Powerful ways Ahrefs can help you win more in Search and AI (November)

Hello. Hello. We have some early participants today. Those that have come in early, you can say hi in a chat as well as share where you guys are dialing in from some early participants today. We will go ahead and get some stuff quickly set up for our today's webinar on powerful ways HFS can help you win more in search and AI. Especially helpful for if you are new to HFS and would like a quick overview with what on earth you can do on this platform considering there are so many tools and different uh options and different reports and filters and things like that. Okay. Hello uh Orin Karen Chris. Yeah. We'll let people start to slowly file in here. So, we'll start in a couple minutes. If anyone has any quick questions, uh you can share them now while I get started. That's also okay. I think usually for our um webinars for uh so this particular webinar is for people who are new to HFS uh but we also cover some of the new uh products that we have launched recently. So you can ask questions about that as well. Especially for those who have used HS before and just coming back. It's also a good overview of what has what is there and what has been changed. If you have come in from like maybe two or three years ago, I think a lot of things have changed because we push out new features and new updates pretty much every week. Small ones and big ones. Yep, we have quite a number of people joining in now. Welcome, welcome. I will go ahead and share my screen. So people uh in the in the webinar room, can you see my presentation today? Hopefully you can. Awesome. Thank you so much. Okay. Uh, Marcel has raised his hand. We're gonna start the presentation, but you can quickly ask the question, Marcel. We will not be bringing people on stage uh until after the main presentation though. I hope that's okay. Marcel, you can go ahead and ask your question in the chat. Oh, okay. I guess no question. Uh, then without further ado, we will go ahead. We will go ahead with the main presentation here. So, welcome everyone to today's HRS webinar. I am your host Constance and today our webinar is about the powerful ways HRFS can help you win more in search and AI. So how today's webinar will work is that I'll be first sharing the main presentation first half. Uh we have quite a bit of material to go through. Uh so I will primarily answer questions at the very end and um where we will open the floor for Q&A. So if you have a question just so that I don't miss it, there is a Q&A function in your Zoom [snorts] uh which should you'll be able to see uh in in the toolbar in the Zoom toolbar. There should be uh Q&A. It it most likely is under more if you don't see it immediately. So you can ask your questions there as we go along and I'll help to answer um as many as I can at the end of today's webinar. Uh and if you share your question in chat note that I may miss it. So best is to use this function. Uh and for anyone else if you see a question there that you would also like to get answered. Uh please upvote it and we will prioritize the most upvoted questions first. Any other questions that we don't cover at the end of today's onehour webinar um I will share together with today's deck uh to all the people participants uh after the webinar ends in a couple days usually one or two days after today's webinar. Uh this webinar is also being live streamed on YouTube. So this YouTube is where you'll be able to find a replay. So very common question when people ask like can they get a copy of the replay of the video. All replays of our webinars are available on our YouTube channel uh at HRFS tutorials. Again you will also get a link to this replay uh sent to you in a couple days in a follow-up email. Okay. So without further ado, let's begin today's presentation. So, you have created an account on hrefs. What's next? What you see in front of you can be kind of overwhelming. It's a place to create projects. I don't know what projects is. There's so many tools in the top of the toolbar. There's so many things on the side here. I just want to focus on what I can do to start improving my geo and SEO or in this case AI search optimization. So what does all these tools have to do with what I'm trying to do? Where do I start? So we do have a lot of different uh tools and um products on our platform. Uh but you can but most of the efforts that go towards go and SEO can be sort of summarized into three categories, right? The first is to understand what customers are searching for and what do they see when they search for something. Uh the second is what's working for my competitors. You can see how they're getting their traffic or what they're ranking for and or maybe what who they are competing with. And the third is which third parties could talk about me or my brand. So in the day and age of AI search uh me branded mentions so just mentions about your products are incredibly important. one of the strongest factor correlated to getting more visibility in AI search in generated answers. So being able with other people talk to you especi um talk about you especially um third parties with like some authority either in your niche or in general and that is really important. It's also important to understand like the surrounding context of how they talk about you. Is it positive? What is it about? Do they associate you with certain concepts? Right? So all of these um efforts in gio are basically in these kind of three buckets. So we can organize um all of these um efforts all of our tools into these buckets accordingly where you can see for example what people are searching for in keywords explore and brand radar. um what's working for my competitors is is the tool site explorer competitor analysis AI content helper that helps you benchmark against other competitors in the SER um third parties that could talk about my brand our uh tool content explorer where you can search through basically every page that