How to use Ahrefs' six core tools to grow organic traffic

Executive overview

Most SEO work falls into three areas: finding opportunities, building links, and tracking results. Ahrefs provides six tools that cover each stage end to end.

The fastest path to SEO wins is competitive intelligence: find what's already working for rivals and replicate it.

Restoring lost link equity with Site Explorer

• Enter your domain and open the Best By Links report
• Filter HTTP code to 404 to surface broken pages with backlinks
• Redirect broken URLs to relevant live pages to reclaim referring domains
• Find featured snippet gaps: filter Organic Keywords to positions 1–10, then add a SERP features filter where "target doesn't rank" for the featured snippet

Reverse-engineering competitor traffic with Site Explorer

• Run a competitor domain through Site Explorer to see total organic visits and page count
• Use the Site Structure report to identify which subfolders drive traffic
• Click through to the Top Pages report for any subfolder to see exact topics worth replicating
• Check the Keywords dropdown on any page to see the full keyword set it ranks for

Finding link building opportunities with Site Explorer

• At domain level: filter a competitor's backlinks by URL footprints (e.g. resources.html, links.php) to surface resource page opportunities
• Find listicle roundups by filtering referring page titles for words like "best", "email", "tool"
• At page level: use the Anchors report to see which specific stats or claims attract links
• Identify outdated stats on competitor pages, then pitch link replacements to sites citing old data
• Broken link building: find 404 pages on competitor sites via Best By Links, create your own page on that topic, then outreach to existing linkers

Keyword research with Keywords Explorer

• Enter broad seed keywords and open the Matching Terms report
• Filter by intent modifiers: include "how, what, why, tutorial" for informational; "best, versus, review" for commercial
• Set a keyword difficulty max (e.g. 10) to find low-competition terms
• Use the Lowest DR filter (e.g. DR ≤ 30) to find keywords where non-authoritative sites rank in the top 5
• Paste up to 10,000 keywords at once to bulk-analyze a custom list
• Use Traffic Share by Domains on your keyword list to see competitors' share of voice and spot gaps

Technical SEO with Site Audit

• Create a project, run a crawl, then work through the All Issues report: fix red errors first, then yellow warnings, then blue notices
• Use Page Explorer with advanced filters to find bespoke issues (e.g. pages linking to a specific affiliate domain that also receive ≥1,000 monthly visits)
• Use the Internal Link Opportunities tool to find pages that mention a target page's ranking keyword — filter by target URL to get a focused list of pages to add internal links from

Rank tracking with Rank Tracker

• Add keywords to a project with country/city/postal-code targeting
• Use tags to segment keywords by page type, category, or author for cleaner reporting
• The Overview report shows share of voice, average position, traffic, and SERP features over time — filterable by tag
• Competitors Overview tracks competitor rankings for your same keyword set automatically
• Competitors Traffic Share (Domains tab) reveals sites outranking you for tracked keywords — useful for identifying new competitors to monitor in Site Explorer

Content discovery with Content Explorer

• Search a broad topic, then combine filters: low referring domains, high page traffic, minimum word count to find low-competition, high-traffic content ideas
• Use DR range + minimum site traffic + minimum word count to identify guest posting targets
• The Use Cases tab on the Content Explorer homepage provides pre-built search templates for common workflows

Prospecting at scale with Web Explorer

• Web Explorer indexes ~500 billion pages (36x larger than Content Explorer)
• Find unlinked brand mentions: search [brand] -site:[domain].com -outlink domain:[domain].com
• Find affiliate content or acquisition targets: search a niche topic combined with outlink domain:amazon.com to surface pages linking to affiliate URLs
• Use the Examples tab on the Web Explorer homepage to load pre-built queries with filters applied