In this video, I’m going to show you how
to get more organic traffic by analyzing and replicating the pages that are sending your
competitors the most traffic from Google. Stay tuned. [Music] What’s up guys? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs. I’ve got a super actionable SEO tutorial for you today that approaches competitor analysis for SEO from a very important angle. And that's traffic. So this research method is super helpful because
basically, what we’re going to do is, is we're going to find the exact pages that are driving the most
search traffic to your competitors’ websites, and then use that data to increase
organic traffic to your own website. Let me show you how it's done. The tool that I’ll be using is Ahrefs’
Site Explorer, which gives you a ton of data on any website or page like backlink reports,
keyword metrics, organic search traffic and more. So first, you would need to enter in the domain
of one of your competitors here in Site Explorer. And by competitors, I’m referring to people
who are actually getting organic search traffic from Google. Now, there are two ways that you can
actually find a list of competitors. And the first is pretty straightforward. You just throw in some search queries related
to your business into Google and then you look for the websites that are ranking for the keyword
phrases that you want to rank for. So for our example, let’s pretend that I
have a golf blog, since the sport is very dear to my heart. I might search for something like
“best golf clubs” or “how to hit a driver.” With the first search query, you can see that
golfdigest.com owns a couple of the top rankings, followed by pga.com, and then you’ll see something interesting.
You'll see businessinsider.com. Now, Golf Digest seems like a pretty relevant
competitor just by looking at their domain name and pga.com is the official site for
the Professional Golfers’ Association. Business insider on the other hand is more
of a general website that covers nearly every topic under the sun. So they wouldn’t be
a good fit for our competitor analysis. There’s also another cool way to find competitors
that you might not even know exist, but I’ll show you that in a bit since it comes later
in the workflow if you want to scale this technique. Alright, so back to Site Explorer. I’ll enter in our competitor’s domain here and hit search. So once Site Explorer loads, you can click
on the “Top Pages” report in the sidebar. And boom! You are now looking at the pages that send
your competitor the most organic search traffic. Okay? So take a look right here. You’ll likely see a bunch of flags here
which are actually filters. By default, the top pages report will choose
the country that sends them the most search traffic for the website that you’re researching. So in this case, it has defaulted to the US of A. Now, if you want to get a more accurate
representation of the total SEO traffic to the pages, you can switch this filter to "all countries",
and you’ll see that the numbers here get bigger. With the top pages report, there’s a lot
of cool stuff we can do here. So first, I’m going to break down these
important metrics and then I’ll show you a couple simple workflows that will
actually help you put this into action. Since we’re looking at the “top pages”
of this domain, this report will sort the table by the pages that receive the most search traffic. And beside each traffic figure, you can see the
percentage of search traffic each page generates for a website in the selected country. So in this case, this story on Bill Clinton
would account for around 3% of the total search traffic across our domain search. Sometimes, you might find that certain pages
bring your competitors over 30% of their overall search traffic. 30 percent! When you find a site where the traffic is
not diluted across all of their pages, it's usually a good indication that the website
you’re analyzing is the perfect target to find some great topics that
you can just piggyback off of. Next, we have the “Value” column which
shows the equivalent amount it would cost to generate this many search visitors
with pay-per-click advertising. This is based on clicks from all of the keywords this page ranks for, multiplied by the cost per click. The next metric is one of my favorites and that's the keywords column, which shows you how many keywords that the page is ranking for. And if you click it, then you can actually see
all of the different search queries a page ranks for in the top 100 Google search results. This goes to show that keyword research
isn’t just about targeting a single keyword. But it’s proof that a single page can actually rank
for tens, hundreds, and even thousands of different keyword phrases. We have a more detailed study on our blog
where we analyzed 3 million random search queries. Our data shows that the average #1 ranking
page will also rank for around 1,000 other relevant keywords. This is definitely worth a read, so I’ll
leave a link to it in the description below. Alright, so next we have RD, which is
short for Referring Domains. So this column shows the total number of unique
websites linking to the target URL. And then we have the page URL,
which is pretty straightforward. The next couple of metrics are also interesting. The top keyword column shows the keyword that
brings the most organic search traffic to its corresponding URL. And then the column beside it is the estimated
search volume for that top keyword. Finally is position, and that’s where Ahrefs last
saw this page ranking in Google’s SERPs. Okay great. Now that you can see the top pages of your
competitor’s website, what’s next? So the beauty of the Top Pages, and actually
