites, you might come across tactics that mention “web 2.0s” and “bookmarking sites.” Those things used to work some 15 years ago, but you shouldn’t waste your time on them today.

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2. Asking for links

As the name suggests, this is when you reach out to the owner of the website you want a link from and give them a compelling reason to link to you.

That “compelling reason” is an absolutely essential success factor. The people you reach out to don’t care about you and your website (unless you’re some sort of celebrity) and, thus, they have zero incentive to promote you or your work.

So before you ask them to link to you, ask yourself: “What’s in it for THEM?”

Here are some of the link building tactics and strategies that fall into this category, along with a briefly defined “compelling reason” that they’re based off:

  • Guest blogging – Create useful content for their website.
  • Skyscraper technique – Show them a better resource than the one they’re linking to.
  • Link inserts – Show them a resource with more information on something they’ve briefly mentioned.
  • Ego bait – Mention them or their work in your own content in a positive light.
  • Testimonials and case studies – Give positive feedback about their product or service.
  • Link exchanges – Offer to link back to them if they agree to link to you.
  • Resource page link building – Show them a good resource that fits their existing list.
  • Broken link building – Help them fix a “dead” link on their page by providing a replacement.
  • Image link building – Ask to get credit for using your image.
  • Unlinked mentions – Ask to make the mention of your brand “clickable.”
  • Link moves – Ask to make changes to an existing link pointing at your website.
  • HARO and journalist requests – Give an “expert quote” for their article.
  • PR – Give them a killer story to cover.

These strategies seem to make quite some sense, right? But as soon as you send your first email request, you’re likely to face the harsh reality—your “compelling reason” isn’t compelling enough:

  • Your guest post isn’t good enough.
  • Your resource isn’t worthy of a mention.
  • Your “skyscraper” isn’t as “tall” as you thought it was.

The truth is it is incredibly hard to persuade random website owners to link to you. Either you have a one-of-a-kind outstanding resource that will genuinely impress them, or you’re well known in your field and they will be happy to fix you a link as a favor.

If it’s none of the two, you better handle rejection well. Because for every 100 emails, 98 will either not reply or say “no.” 

And that is exactly the reason why many SEOs started looking for ways to make it worthwhile for the other party and offer something in return for a link, such as:

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  • A shoutout on social media.
  • An email newsletter blast.
  • Free access to a premium product or service.
  • A link in exchange.
  • Money.

But offering these kinds of “extras” gets them into the gray area of what is considered a “link scheme,” according to Google’s guidelines.

So there you have it. The candid ways of asking for links have a rather low success rate. But as soon as you try to “sweeten the deal,” you’re entering Google’s minefield.

At this point, it may seem that I’m dissuading you from using tactics and strategies listed in this group. I’m not. I’m merely suggesting that you ensure your content is outstanding before reaching out to hundreds of people.

3. Buying links

Let’s get this straight from the get-go: 

We don’t recommend that you buy links! 

If you don’t have lots of experience with it, you’re likely to waste lots of money on useless links that will have zero impact on your rankings. Or even get your website penalized.

However, we will be putting you at a disadvantage if we don’t disclose the fact that many people in the SEO industry do “buy” links in all sorts of ways and manage to get away with it.

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So if you’re willing to risk the well-being of your website and buy links, please look for advice on doing that “safely” elsewhere—because here at Ahrefs, we don’t teach that.

4. Earning links

You “earn” links when other people link to the pages on your website without you having to ask them to do so. This obviously doesn’t happen unless you have something truly outstanding that other website owners will genuinely want to mention on their websites.

But people can’t link to things that they don’t know exist. So no matter how awesome your page is, you’ll need to invest in promoting it. And the more people see your page, the higher the chance that some of them will end up linking to it.

Later in this chapter, I’m going to share some tactics and strategies that will help you both create “link-worthy” content and promote it to relevant audiences who might end up linking to it.

