NEW Find target keywords with Ahrefs for local business SEO

[Justin Mosebach]

Our team is thrilled to announce that Ahrefs is a sponsor for LocalU April 2022!

If you do SEO, you probably already know how powerful Ahrefs is for finding backlink opportunities, doing technical SEO site audits, tracking rankings, and more.

But, have you tried using Ahrefs to do keyword research for local SEO?

Here’s an easy way to use Ahrefs for local keyword research:

1. Start with Keywords Explorer to get ideas.
2. Get page/post ideas using Site Explorer to see traffic volume for popular URLs on a competitor's site.

1. Start With Keywords Explorer​

This keyword research tool lets you search for a single keyword or group of keywords and tells you lots of information about it (in addition to avg monthly search volume).

For example, let’s say you’re a lawyer in Philadelphia and want content to write that will get clicks for your website from potential customers. Even if you start broadly with a keyword like “lawyer in philadelphia”, Ahrefs will surface helpful data points to answer questions like:

• How competitive is the search term? (see “Keyword Difficulty”)
• How much change happens in organic results on the SERP? (see “Position history”)
• What other keywords do the top-ranking pages rank for? (see “Also rank for”)
• What questions are searchers asking about this topic? (see “Questions”)
• How many overall monthly organic clicks does the top-ranking page get? (see “Traffic”)

Note that if you entered more than one keyword, you’ll have to click on a specific keyword to see the following. And if you’re not an Ahrefs subscriber, they have a slimmed-down free keyword generator tool.

(Ahrefs Keywords Explorer)

Free Version:

(Ahrefs' free Keyword Generator tool)

2. See what pages a competitor gets traffic from by using Site Explorer.​

You can also narrow down to a specific competitor's site to see what pages/blog posts they have that are getting traffic.

To do so, click on “Site Explorer” in the header, enter the URL or domain, and hit enter.

Tip: Make sure the drop-down menu next to the URL is not set to “URL” (“Exact URL”). Choose one of these 3:

On the left-hand menu, under “Organic search”, click on “Top pages”.

A competitor's website is getting traffic for these pages. Consider creating similar pages/posts.

Thanks again to Ahrefs for sponsoring April 2022's LocalU virtual conference!

 

[Conor Treacy]

This is my go-to tool for pretty much everything these days. I canceled and removed subscriptions to some of the other software that we were using as ahrefs does so much.

Between ScreamingFrog, ahrefs and BrightLocal - there are no other paid tools I need for Organic SEO

Congrats on them being a Sponsor. Awesome news!

 

[Learning2Day]

I love Ahrefs, only tool I use. Since every niche has different ranking factors.
Ahrefs makes same niche company side by side comparisons that allow for learning that would not otherwise be possible.
From top ranking company in my niche. I learned the value of City pages they are copies of my home page with city names changed.
They work amazingly well and responsible for 20% of my new client acquisitions.