The New SEO Toolbar by Ahrefs (and How to Use it)

In December, 2017, Chrome launched an update, that broke Ahrefs' SEO toolbar.

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Well.

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its back – faster, stronger, and betterthan ever.

And in this video, I'm going to show you howto use Ahrefs' SEO toolbar for more effective content research, prospecting, and more.

Stay tuned.

[music] What's up SEOs, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, theSEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate yourniche.

Now, if you haven't used our toolbar, thefirst thing you're going to have to do is install it.

The toolbar is available as a Google Chromeextension and Firefox add-on.

So you can install it on whichever browseryou prefer.

Now, there are two main places where you canuse Ahrefs' Toolbar.

First is in the Google SERPs and second ison individual pages that you're browsing.

So let's go to Google and type in a searchquery.

Right away, you'll see an inline view of thekeyword metrics for your search query in your selected country.

And by default, you'll see the US search metrics, but you can change this by clicking on the gear icon, then click on the SERP overlaytab and select the country you would like keyword data from.

So if I choose Canada and click out of theoptions menu, you'll see the updated keyword metrics for the selected country.

Now, our toolbar is obviously integrated withour SEO tools, so all relevant reports are just one click away.

For example, if you want to get detailed searchmetrics for the keyword in question, you can click on the Ahrefs logo here, and it willopen up the query in Keywords Explorer where you can generate more keyword ideas usingthe various reports.

But you can go way beyond keyword metricsright here on the Google search results page.

If we scroll down, you can see the SEO metricsfor each individual page.

The left side shows data at the page level.

So you'll see the URL rating, which representsthe strength of the page's backlink profile, the total number of backlinks and referringdomains pointing at the page, its estimated monthly search traffic and the total numberof keywords that the page ranks for.

Now, it's important to note that the trafficmetric is based on the sum of all search traffic from all countries.

And the same goes for keywords.

Now, by analyzing search traffic and keywordsof the top 10 Google ranking pages, you should be able to instantly get an understandingof the full traffic potential of a topic.

So in this case, you can see that our searchquery, “bumps on skin” has an average monthly search volume of around 8, 000 in the US, but you'llsee that the top ranking pages get tens of thousands or even over a hundred thousandsearch visitors each month.

On top of that, they rank for tons of keywords.

Now, on the right side of the toolbar, youcan see the domain level metrics.

And these are really helpful to get an ideaof how the domain is performing overall.

For example, if we look at the search resultsfor a common guest post query like: “write for us” + “your topic”, then the domain levelmetrics become particularly helpful.

By scanning through these results, you caninstantly see which websites would be worthwhile to pitch without even clicking through tothe page.

Now, my recommendation is to look at the searchtraffic a domain receives as a whole and the domain rating also, which represents the strengthof a backlink profile of a target website.

And they'll often go hand-in-hand and makeprospecting much faster.

You can also customize the search metricsthat you see in the toolbar.

Just click on the gear icon, and in this case, if we wanted to see just the metrics for organic traffic and domain rating, we can just uncheckall of the other options here.

And you'll see that it's much cleaner andeasier to scan through.

The other place you'll see Ahrefs toolbaris when you're browsing through pages.

Now I can see this fitting into your workflowmore organically when you're using search engines that are not Google or Bing.

So let's say I'm reading through Reader'sDigest and I use the search function to look for hairstyles because I normally like theadvice they have on this topic.

Now, this one seems perfect for me, so I'llclick through to it.

And as you're reading through this page, youmight notice something interesting.

If you look at the toolbar, you'll see thatthis page gets over 40, 000 search visitors each month and ranks for nearly 32, 000 keywords.

And best of all, it looks like they only have22 referring domains linking to this page.

You can then click on the number to analyzethe backlinks report for this page.

And there are only 29 backlinks with nearly40, 000 search visitors, so it seems to be somewhat of a low to medium competition topic.

Or if you're wondering which keywords thepage ranks for, you could click on the number beside the keywords to open up the organic keywordsreport.

And you'll see that this page ranks at thetop for the keyword, “hairstyles, ” as well as a ton of other long tail variations.

You'll also discover that the keyword phrase, “hairstyles for women over 40” actually has 8300 monthly searches, which is news to me.

Other sites you may find interesting datafrom in your regular browsing are Amazon, Wikipedia, Medium, maybe Quora or any of yourother favorite blogs in your bookmarks.

Also, any links that you click from socialmedia networks will ensure that you don't miss out on potential opportunities that wouldnormally just pass you by.

So as you browse the web, pay attention tothe toolbar, and you may find some interesting topics.

So for example, you might find that some pageshave generated a ton of links organically, or that a topic ranks for thousands of keywords, despite having a low individual search volume.

Now, there may be times that you don't wantto see the toolbar on every page.

You can simply click on the icon in your extensionsbar, and it'll put Ahrefs toolbar in standby mode.

By changing to standby mode, no credits willbe used, but you'll still be able to see the domain rating for each website you browse, which you can see here.

This way, you'll always have a general ideaon the strength of a website's backlink profile and if you want to further investigate thepage or website, then you can just click on the icon again, to see all metrics.

Now, we want to continue to innovate and makethis toolbar awesome for you.

So make sure to leave a comment and let usknow how we can make this toolbar even better.

So keep grinding away, play around with theSEO toolbar, and I'll see you in the next video.

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