Bonus: Preserving links

Technically, preserving your hard-earned links does not really fall under the definition of “link building.” But when you lose an important backlink, the “vote” that it was sending to Google is also lost. So it is fairly important to preserve your hard-earned links.

There are two simple ways to do it:

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  1. Fixing 404 pages that have quality backlinks
  2. Monitoring your lost backlinks and reaching out to a website owner when an important link goes missing (also known as “link reclamation”)

Both of these things are easy to do with Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. The Best by links report will help you find the 404 pages with links. While the Backlinks report has a handy “Lost” filter, which will show you all links that were recently lost.

One important caveat, though. You don’t need to bother about every single link that goes missing. You just need to preserve the most important ones. And that is exactly what we’re going to talk about next.

Nobody knows for sure how exactly Google measures the value of each link. But there are some general concepts of evaluating links that the SEO community believes to be true:

  • Authority
  • Relevance
  • Anchor text
  • Nofollow vs. follow
  • Placement
  • Destination
Six aspects of a good link

1. Authority

As you already know, Google sees links as “votes” that a given page deserves to rank well. But a link from techcrunch.com can’t possibly have the same power as a link from your friend’s personal blog, right? (Unless, of course, your friend is Tim Ferriss.) 

Well, Google has consistently denied that some sort of sitewide website authority metric exists in its system. And yet, many SEOs believe that the concept of “website authority” makes too much sense to completely discount it.

What is more important, though, is the authority of the actual page that is linking to you. It’s one thing to be mentioned in a TechCrunch article that goes unnoticed, and it’s an entirely different case if that article “breaks the internet” and gets referenced on dozens of major news websites.

Pages that have backlinks cast a stronger vote than those that don't

In other words, a page that has some strong votes of its own will cast a stronger vote compared to a page with no votes. This simple principle lies at the core of Google’s famous PageRank algorithm.

Back in the day, Google even provided a browser toolbar, which displayed the PageRank of any URL you visited. But this toolbar was deprecated more than 10 years ago. Which gave SEO tool providers an opportunity to fill that gap and develop their own authority metrics.

Here at Ahrefs, we have Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR), which measure the so-called “link popularity” of websites and URLs, respectively. 

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2. Relevance

Let’s say you published a guide on grilling a perfect steak, and you want it to rank high in Google. Who would you prefer to get a link from—Joe Rogan or Gordon Ramsay?

I would imagine it’s the latter. Joe may have a larger audience than Gordon, but he’s not a world-renowned chef. So he can easily be wrong with his cooking advice.

And that is something that Google seemingly accounts for when ranking pages. Links from websites on the same topic as yours are deemed to bring more value than links from irrelevant websites.

Here’s an excerpt from its “How search works” guide:

If other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign that the information is of high quality.

3. Anchor text

Just in case you’re not already familiar with the term, “anchor text” is a clickable snippet of text that links to another page. In many cases, it succinctly describes what the linked page is about.

So it’s no surprise that Google uses the words in the anchor text to better understand what the referenced page is about and what keywords it deserves to rank for. In fact, Google’s original PageRank patent talks about this quite explicitly:

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Google employs a number of techniques to improve search quality including page rank, anchor text, and proximity information.

So how do you leverage anchor text when building links?

Well, it’s better that you don’t. The more you try to control how different pages link to you and shoehorn all the “right words” into the anchor text of your backlinks, the higher the chance that Google will suspect manipulation and penalize you for that. So it’s better to just let the author of the linking page decide how they want to reference your page. 

4. Nofollow vs. follow

Nofollow” is a link attribute that tells Google that the linking page will rather not give its vote to the page that it is referencing.

Here’s how that looks like in page code:

Page code for nofollowed link

Historically, Google didn’t count votes from “nofollowed links” (or so it said). Then, in 2019, it switched to a hint model, which means that some “nofollowed” links may now influence your search rankings.