we have ever crawled um in in our index and you can see like what is being mentioned, who is being mentioned as well as linked And then there is a fourth category which is how's my own website or brand doing and that we have the tools site audit which um helps you audit your website for technical SEO uh issues. It's also capable for like quite a number of other things but we won't cover that today. We don't have time. uh web analytics, our free um website uh analytics clicks analytics tool uh as well as rank tracker and uh Google search console is technically like Google's product but you can actually view that data on our platform and we'll give you like more information about how you can do that and why it may be advantageous to you to do so within HFS. So we'll cover that in a little bit. Okay, so let's dig in. So the first section is of course about what are people searching for and what do they see. So let's if you are following along and you're logged into your HFS we're currently at the dashboard. So the first section is reing um dealing with the certain features that are available in keywords explorer. Okay. So if you want to know where to find keywords explorer, it may be under here or it can be saved on your toolbar. Uh but you can click on all tools and it will be under content marketing here. So click on keywords explorer. So you'll be greeted with this page. What you can do is you can for example I'm going to filter for United States. Uh you can actually start off by doing an empty search. You don't have to enter anything here. So what that tells you actually for the country you've selected you can see the top keywords that are being searched in uh United States which is pretty cool that that helps you like I can do things like filter for uh keywords that are growing. So like within like 0.1 or like 1 to five for example, they're slowly growing in uh over 3 months. I can do things like um first scene. So first scene is kind of useful for seeing uh Whoops. First scene. Oops. Let's clear this. Show results. Now I can interesting. Okay. But the first scene filter you can use it to filter for keywords that were seen like uh at least a few days ago or up to a month ago. We show you here like when the keyword was updated as well as first seen. So like any keyword that is only seen the first time, the very first time like a month ago is more likely for like recent um topics like for example the hurricane miss that hit Jamaica that was like the strongest hurricane in the last like since the 1900 uh 19 late 1900s. So that's something you can do with the filters here. All of our reports will have helpful filters at the top. It's one of the most important things uh most powerful things about HRES. So you can go take your time to go through them and if you don't know or you don't understand something um you can hover over and usually there's a there's something here to explain or here you can hover over the topics here to and there'll be an explanation about what they mean as well as usually a a link you can click on to learn more that brings you out to like our glossery page or our help articles page. Okay, for example, uh one of the powerful things that we have on our platform is user intents. So um we have in like analyzed the SERs of all the keywords in a database which is like in the billions and we we can see if a keyword most likely has um intent that refers to for example informational and that is about uh users that are looking to learn about something understand something versus transactional which is that when people search a keyword they're actually looking to already make a purchase. So these are different intents when people search for particular keywords and you can filter for them. So let's say I want to filter for traditional and commercial. Commercial is more on the level of like the one step before buying where you want to like compare two brands or two products. We usually put that in that category. Okay. So I can filter for these intents here for example. And you'll notice that when you filter, you still get the other intents. What this filter mainly does is to filter for keywords that definitely include at least C or T, commercial transactional. Okay? Because sometimes, for example, a keyword like Zillow can have multiple intents, right? So if you read it there are you may get the homepage that'sformational but people are looking for um or or for example they're looking to download the app here but or or learn about the company via Wikipedia but you also see information about people that are trying to uh compare different uh platforms I believe for for buying or renting houses. So you can see that multiple search intents are are available in the SER. And if you have I believe standard or higher plan, you can also use this identify intents uh feature which aside from using these like simple categories can analyze search intents in a more uh nuanced way. So a we we're basically with this feature we're asking AI to sort the results in the the search results into like search intent categories like people are looking wanting to access the homepage mainly when they search for this keyword but also they're looking for their social media platforms that's why that is ranking in the serves and and a very small percentage of people are looking for other things like finding their local store or finding a local video content. Okay, so this is a useful feature also for you to understand search intent. Search intent is important to understand because it like we have to in order to succeed in ranking for particular keywords in top results, we must know what uh pages users seem to prefer to click on or um that seem to rank higher. The closer you match the search intent of what the user is looking for when they search for a keyword, the better your chances are at ranking and as well as getting clicks generally. Okay, so that is the search intent uh filter that we have here. You'll notice also like we have filters for