almost all of Ahrefs’ reports is that there are some super helpful filters that you can use to narrow down the results and actually see the metrics that you care about. The first thing you can do is to set
up some filters similar to this. So first, we’ll set the positions to 0 to 5,
which is gonna show us only the pages that rank in the top 5 results of Google. Then we’ll set the traffic filter to have
a minimum of 500 search visitors. You might have to play around with the minimum
search visitors number a bit depending on the site that you’re analyzing. So I do want to mention a quick side note here. You might notice that the total reported traffic,
value, and the keywords numbers, they decreased. And the reason why is because the keyword rankings
below the top 5 were filtered out when we set this filter and the same goes for the
minimum search traffic filter that we set. From here, you can export the list to CSV. And with this CSV export, you can do some
pretty cool stuff in Excel to find high traffic topics without much competition. Here's how: I’ve already set this up in a Google sheet
since most of us should have access to this tool. So first, I’m going to freeze the first row, so you
can see the columns as I scroll down. And then we can actually sort the table by
the referring domains in ascending order. What this is going to do is it's going to reveal
pages that are getting a ton of traffic without any or many backlinks. Now, with this particular site, you’ll
notice that there are a lot of ‘top stories’, since a lot of their content is news based,
but there are also some low hanging content ideas you can dissect from this report. Check this one out. This page ranks in the second position for
the top keyword “Ping G Irons” which is a branded type of golf club. And this table also shows that this page
receives about 677 search visitors with zero referring domains, which is pretty surprising to me. Now this might be a topic that you
want to create content around because you know that the competition is low, and that the traffic is actually at a pretty decent amount considering that they’re not even ranking in the number one position. One more cool thing you can do in the top
pages report is to find individual pages that get a ton of traffic and basically create
an entire outline for your content using the keywords that they rank for. So I’ve cleared the filters already, and the only thing you really need to do is
sort the table by traffic in descending order, which is already done by default. So, if we skip through some of the
branded search queries like these ones as well as the ones that don’t
have much context or commercial value, you’ll see this cool one here. You can see that the top keyword is “best golf drivers” and this page ranks for over 2,600 relevant search queries with
over 12,000 monthly search visitors, which is actually a conservative
estimation, not the actual traffic value. Now, I’m sure these pages also get traffic from
other sources like social, referral traffic, email, etc. In fact, the actual SEO traffic will almost
always be higher than what Ahrefs reports. So let’s say that I wanted to create
my own post on the best golf drivers. What I can do is click here under the keywords
column to open up a pool of relevant keywords that this page is ranking for. And by analyzing these, I can basically create
an entire outline of what I should be covering in my blog post. For example, it's 2018, but people are still
searching for a “best list” from 2017. And they also want drivers that are known for distance. You can click on the “Next 100” link here
to see more of the keywords that they’re ranking for. Then you’ll probably want to talk about
game improvement drivers. Maybe create this post in a review-like style. And then talk about different handicaps and to make
sure to include something about mid handicappers. And you can see that all of these rank in
the top or near the top of Google, which shows high relevance from the content to the searcher’s intent. So rather than spending your time creating
multiple pages targeting a single or just a few keyword phrases, you can confidently focus on creating just one, just one, epic post on drivers. Now that you’ve seen the top pages report
in action, it doesn’t mean that it’s time to stop your research. You can obviously search for
more competitors in Google... Or... you can go to the “Competing Domains”
report inside Site Explorer. If you look in the sidebar, you’ll see the
competing domains report here. This page will show you a list of websites that
rank in the top 10 for the same keywords as this as this competing website. Now, when you’re looking at this report,
you’ll see that there are some irrelevant sites like Wikipedia and Twitter. So a quick way to look for relevant competitors
is to scan for lots of “green” in the visual bar here. The blue color represents the amount of unique
keywords for the website we’re analyzing, the green represents the number of shared
common keywords, and the yellow portion shows the corresponding site’s unique keyword rankings. In this example, you can instantly see that golf.com, pga.com, golfchannel.com and golfweek.com are all highly relevant sites to this domain. You can just rinse and repeat this entire process
that we just went through and find an endless number of topics that you can use as inspiration
and then create new content for your site. I hope you enjoyed this SEO tutorial and
that you’ll start using the top pages report to increase organic traffic to your website. Make sure to hit the thumbs up button and
subscribe for more actionable tutorials in our Marketing with Ahrefs series. I've got to get going because I have an important place to be, so I’ll see you soon, my fellow marketing compadres. [Music]
