How to find your competitors' best-performing content using Ahrefs

Executive overview

Knowing which competitor content earns the most shares, backlinks, and search traffic lets you identify high-value topics to outperform. Ahrefs provides two tools that expose this data directly.

The content that wins on social media is rarely the same content that wins backlinks — targeting both requires creating different pieces.

Three types of competitor content to target

• Content with high social shares — signals what resonates with an audience
• Content with many referring domains — reveals link-worthy formats and topics
• Content driving organic search traffic — shows ranking opportunities to pursue

Finding top shared and linked content with Content Explorer

• Open Content Explorer from the Ahrefs top menu and enter a competitor's domain
• Results default to most popular; sort by any social column (Twitter, Google Plus, etc.) to find top shared pieces
• Sort by referring domains to switch view to most-linked content
• Top shared articles and top linked articles are often entirely different — note the distinction

Finding top traffic pages with Positions Explorer

• Open Positions Explorer, enter a competitor domain, then open the Top Pages report under Organic Research
• Each row shows a page and its estimated organic traffic (not exact figures)
• Click the keywords column expand button on any page to see all ranking keywords
• Use ranking keywords to gauge whether a topic is worth targeting on your own site
• Write a more comprehensive, better version of any article you decide to pursue