brand like whether keywords brand and non branded or local and non-local and these are things you can definitely explore on your own time. grouping keywords into topic clusters for smarter planning. So for that I would like a suggestion from the audience. Audience can you please share with me uh topics you like to see uh grouped. So maybe a topic that is u relevant to your business or something that you like to search for in keywords explorer. You please share that in the chat please. I'll pick one or two examples to show off the groups uh keywords feature here. Fastest fingers first. I'm going to pick Joseph's if no one else suggests anything. Okay, let's start with Joseph's uh suggestion. Some of you guys are Yeah, that's another interesting one. So, we'll do building materials and sim cards. But first, we'll do building materials. building materials. Okay. So, when I do a search for just one keyword, uh I only get information about this particular keyword here like its search volume, its traffic potential uh and keyword ideas. But if I want to see keywords related to building materials, I can use the the main reports that you'll be using here is matching terms, related terms, and search suggestions. Basically, from your one or up to 10,000 keywords that you enter into the search bar at once, you can find additional keywords in our database that we find has some significant search volume per month that you can also potentially target based on what you're searching on. Right? So here we see that matching terms are keywords that in our database have at least the word building or materials or the or both building materials as a phrase in uh so we uh in our database. So we have like 17,600 for United States here. Let's cluster by parent topic. What is parent topic? parent topic is the keyword that sends the most traffic to the top results for the keyword that you're looking for for the for the topic that um yeah so so for example in building materials let's just go back very quickly here now I just want to see building materials right the parent topic in this case I think is also building materials so it's the top result and it's uh building material store. This is the parent topic, right? It's the it's the keyword that is sending the most traffic to the number one result. So you see in this case, this is the parent topic here, building material store. So you notice that for there's a number of keywords that are um here together that clustered together. So what this means is that since this is the keyword that is sending the most traffic as opposed to like just being searched, this is the keyword is sending the most traffic to the number one result. We see that this is true for a number of other keywords here where the same u same few results are basically ranking at the very top. They will all be for for one particular keyword. So like what how you should understand this is that if I focus my efforts into ranking for this parent topic building material store I would also get a chance a higher chance of ranking for all these other keywords. Okay, in the same cluster. So that's how it works. That's for pan topic. Now, if you want to that's it's not the same as like other clustering tools where you're trying to find like a topic pillar to to write content around. If you want to do something like that, it is better to cluster by terms. Okay. So then you can see that for example let's look at um I need to filter some of these because there are a lot of terms here. So let's pick something like supplier maybe. Here you see that there are many terms under supplier. So then you have keywords are clustered based on whether or not they contain this term. So building materials near me um supplier for in particular areas. So these are all like different different locations around. So this is a very local keyword. This is in of itself like a program programmatic SEO uh idea where you can say okay let me just create pages for example if you want to rank for this keyword uh for different locations in the United States okay where they all have all this like minimum search volume so that's like two ways that you can cluster here at HFS and you'll notice that they cluster pretty fast compared their other tools so that's something that we're definitely proud of so that's how you can use this clustering tool Okay, hope that was helpful. We move on. Again, if you have any questions, use the Q&A function. We will then answer them at the end. Uh, okay. So, we covered things like that some cool features that you can do in Keywords Explorer to understand what people are searching for. Let's now look at what do they see. Okay. Um, we definitely have to talk about brand radar. even though you do like for your current subscription, it's likely you don't have access to uh the AI modes just yet, unless you guys have already bought it. But let's say you you've not bought it uh the the add-on. There are things you can actually check out in Brand Radar right now that are that may be useful to you. So, for example, I think someone um earlier mentioned SIM cards, right? Let's look at the SIM cards niche here at Brand Radar. Okay. Um, so you may not have access to AI visibility like these may all be locked for you, but you can actually use AI brand radar to look at search demand. And so what this is useful for doing is to see trends over time like how many queries search queries related to SIM cards have been trending over time. Overall looks like it's going down. Uh you can also see search volume. So uh like this will multiply the queries based on the uh search volume that each of the queries related to SIM cards have. And over time that seems to be relatively stable. That makes sense, right? So, if we want to see all the search queries in detail, we can do that, right? We can see all these uh search queries related to SIM cards. Again, you can do filters that are quite similar to uh keywords explorer, but I can filter for things like does the do which keywords