Content marketing use cases

Here are some actionable content marketing use cases for Content Explorer.

Find low competition topics with high traffic potential

If a page that targets a topic has little backlinks yet still gets lots of search traffic, then that is a low-hanging content opportunity.

To find such topics, search for a broad topic and filter for pages with few or no referring domains that also get a good amount of monthly organic traffic.

Such pages often revolve around uncompetitive topics, like “best backpacking trails in Colorado”.

From here, you can see which keywords each page ranks for. Just click on Paid traffic, which will open the Organic keywords tab.

Find guest blogging opportunities

Search for niche relevant websites to pitch a guest contribution.

To find them, start from a broad topic and add the following filters:

1. DR: 30-70 (weeds out high-DR news sites and low-DR sites that won’t bring exposure)

2. Website traffic: min. 3000 (shows websites with a decent amount of monthly organic traffic)

3. Word count: min. 500 (to find actual blog posts)

4. One page per domain (to prevent pitching the same website multiple times)

5. Exclude homepages

Next, go to the Website tab and sort by the Authors column. The more authors a website has, the higher the probability that they accept guest blogging opportunities.

You now have a list of websites that have covered this topic before and might be open to accepting a guest post on a similar topic.

Find YouTube topics that generate traffic from Google

Get more views for your videos and improve their rankings on Google by targeting topics with video intent.

To find such topics, paste the following query: site:youtube.com inurl:watch title:[your topic]

Then sort pages by Page traffic to find video topics with high traffic potential.

TIP

Watch this video to learn how to create YouTube videos that rank on Google:

See your brand’s popularity over time

To monitor how frequently your brand has been mentioned in the media lately, type in your brand and exclude mentions from your own website using the operator -site:[own website]. Then hit the News tab.

And as you notice, there’s been a steady rise in pages talking about our brand in the beginning of 2023.

NOTE

You can use this strategy to analyze your competitor’s “popularity spikes” and reverse-engineer their PR and link building campaigns.

Monitor your competitor’s publishing frequency

Keep an eye on your competitors’ publishing frequency so you don’t get outpaced.

To do so, type in site:[competitor website] and check the Pages over time chart.

For Ahrefs.com, we publish around 30–50 posts per month. You can also see we don’t just publish new posts—we strive as much as possible to keep our content up to date.

To see republished pages, filter for republished pages only.

Update old pages with low traffic

Republish relevant pages with low traffic to increase their rankings.

To find them, we’ll take Ahrefs blog as an example and search for pages that have only been published once, which are older than 12 months and which get up to 50 search visits a month.

Then manually go through the pages and see if it’s worth updating them.