It also introduced two new link attributes along with this announcement:

  • rel=“UGC” should be applied to user-generated links, e.g., blog comments and forum posts.
  • rel=“sponsored” should be applied when the link is part of an advertisement, sponsorship, or some other compensation agreement.

As a general rule, you want to be getting “followed” links (i.e., links that don’t have any of the aforementioned attributes) because these are the ones that are supposed to cast the strongest votes.

However, if you see an opportunity to get a nofollowed link from a relevant high-authority page, you should absolutely take it.

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A good example is Wikipedia, where all outgoing links are nofollowed. Getting a link from Wikipedia is incredibly hard, which is why many SEOs are convinced that those links are quite valuable in the eyes of Google.

5. Placement

Google’s reasonable surfer patent talks about how the likeliness of a link being clicked may affect how much authority it transfers. And placement of a link on a page is one of the few things that can affect its CTR.

Let’s say there’s a webpage that consists of three blocks: content, sidebar, and footer. As a general rule, links in the content will get more clicks because the content block gets the most attention from visitors.

Prominently placed links may transfer more "authority"

One other thing that can affect the CTR of a link is how high on the page it appears. Readers are more likely to click links at the very beginning of the article rather than the ones at its very end.

6. Destination

When building links to your website, there are three destinations where you can point them:

  1. Your homepage.
  2. Your linkable assets.
  3. The actual pages that you need to rank well in Google.

And quite often, the pages that you need to rank well are also the hardest ones to get links to. That’s because people generally prefer to link to informational pages where their audience can get value for free rather than commercial pages where their audience is likely to part ways with their cash.

Thus, one of the most common questions in SEO is this: “How to get links to boring pages?”

And while there’s no single right answer to this question, everyone agrees that you should leverage the power of internal linking to help your “boring pages” rank better.

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Use internal links to transfer authority to the boring pages that you need to rank well in Google

In part two, I listed a few dozen link building tactics and strategies for you to explore. But which of them are the best and most effective ones?

Here at Ahrefs, we’re big advocates of the following four:

  1. Pursuing competitors’ links
  2. Creating linkable assets
  3. Content promotion
  4. Guest posting

1. Pursuing competitors’ links

Competitor link research is one of the most fundamental activities in link building. Think about it. The top-ranking page for your desired search query has all the right links, which persuaded Google of its superiority. Therefore, by studying its links, you can figure out which tactics to use so that you can get similar links and outrank that page.

And this is where an SEO tool like Ahrefs is absolutely indispensable.

Just put the keyword that you want to rank for in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and scroll down to the “SERP overview.” It will show you how many backlinks (and linking websites) each of the top-ranking pages has:

SERP overview for "best productivity apps"

Click on any of these numbers, and you’ll see a report listing all of the links.

From here, your course of action is twofold:

  1. Try to get links from the pages that link to your competitors
  2. Study how those links were acquired and use the same tactics to get more links than your competitors

2. Creating linkable assets

In SEO, we use the terms “linkable asset” or “linkbait” to refer to content that is strategically crafted to attract links. Such linkable assets can take on many different forms:

  • Online tools and calculators
  • Infographics, GIFographics, and “Map-o-graphics”
  • Awards and rankings
  • Studies and research
  • Industry surveys
  • How-to guides and tutorials
  • Definitions and coined terms

I’m sure that even in the most boring industries there’s a way to create an interesting piece of content that will attract links. So it’s always a good idea to study the websites of your competitors and see if they have any linkable assets that you could get inspiration from.

To do that, simply put their domain name in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the Best by links report. This will show you which of their pages have accrued the most links.

Best pages by backlinks report

As you can see in the screenshot above, three of the five most linked pages on the Ahrefs Blog (excluding the homepage) are data-driven research studies. That gives you a pretty good idea of the kind of content that attracts links in our industry.

3. Content promotion

No matter how “linkable” your pages are, people can’t link to them without first discovering them. In other words, even the best linkable assets have to be promoted in order to attract links.