show AI overviews here? So these are the keywords where AI overview shows up in the SER results and that for you that could be important. Let's go back really quickly here to search queries or overview. So but otherwise I think for other people as well that have standard or higher plan you can also see web visibility key like websites that mention SIM cards. You can see that like there was a like an increase from basically 2019 2020 onwards. There was like quite spikes in here of like pages that are new that started to mention SIM cards and then that has waned a bit in the in the recent days. You can also see as a cumulative thing right to see the overall trend. You can also view this as information um based on like what pages are gaining organic traffic. So maybe there could be pages that are being created but it's not getting traffic but it's not true in this case. Yeah, I think overall pages are about sim cards are generally getting some traffic at least. Uh Sean Phillip wants to put in pet products. We can do that with pet products as well. Explore I think pages related to pet products surged uh again around this area and then in the recent um years not as much. So this is like reviewing the data on a month-to-month basis in terms of like new pages being created that mention uh pet products. So, these are ways to use brand radar that don't require you to uh purchase the AI add-ons. It can be quite useful to understand like generally how the niche is growing or whether um it's slowing, whether it's getting traffic or not. I think overall not that much traffic unfortunately uh at least the new pages there's more pages being created than they are pages getting traffic in this category that's what we can understand this I'll quickly demo uh one of the demos for brand radar here so if you click any of these here you can actually use brand radar for these search queries without purchase purchasing any of the AI visibility tools. So, this is useful to basically get an overview of like what actually you can do in brand radar if you bought the add-on. Okay. So, you get information about like every brand. You can uh see all the AI responses filtered based on like the topics being mentioned where the brand is being mentioned and you can see them side by side of other brands as well. Uh you can see the differences between different platforms. Oops. Let's go back. You can see here like AI overviews versus AI mode. There are differences in the ways that brands are being mentioned. Some queries mention all the brands. Some mentions some some queries only mention other brands. So let's for example we can click on this to see uh responses that mention only BYD Riviera Lucid at le one at least once uh one of those but not Tesla right so by clicking that you can auto filter out like it should it should only filter out others Wait, it should not. So let's say I want to see like if I am Tesla, I want to see queries that does not contain Tesla but contains my competitors. So this is chat GBT but obviously you can select other things as well. And then of course this is for worldwide but if I want to filter for for like a different country you can. So you can see here on the side it shows you the the country. So because we're on a demo you can see like by clicking the demo you can access all these features specifically for these search queries. you don't have to like uh to to get an idea of like what brand radar can do. So you can see for example which electric car is the best is showing uh different different brands here and how they answer they answer it's a table and and they share links with images and things like that lots of links actually okay so it's important to know because this is the context in which people are learning about different brands different car models these are the questions that they're asking about pricing ing about how what is the cost of a car when it's bought new when it's bought used and you can see what AI all the cited sources AI is taking in order to generate these responses. So this is this is core in understanding like um what people are experiencing when they ask these questions into uh AI or um AI overviews or AI mode. Okay. So in summary, what to do with these insights, the first is to that this information should help you plan your content strategy. What kind of pages should you create? How should they help people? How would they u be better than my um or rather um how will it serve what people are searching for? How would they serve it well? Um what contents they need to um be in? Should they be a listical? Should they be a free tool? Should it be a like a detailed analysis write up? Or should it be a video? And you can also see different keywords within your um topic vertical that you can target in order to build a topical authority. rather than writing about lots of things, you can focus on specific areas to um build a more authoritative uh stance um that is associated with your website or your brand. And then of course the last is if you want to go into new markets or new products uh or test new product ideas, you can first check is there search demand for it first? uh or if there is um who are the like uh already dominant players in search results for this new market or new product. Okay, so let's move on to the next section. So what's working for my competitors? Okay, um the main tool to analyze this of course is site explorer. It's the main one I think most people would have started using by now. So let's go ahead if you follow along to site explorer D I have it over here but again if you cannot find it it should be under competitive intelligence here and so you can go ahead and put in your website uh let's get some suggestions from the audience again people like to volunteer their website for uh for analysis inside the explorer Uh if your website doesn't really have organic traffic yet, um I um I'm looking for websites that have some sort of organic traffic already because otherwise you're not