Ahrefs is a suite of SEO tools that are widely used by digital marketers to enhance SEO efforts. However, there are many lesser-known features and use cases of Ahrefs that can be of great help to SEO professionals. One such use case is to browse the most popular search queries in each country by running an empty search in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. This gives access to over 19.2 billion keywords across 200+ countries and regions. Another use case is to find out if multiple keywords can be targeted with one page by checking if Google ranks similar search results for them. The SERP comparison tool under the SERP overview is an easy way to do this.

SEO professionals can monitor the pace at which their competitors release content by using the Top pages report in Site Explorer. The report filters for newly created pages and compares the current output of pages with that of, say, three months ago. This can be used as an argument to ask for a budget raise and build a larger content team. Similarly, link builders can filter out low-quality backlinks by website traffic (and vice versa) by filtering the backlinks by domain traffic. This weeds out links from low-quality websites and gives a manageable list of websites to reach out to.

SEO professionals can also use Ahrefs to find potential podcasts to be interviewed on. By entering the Twitter URL of a regular podcast guest in their industry in Site Explorer and filtering for referring page titles that contain words like “episode” or “podcast,” they can find over hundreds of podcasts to pitch themselves to. Another use case for Ahrefs is to get internal linking suggestions on autopilot using Ahrefs’ Site Audit. By running a site crawl, the Internal link opportunities report can identify internal link opportunities by taking the top 10 keywords for ranking pages and finding mentions of them on other pages.

Ahrefs’ tools can also be used to find local citation opportunities. To do this, SEO professionals can use the Link Intersect report in Site Explorer and paste their competitors’ websites in the top section and theirs at the bottom. This will show all the websites that link to competitors’ URLs but not to theirs, and usually, the more targets the referring domains are linking to, the more likely it’s a business directory. Similarly, SEO professionals can use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer to find missed keyword opportunities. Missed keyword opportunities are those keywords where competitors rank for, but they don’t. To close this content gap, SEO professionals can find relevant pages that get lots of organic traffic and are easy to rank for, and dig further into the keywords driving the organic traffic to get guidance on both on-page and video optimizations.