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Generally speaking, there are just three ways to promote content:

  1. Influencers and communities
  2. Advertising
  3. Growing an audience

1. Influencers and communities

Who will amplify this? And why? According to Rand Fishkin, the answer to this question determines the amount of exposure that your piece of content is destined to get. 

Who” refers to influential people and relevant communities in your space that might help to put your content in front of large numbers of people. And “why” refers to the actual merit of your content that makes it worthy of being promoted in the first place.

Fun fact. Back in 2015, I reached out to Rand, asking him to tweet my article. And his response was essentially a crash course in how this works:

Rand's email reply to Tim

2. Advertising

You can easily bring lots of visitors to your content with the help of advertising on platforms like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the like. Alternatively, you can partner with selected influencers and content creators in your space and pay them to promote your content to their audience. 

Some people, though, find it hard to justify spending money to promote their content. Which naturally begs the question: How did they justify spending time to create it in the first place?

If you create your content with your business goals in mind, you should not have issues to justify spending money to promote it to people.

3. Growing an audience

Each time you publish and promote a piece of content, you’ll reach some people who will find value in it (or simply enjoy it). And it would be a real shame to part ways with these people and never be able to reach them again, wouldn’t it?

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That’s why you have to work on growing your audience. Which can be done in a few different ways:

  • Ask them to subscribe to your email list
  • Ask them to follow you on Twitter/LinkedIn/Instagram/TikTok
  • Invite them to join your private community on Slack/Discord/Facebook
  • Retarget them with Facebook/Twitter/Google ads

With every new cool piece of content that you release, your audience should be getting larger and larger. And the more people follow your work, the less you’ll need to bother about promoting your content manually.

4. Guest posting

According to a 2022 survey by Aira, guest posting is the third most used link building strategy among professional SEOs.

As discussed earlier, asking for links without offering anything of value in return barely even works these days. But guest posting is not like that. You’re offering a quality piece of content in exchange for an opportunity to link to your website from it. That sounds like a fair exchange of value.

Here at Ahrefs Blog, we have a “write for us” page, inviting our readers to contribute a guest article for us. And yet, we reject the vast majority of pitches we receive. Our standards for guest contributions are very high.

So here are two simple tips that will help you get published in the top blogs of your industry:

1. Start small and work your way up

It is much easier to get the attention of the top blogs in your niche when you have a solid portfolio of published content on slightly smaller blogs. 

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So before you pitch a guest article to the owner of a DR80+ blog, make sure you have a published DR70+ piece to show them. And before you pitch that DR70+ blog… well, I’m sure you get the idea.

You can use Content Explorer to quickly find relevant blogs of required “authority.” Just search for a related word or phrase in page titles and use the “Domain Rating (DR)” filter to narrow down results:

Finding blogs with required authority using Ahrefs' Content Explorer

2. Make an irresistible offer

What do blog owners want? They want to grow traffic to their blog.

So if you can persuade them that your guest article will rank well in Google for its target keyword and bring them consistent search traffic, it will be an easy sell.

And that’s where the previous tip is absolutely invaluable. If you can show some actual examples of your past guest articles that rank well, I bet you’ll get the deal easily.

A somewhat lesser-known guest posting tactic is to find an underperforming article on their blog (in terms of search traffic) and offer to do a complete overhaul with the goal of improving its Google rankings. In many cases, the blogger will be happy for you to do that.

Just open the Top pages report in Site Explorer and use the “Traffic” filter to find underperforming articles easily:

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Underperforming articles in Top pages report

While it is technically possible to build links with just a bit of brain power and a Gmail account, there are a number of link building tools that will help make the process of acquiring links much easier.

Here are some free ones:

  • Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – Shows all links pointing at your own website already and lets you sort and filter them by many important SEO metrics.
  • Ahrefs’ Free Backlink Checker – Shows top 100 links pointing at any website or URL.
  • Google Alerts – Notifies you whenever a specific word or phrase was mentioned on a newly published page. Which is a great way to source quality link prospects.