going to see much um information. Okay. Uh Joseph is fastest fingers again sharing his website. I'm going to start with his if there are no other suggestions. Okay. We'll start with yours, Joseph. Uh, ba plaza.hu. Sorry. B Plaza Hungarian website. Okay. Marcel, you need to share your website URL, not uh your brand. So, I'm looking for website. So, in this case, there is some uh organic traffic here. Seems to have recently dipped. So, here's a quick hack. Um, if you are on the overview of your website or any website including your competitors, you can see that here I can see that there were some quite a number of changes that were applied recently as traffic went down to try and save the traffic with a hopeful uptick in the most recent days. Huh. So you can see this also with uh other uh websites to see that like are people making changes to their website uh and and like if this goes back up so like organic um traffic is increased you can actually click to see more because usually uh changes on the website correlate very well with uh changes uh to traffic like if it's like instant changes it's a um it's a most likely culprit not guaranteed, of course. And if you don't see these bubbles, make sure that you use this menu here and click content changes. Okay. So, when I look at my competitors and I want to see what exactly they're doing, uh I find that it's very useful to view like a sideby-side page. So, hrefs when we have a crawler and we crawl and index pages around the web, we basically save um versions of web pages of across the world just like Google does and we can show you like if we are able to crawl that website or that page we can see what changes were made side by side. So between 10th and 11th September these were the changes that were made to the website. They were added basically a bunch of different links. Okay. Uh yeah. Wow. Okay. Lots of different links were added here. A lot of different content was added to this page. Um we can see that that it in in of itself did not impact uh traffic. Uh and sorry I don't know Hungarian so I actually can't tell you what's going on on this page. Like for example, I can see that like adding this content has basically changed uh how Google has understood your website. Compare with let's say I want to compare two things. So I want to compare uh November 5th with Can I move this along? Nope. November 5th compared with uh November I think earlier in the year there was some attempt. So here changes were being made. So so now I can see other changes. So I can pick any two points in history basically to see what was removed and what was added. Right. So here in the navigation, I think they're trying to add more um different pages to give more context to uh both users that visit the website as well as uh most likely AI engines or search engines to [clears throat] understand what this business or this page is all about. Yeah, I can see very easily the sideby-side differences here that were made to a particular website. Right? So uh this is how you can find things that are useful for changes especially if you see um if there's an increase in traffic you can look for a particular page. So this is analyzing obviously a particular page. So you can use this to see okay what did they change and then if there's a drop in traffic you can also see if it's if there was recently like a overhaul change made to the website you can check to see okay maybe they made a mistake and you can go in to see uh what changes they made and try to avoid making the same mistakes. This is also good for yourself if you find uh and you want to audit any uh changes that were made recently. Suddenly there's a drop in a particular category, a particular page. This is the way to look into it at least for on page uh problems. Okay. Uh we can go cover a different page here uh a different website here for example. Okay. You can again like these bubbles are very uh helpful in understanding where changes may have been like when a person has made changes to the website and how that could have influenced um how they perform an organic search. So maybe I'll pick this one for example. not guaranteed, but uh most of the time information like this uh that's what's happening on page helps us understand whether or not they're doing a better job in ranking for uh in organic or getting traffic from organic search. You can see side by side how the changes have been made from things like uh mentioning destination. So they basically hid it behind uh uh uh rather than just putting links to particular destinations, they just hid it underneath like one uh one category. Oh, actually I think there was a problem. So sometimes this does happen. I think the website showed something differently instead based on um like they responded specifically to how our crawler visited the website. So maybe it's not a very good example. Um I'll try to pick something from hres.com. So yeah, our traffic is pretty stable, but uh I think there was a point here where we did a overall change to our um landing page where we we went through in the last uh year or so some rebranding where we talked we added in more information about the AI visibility uh features that we currently provide. Yep. So, you can see Oh, like the language is different. Whoops. Let's do these two instead. Or like this one. One second. Uh I want to do I want to compare the order place in time. So like this. This one we do eight. So for examp I don't know why but the wrong language is being shown. Okay there you go. So now they're both in English. You can see specific changes to the copy was made. adding of new tools. Before we didn't have uh tools for local SEO, now we do. Uh we added more use cases around like um paid search, brand marketing, and we changed the copy. But this is like a really cool way to see side by side what are the changes that your competitors are making over time to not just about like to rank high better in search, but also to to work in rebranding, right? So this