This course is designed as an introduction to the popular digital marketing tool Ahrefs.  Learning how to use this service can empower digital marketers to run better and more efficient marketing campaigns.  The course shows both the instructor and an over-the-shoulder view of the Ahrefs user interface.

For example, the service can be used to view a significant amount of your own and your competitors' backlinks.  A backlink is a link from one website to a target website, and remains one of the most important ranking factors for Google.  By understanding the links going toward your competitors, you can attempt to gain similar links so that your own website increases its odds of moving up in the rankings.  Students also learn how to comprehensively analyze these backlinks such as by assessing their quality, anchor text, and other important attributes.  These and other metrics can show you how helpful particular pieces of content (such as blog posts or videos) are for competitors' business.

Students also learn how to view the most viral content in a given time frame.  This is an important source of inspiration for content marketers and bloggers researching new content ideas.

Students learn how to do keyword research with the program.  This is key to finding content opportunities that are both valuable to the website (in terms of search volume and how much the term costs to buy ads for) and not too difficult to rank.  Students will learn how to view the keywords that their competition ranks for naturally in the search engines.  Students can also learn how valuable the market believes those keywords are by seeing estimated cost per click information.  Additionally, traffic metrics are included as well.

Students further learn how to use Ahrefs to analyze the paid search ads their competitors are buying.  This information can inspire students to run similar paid search campaigns.  Students with similar competing products and businesses that run similar ads on similar keywords may therefore hope to achieve similar results.  This is particularly useful when a new entrant to an industry competes against a large business with millions of dollars to experiment with various marketing strategies.  However, competitors of all sizes can provide enormously valuable information.

By figuring out the blueprints to the competitions' marketing success, students can attempt to compete on a more level playing field. A courtesy review copy was provided.