 And here are some premium ones:

  • Ahrefs’ Site Explorer – Shows you all links of any website or URL with an option to sort and filter them by many important SEO metrics.
  • Ahrefs’ Content Explorer – A unique link prospecting tool, which helps you find thousands of relevant websites for link requests and guest posting. Also helps to research linkable assets on any topic from all around the web.
  • Ahrefs Alerts – Similar to Google Alerts but designed specifically with SEO professionals in mind.
  • Pitchbox/BuzzStream/GMass – Email outreach tools. There are many other tools that let you send personalized emails at scale, but these ones are the most popular among SEOs.
  • Hunter.io/Voila Norbert – The so-called “email lookup services,” which help you find contact details of websites at scale.

Let’s wrap this up

This guide turned out to be over 4,000 words. Yet we’ve only scratched the surface of what link building entails. So if you want to dig deeper, make sure to check out our other articles on this topic, which I’ve linked to throughout this guide.

And should you have any questions or comments, just tweet me at @timsoulo.



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SEO

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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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.


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Automated SEO Reporting (The Easy Way)

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Automated SEO Reporting (The Easy Way)

If you’ve dabbled in SEO reporting, you’ll know that manual reporting becomes more painful the more you have to do. So, how can you take the weight off your shoulders? By automating the repetitive bits.

In this article, I’ll share how you can automate your SEO reporting easily using just two tools: Ahrefs and Google Looker Studio (GLS).

In theory, automating SEO reporting should help:

  • Free up time
  • Improve efficiency
  • Improve consistency
  • Reduce costs

But, in reality, these types of projects can get complicated quickly—often taking longer than expected—if finished at all.

Source: XKCD (crude adaptations by me)

So, rather than trying to automate all the things, let’s keep it simple and focus on what we can automate easily:

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  • Organic traffic reporting
  • Keyword rank tracking
  • Website auditing
  • Competitor analysis
  • Website changes
  • Brand mentions

The two most popular data sources for SEO reporting are Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics (GA). So, how can we automate these two reports?

Here’s what we’ll do:

  • Connect data sources to Google Looker Studio – GSC and GA
  • Design a report – we’ll cheat using a template
  • Schedule it to be delivered in our email box

Plot spoiler: We’ll use these two Google Looker Studio templates:

looker-studio-templates-with-highlightslooker-studio-templates-with-highlights

Automating Google Search Console reporting

To start, make sure you’re logged into Google Search Console. Then, head to Looker Studio and click on the Search Console Report.

Google-looker-studio-search-console-report-homepageGoogle-looker-studio-search-console-report-homepage

Then click on Use my own data and Replace data.

Use-my-own-data-search-consoleUse-my-own-data-search-console

Then, select your site from the list.

Add-your-site-to-the-list-google-looker-studio-screenshotAdd-your-site-to-the-list-google-looker-studio-screenshot

Then select either Site Impression and web or URL Impression and web, depending on your preference. I am using URL Impression and web in this example.

Site configuration GLS screenshotSite configuration GLS screenshot

Sidenote.

Site Impression and URL impression support different search types. For full details and differences, check Google’s documentation here.

Click Add at the bottom right-hand corner. You’ll then probably get a pop-up—click Add to report.

Add-to-report-gsc-screenshotAdd-to-report-gsc-screenshot

Once that’s added, you should get something that looks like this but with your website’s data showing.

google-search-console-looker-studio-templategoogle-search-console-looker-studio-template

Now you’ve got your report, let’s schedule it. To do so, click on the downward-facing caret in the top right and click Schedule delivery.

schedule-automatic-delivery-of-reports-google-looker-studioschedule-automatic-delivery-of-reports-google-looker-studio

Add the people you want to receive the report and pick a start time and time for the report to be sent. Then click Save.

email-delivery-schedulingemail-delivery-scheduling

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’ll get a PDF report automatically sent to those email inboxes on the date you specified.