is how you can see side by side the changes that are being made. It's pretty cool, right? And so these are the things you can take into account uh when you uh work on your own content strategy. So that's for uh comparing the changes over time. The other tool that you can there are many many other like reports here. Um I will go through a few more examples in a bit but first we will cover uh another tool here which is a competitive analysis. So this so um I think someone shared they want to they want to analyze lego.com. We can analyze lego.com lego.com massive brand massive website. Um, if I want to, I can analyze this website against its competitors. So, um, a quick way to access this is I go into the opportunities report here for any website. There's actually a number of like quick access um, filtered websites that you can uh, filters that you can use to check things like lowhanging fruit keywords. Uh, I want to look at lego.com's like keywords that are ranking for AI overviews and feature snippets and stuff like that. The one that I'm referring to is competitive analysis tool. I want to see what keywords that Lego.com's competitors rank for that Lego does not. So, I can click here. So, you'll load the top 10 competitors to Lego.com. This will take a bit of time because uh it's trying to synthesize a lot of information. But uh after it's done, you can see side by side all the 10 competitors that we find at least in the organic traffic space here. Most of the time it's relevant to Lego like to the main websites industry. Sometimes it's websites that compete like in organic search but are not necessarily direct business competitors. But ultimately, if they're ranking in places in keywords that you're supposed to be ranking, they're can they can still be considered a competitor to you. Marcel, I answer your question after I finish the segment on competitor analysis. So, you can see here these are the keywords that other uh competitors rank for, but you do not, right? Which is uh quite interesting because some of these keywords are branded with Lego in it, right? Uh but Lego.com is not ranked for these keywords. So it's quite interesting like Lego hell divers huh they don't rank for it at least not in United States. Okay. So uh and if I want so some of these for example uh are branded keywords of my competitors like brick owl. You see like brick owl here brick owl here. So these keywords lego.com is unlikely to want to rank for them. So what can they do in this report? I can filter it so that at least two competitors I can do more in this case but here I want to do at least two competitors because it's unlikely that multiple my competitors rank for the same branded keywords and I can apply it also means that I'm filtering for keywords that if multiple competitors rank for that I do not they are likely important in my industry that are better opportunities for me to target. So there you go. Actually, not really that filtered. So I guess lots of competitors also rank for breakout owl. Uh but I can filter this and they have like pretty low competitive uh keyword difficulty which is also great. So let's say I want to f at least like in this case four competitors. Let's just try and see if it works. a lot of like branded and product uh keywords here that are related to other competitors that are not particularly um so okay so now we have information about like Lego Spongebob sets um Lego uh Atlantis minifigures so like these are more where competitors are ranking for them these are basically product opport like category opportunities that Lego can get into uh that their search that other competitors are ranking for. I mean these are just like areas to say that um that competitors are covering that um you are not or Lego is not covering and you can compare that with the search volume too like is this worth targeting? Is this worth um building content or creating a product around uh how many people are searching? Is it worth my is it worth my time to go after all these keywords? Okay, so that's how you can go about doing a competitive analysis using the content gap tool. Link intercept is similar where you look at links that your competitors backlinks that your competitors have that you do not. So in this case, these are all the back links that the 10 competitors to lego.com have uh that Lego does not. And they're um all related to these. In this case, I think these are actually spammy keep uh spammy links here. Can they be filtered? Say I want to only see uh referring pages. They can't be filtered. I actually have to report this to our team to find a way to filter out the spammy. Like let's say I want to look at um domains domain rating of at least like 40. LEGO's a big brand. So this is something you can definitely do. Or I want to say the domain traffic needs to have at least uh 1,000 per month. Okay. So it should not be a website that is like a like a fake website that has that doesn't rank organically at all. Now I have a pretty um cleaned up list of different different um referring domains that I can check into to see whether or not they'll be worth getting backlinks from. I can even uh open this up to see how my competitor exactly the referring page that my competitor is getting from reeftoree.com. All right. Side by side following. So far everyone everyone is okay. So it's uh I think it looks to be I can even like open this thread. This seems to be a user generated. Yeah. Okay. So, it's a user generated um like a forum page basically where they talk about um different setups and uh it's likely that they even mentioned some particular build that they created here. So, that's a backlink from a forum like this. So, it's user generated content that is backlinking to a competitor brand, right? So is this something that you can encourage or you can monitor for um in in um in how your competitors are competitors are working on. So that's like opportunities that you can look into how competitors are getting back links that you can