Ahrefs - Ahrefs' Weekly Digest #74

✍️ New on our blog

1. SMX München (March 16–17): online and in-person (Munich, Germany)
2. SEO Outreach Mastery Summit (March 7–13 and Sept. 5–11): online
3. brightonSEO (April 7–8, April 21–22): in-person (Brighton, U.K., April 7–8) and online (April 21–22)
4. Women in Tech SEO Festival (Feb. 25): in-person (London, U.K.) and online
5. DeepSEO Conference (Aug. 23–26): in-person (Ensenada, Mexico)
6. Traffic Think Tank Live (TBC)
7. SEO on the Beach (June 17–18): in-person (La Manga, Spain)

1. Identify your needs and match that with your current stack – Your needs will come from two things: your marketing goals and your team’s need to make everyday operational work happen. 
2. Establish a budget – Know what you can afford. If your budget is fixed and you really need a tool, try to explain the demand for it through your marketing goals.
3. Research possible software options – Get recommendations from your network, use tools like BuiltWith or StackShare to analyze the tools used by your competition, and check out review platforms like G2. 
4. Deploy the tools and make the transition 
5. Make sure your tools are used properly – New tools can be confusing, so set aside some time to learn how to use the tools. Many software companies offer comprehensive educational materials for free, so make sure to take advantage of them.

1. The 4 Ps of marketing
2. The marketing funnel
3. The different types of marketing

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – Visual load
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Visual stability
• First Input Delay (FID) – Interactivity

1. A page focused on a topic.
2. A “cluster” of pages covering related subtopics in more depth.
3. Internal linking between all of the pages.

1. Choose a topic (to build a cluster around) – Choose one that’s broad enough to generate subtopics (and not so specific that it focuses on just one concept).
2. Do topical keyword research with Wikipedia – Wikipedia is the ultimate topic cluster. Look at the internal links for your topic to find indications of subtopics.
3. Find more subtopics (if you don’t have enough) – Use MissingTopics to find topics missing from your content. Then, use them as seed keywords to find more topics in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. 
4. Put together a topic cluster plan – Group subtopics with similar intent together using Keywords Explorer. Paste the keywords you want to compare, go to Traffic share by page, look for pages ranking for multiple terms, and look at how much the SERPs overlap. 

1. Identify what you want to measure – If your analytics tool were a person, what questions would you like them to answer?
2. Assess your capabilities – Do you have access to quality data? Do you have the skill to extract and process the data?
3. Gather data using marketing analytics tools
4. Draw conclusions 

📹 New on YouTube

1. Get inspiration from your competitors’ most linked-to pages – Enter a competitor’s domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and go to the “Best by links” report. Look at what kind of topics and formats (e.g., data studies) perform well. 
2. Run Google ads for queries that are part of the “vicious cycle of SEO” – Find topics that journalists and bloggers tend to link to and run Google ads on them. Learn more about the strategy here. 
3. Guest posting 
4. Create linkbait data studies with strategic partners – Data studies tend to attract a lot of links. And even if you don’t have access to data, you can always reach out to partners to create one together. 
5. Use HARO – Sign up and answer queries from journalists and bloggers.

📚 What we’re reading

1. Understand the business – If you don’t spend time understanding the marketing, product, or development strategy or the metrics that the business cares about, then you will hit roadblocks.
2. Identify outcomes – Think of an outcome as a way to measure success based on positive user or customer behavior. It’s what you want customers to do to drive business results.
3. Identify opportunities – An opportunity is a pain point that, when addressed, will result in the desired outcome and can be found via technical and content audits, keyword research, etc.
4. Group opportunities into relevant initiatives – The writer, Adam, uses the Opportunity Solution Tree framework to visualize and then connect opportunities/solutions to SEO initiatives. 
5. Prioritize initiatives and opportunities – Adam then uses the ICE framework to prioritize. 
6. Goal-Signal-Metric Review – Before presenting the final roadmap, answer this question: How will you know you’ve solved the problem and achieved the business goal?
7. Present SEO strategy and roadmap