Automating Google Analytics 4 (GA4) reporting

Automating GA4 reporting uses a similar process. To start, head back to the main Looker Studio dashboard and set up a new GA4 report by clicking on the GA4 Report icon.

GA-4-report-template-via-google-looker-studioGA-4-report-template-via-google-looker-studio

Then, click on Use my own data and select your GA4 account.

ga4-report-template-ga4-report-template-

Then select your site from the drop-down list and click Add.

selecting-your-site-ga-4selecting-your-site-ga-4

Your site’s information will then be populated in the copy of the GA4 template.

ga-4-report-template-examplega-4-report-template-example

Once you’ve done that, you can automate the sending like we did with the GSC report.

  1. Go to Share and click the downward facing caret
  2. Click Schedule delivery
  3. Add the people you want to send the report to and select a frequency to deliver the report.
sharing-report-with-other-people-google-looker-studiosharing-report-with-other-people-google-looker-studio

Now, we’ve seen how easy it is to schedule reports for GSC and GA4. We can do the same using the Ahrefs Google Looker Studio Connectors.

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Ahrefs has three connectors for Looker Studio that help you create GLS dashboards in a couple of clicks. You can find them in the Partner Connectors list within GLS.

Here’s what they look like:

Ahrefs' Partner connectors for Google Looker StudioAhrefs' Partner connectors for Google Looker Studio

Let’s get started with keyword rank tracking.

One of the issues with sharing traditional rank tracking data with clients is the reports can be too overwhelming at a glance, making it hard for them to see what’s going on.

Our Rank Tracker connector creates a shareable, easy-to-understand scheduled report in a few clicks.

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Here’s how you set it up.

Go to Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker

Click on the project that you want to create a dashboard for, then click on Looker Studio.

Looker studio button screenshotLooker studio button screenshot

Then click on Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker connector.

Ahrefs Rank Tracker connector highlightAhrefs Rank Tracker connector highlight

Authorize the connector

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be taken to Google Looker Studio to authorize the connector.

Authorize the connectorAuthorize the connector

Click on Authorize and sign in using your Google account. You’ll need to click Allow for Ahrefs Rank Tracker to access your Google Account.

1711554966 825 Automated SEO Reporting The Easy Way1711554966 825 Automated SEO Reporting The Easy Way

Once you’ve done that, enter the project you want to add and then hit Connect in the top right-hand corner. When you’re happy with everything, click Create Report.

1711554966 848 Automated SEO Reporting The Easy Way1711554966 848 Automated SEO Reporting The Easy Way

Then, you should get a dashboard that looks something like this.

1711554966 604 Automated SEO Reporting The Easy Way1711554966 604 Automated SEO Reporting The Easy Way

Schedule it

To make it automated, follow the same steps we used for our GSC and GA4 reports by clicking the downwards facing caret next to Share and click Schedule delivery.

schedule-automatic-delivery-of-reports-google-looker-studioschedule-automatic-delivery-of-reports-google-looker-studio

Add the recipients to the report and select how regularly you want it sent.

Adding recipients to the scheduled email Adding recipients to the scheduled email

Now you’ve set up the Rank Tracker report, you’ll be able to check these details in every email:

  • Positions
  • SERP features
  • Competitors
  • Tags
  • Traffic share
  • Keywords metrics

If you’re focusing on technical SEO on your website then it’s a good idea to get an automated Site Audit dashboard set up. It lets you keep track of your website’s technical health easily.

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Audit

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Audit and select a project from the dashboard to click on it.

Selecting an Audit from Site Audit DashboardSelecting an Audit from Site Audit Dashboard

Then click on the Looker Studio button in the top right-hand corner.

Looker Studio button screenshotLooker Studio button screenshot

On the dropdown, click Ahrefs Site Audit connector.