maybe see if it's something that you can try as well the same strategy. Okay, that is so that is a quick quick quick overview of the competitive analysis tool. Okay, Marcel asked, "How often is the paid traffic information updated? How accurate is the information provided?" I'll explain how we get paid traffic information and um I'll show you. So, let's say I think LEGO runs paid ads. I think they run paid ads. Do they run paid ads? Let's see. So when we take the keywords in our database and we search them across the world, sometimes paid ads show up. I think LEGO does run. Yeah. Okay. So they do pay for ads. Uh so when paid ads show up in the SER, we record it. So in this case, for example, they're running ads on gift ideas for women or they were running ideas for um gift ideas for women. So you can see here in the shopping ads that you can see all the way somewhere along or top ads I think is Okay. Or there are bottom ads. One second. It is a bottom ad. Okay. Bottom ad. So I think it's here. Basically the ad for uh that Lego.com was running for gift ideas for women. So this is how we we we get information about it. We see that a when we when we search this keyword, we see an ad. What link is um is being run on this ads like who's running the ad like which website and we save the copy and we see its position and based on its position we estimate the traffic that they would that they would receive based on what we understand is the um overall click-through rate traffic for all positions in the in in the SER. Does that make sense? So then we basically sum it up and then we estimate the overall paid traffic that a that a website is paying for. So that's how we do it. We look at the SER, we see what ads are there, we see the position and we estimate based on the position in SER and the click-through rate how much traffic is um getting uh is going into these paid ads. Okay. Okay. So that's how we we estimate things and that is based on like how we so that it's basically two factors in about um estimating uh three factors actually. It's one you're estimating the click-through rate of the position like we have data about that like how accurate that would be as well as um clickthrough rate is multiplied by traffic uh I'm sorry by search volume. So for in this case, gift ideas for women have 83,000 search volume per month. So we multiplied it by the click-through rate of that position here at the very bottom. And then we multiply it by um data we have about the click uh cost per click If if we want to understand like estimate like roughly how much was spent uh like the to to get the traffic that they received okay so this is how we calculate things like based on that obviously there will be a degree of discrepancy with like how it really is accurate in real life but uh by and large even Google's own platform gives you a range when they tell you like what is the search volume what is the clicks and how much it costs and Google changes the cost of a particular keyword and it can run ads for literally like multiple times even a day. So we give you like rough ideas um like this is all average average price and that's what I can say about how we calculate things. Okay. uh I we've not really done a full-scale study about how accurate it would be because that generally requires information that uh has to be benchmarked against people who would offer information about how much they spend. Uh so it's not something that we've been able to achieve yet but uh I would I can feed back to our team that we can if we can do such a study we can look into it. Okay, I hope that answers your question Marcel. Okay, let's go back to presentation Uh, other ways you can look into what's working for my competitors. Uh, while we're on Lego.com here, I can filter for, let's go by organic keywords, let's filter for SER features. Okay, let's filter for SER features that contain AI overviews and feature snippets. Oh. Try again. Why does this matter? Because we want to see um because this is what's all in the rage right now with AI overviews. A AI overviews can reduce the overall organic traffic that you're getting just by existing because people uh we see that overall people seem to be uh getting satisfied from uh what AI overview shows and then just not clicking on anything. So we can look into uh what are the keywords that AI overview is showing up for. So in this case a lot of it is the branded keywords. Let's just filter for one location just to make it simple simpler. We can also filter for if I recall. Yeah. So I can filter for Okay. Okay. So in this case, if it's just United States, sorry, not that many organic uh not that many AI overviews showing up actually just for two keywords, which means most of their keywords are not really or at least in United States is not showing AI overviews, feature snippets and AI overviews. Oh, sorry. Any rule. Let's do any. That's not accurate. So, it's either AI overview feature snippets. Just now I was filtering for so yeah. Okay. So, there are quite a number quite a number of keywords that um show AI overview in the results. So you can see next to the the the URL here. These are the different keyword snippets uh keyword SER features that show up here. So I can open up SER overview here overview here to see the exact SER to see what was being shown. You get thumbnail the knowledge panel is here. People also ask us here and the very top of course the air overview. So um here we can see what was being uh linked in the air overview as it was being generated. Okay. So um if you're seeing your own uh websites being linked here that's great but sometimes you can see that these are your competitors that are getting cited in AI overviews and then you can see you can maybe analyze those pages to see why they were being cited uh for uh when being generated for a particular keyword and see if it's something that you can also build pages around to to uh get a similar mention. of your brand when AI overview is being generated. I can