Ahrefs Site Audit Connector setupAhrefs Site Audit Connector setup

Authorize the connector

Like other connectors, you may be prompted to Authorize and sign in using your Google account. You’ll need to click Allow for Ahrefs Rank Tracker to access your Google Account.

Afterward, set your parameters. I normally set it up like this.

Parameters-selectionParameters-selection

If prompted, click on allow parameter sharing and then Create Report.

Create-GLS-report-button-screenshotCreate-GLS-report-button-screenshot

Then click Create Report again when prompted.

Create-report-glsCreate-report-gls

GLS then starts to build your report in the background.

Schedule it

You can schedule the reports in exactly the same way as you did with the other connectors. Click on Share and Schedule delivery to share with the people you want to receive the report.

schedule-automatic-delivery-of-reports-google-looker-studioschedule-automatic-delivery-of-reports-google-looker-studio

You can use the Site Explorer report for monitoring your own site, but you can also use it to monitor your competitors’ sites.

Sidenote.

You must have your competitor’s website set up as a project in order to create a dashboard for it.

This dashboard report makes it possible to keep tabs on your competitors, and have it sent to your or your client’s inbox on a regular basis.

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer

Once on the Overview page, click the Looker Studio button in the top right-hand corner.

ahrefs-site-explorer-overview-google-looker-studio-connectorahrefs-site-explorer-overview-google-looker-studio-connector

Then click on Ahrefs’ Site Explorer Connector.

ahrefs-site-explorer-connectorahrefs-site-explorer-connector

Authorize the connector

Once you’ve done that, hit Authorize.

authorize-the-ahrefs-connectorauthorize-the-ahrefs-connector

And sign in with Google.

ahrefs-site-explorer-google-accessahrefs-site-explorer-google-access

Then, select a project and check all the boxes to ensure compatibility with the template.

1711554967 412 Automated SEO Reporting The Easy Way1711554967 412 Automated SEO Reporting The Easy Way

Once you’ve done that, hit Connect, and if prompted, select Allow. Then click Create Report on the following screen.

Create-GLS-report-button-screenshotCreate-GLS-report-button-screenshot

Once you’ve created your report, it will appear on the following screen, and all the data should be populated.

ahrefs-site-explorer-google-looker-studio-reportahrefs-site-explorer-google-looker-studio-report

Schedule it

Scheduling delivery is the same as we have seen for the other reports.

schedule-automatic-delivery-of-reports-google-looker-studioschedule-automatic-delivery-of-reports-google-looker-studio

Once you’ve shared it with your colleagues or clients, it will automatically be delivered to your inboxes on your chosen schedule.

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If your website is prone to occasional downtime, a tool like Uptime Robot is an easy and free way to automate monitoring of your website’s status.

Once you’ve set it up, you can receive notifications through email, slack messages, SMS, or even a voice call—that way, you’ll be the first to know when your website goes down.

If you want to monitor certain pages on your website for changes, you can use a tool like Little Warden. The tool can monitor many different things, but I like to use it to monitor the robots.txt file for changes.

This type of monitoring is useful in enterprise SEO, where multiple teams have access to the website and can change things often without notifying the SEO team beforehand.

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If tracking web mentions of your brand or a specific keyword is important, you can do this using Ahrefs Alerts.

To do so, head to Alerts on the main site navigation and click the Mentions tab.

ahrefs-mentionsahrefs-mentions

Then click + Add alert and enter the details in the pop-up box of the mention you want to track.

new-alerts-ahrefsnew-alerts-ahrefs

Mention alerts are a useful way to report unbranded mentions of your brand or website. Once you are alerted of the mention you can contact the website to request a link.

Final thoughts

Automating your SEO reporting process isn’t always easy to do. But by using Ahrefs’ Google Looker Studio connectors, you can make it easier to automate your SEO reporting process—without sacrificing quality.

Even if you have no coding knowledge or experience in building SEO dashboards, you can have a plug-and-play set of automated SEO reports ready to go in just a few clicks.

Got more questions? Ping me on X

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