open up this page for example and see okay what are the entities that are being mentioned here what are the brands the products maybe like related um uh TV series in this case like books and video games so you can see all the entities that being mentioned and that's basically what um AI or in this case Gemini is using to generate uh an answer for uh the people who have searched for this keyword okay let's go back links. Quickly um go over links here. So um best buy links helps you discover your competitor's most linkable assets. The best buy links report can be found under the pages section here. Best Buy links. And what that helps me do is I can look at the specific pages that have the most uh referring domains or referring links. referring URLs. What are the pages that are attracting people to link to my pages the most? Uh, I can filter for the best links only, like non-spammy to to really cut that down. I can also It really does cut that down, huh? So, you can see that there are a lot of press releases releases about particular products here that are relevant to LEGO. Um, if I want to give a different example, yeah, a lot of it is related to like I don't I guess like a whole category of like uh products, toys that get launched, press releases within their own website. Let's look at.com to give another example. So uh in this case you can see that our tools are being linked to I mean that's that's something that may be obvious but what may not be obvious is our data studies are being linked our listic goals our list of different statistics are being linked free tools are being linked to uh again this is another uh free tool um blog talks about longtail keywords, uh, beginners guides, studies, more case studies, more case studies here. There again, another case studies and free tools. So, this gives you an overall idea of like, okay, case studies, oh, not case studies, data studies and free tools, um, attract people to link to them. People like to link to these things. I can actually also even filter for um things like JPEG or PNG. I think it's JPEG or WEBP. I remember the file format exactly. Uh but you can see no I think it's any rule. for example to see links that are being backlinks that are coming from images. So some people may be using the images that we've created. For example, we have uh different uh we have like pretty just give an example here to open it so you can see it. So this is being linked to um but I want to give some examples of our like pretty graphics that people like to link to. So this is not the way huh I think I can show you in a different way. So there's an anchor report again. I'll filter for best links only. So you can see here based on the the back links the anchors like what people are like like what is the anchor. So see they're using study by HFS. This also gives you an idea of what people are um backlinking with. So they're backlinking different stats. Uh I think there like you can see um image source. Okay. So image source. So this is what I'm referring about or I think this one where you can see that people are linking to our graphic. So we have like a different statistics as an image and so people are like using our images in their own blogs and basically linking to them like these images here they have become back links. these these in of itself create back links to us because people like to use our images. Okay, sorry that's that's the example I wanted to to raise here. So this is um if you can keep that in mind when you do analysis of our uh of a competitor or any website here, what is attracting links links that gives you an idea of what content you can create in order to um get people to mention you, backlink to you and see what is or or see what is working for a competitor and try to put an effort to create something that can go beyond what is um what your competitors are doing. so it's summarized here. Can you make a better version of their best work? Is there a customer segment of problem that is underserved? You can do that like just from filtering out what is working or not working from their website? Um, is everyone doing the same thing? Maybe you can do something else instead. Uh mostly because as marketing goes, if you're copying, if everyone's copying the same idea, eventually like the second person, third person, fourth person doing the same thing will get like less attention because it's no longer unique or original. So like understanding what people are already doing like if it's already a saturated idea gives an idea of maybe you can try pursue something else. And of course um if something that a competitor has done has resulted in a drop in traffic or um some issues to the page, you can learn from their mistakes. Okay, we are at um the hour. So I'll very quickly talk about this and then we can go into uh I'll talk about yeah I'll quickly go through this topic before uh we go through the other sections and then Q&A. Okay. Okay. So, I'll go very quickly here. Which third parties could talk about my brand? Now, this are two tools that can do this. The first one you saw already is brand radar. So, maybe I will go into content explorer. Maybe I want to see if for this tool I think you you require the uh standard or higher plan. So, what if I want to see uh unlin mansions? So, brand mentions, sorry, let's do brand mentions of uh maybe people can share their brand with me here. Let's uh let's have other people share examples of their brand in the chat. Anyone other than like the people that have already volunteered? Anyone else there in the chat? Uh other attendees they would like to volunteer their brand. AI advantage. Let's look at uh brand mentions from AI Vantage. It's filtering for last 12 months and in news category. So you can see uh basically all these different pages that are mentioning your brand. You can actually also see if the pages uh the the mentions are being there but they're not linked to you. So for example sorry one second here highlight unlin highlight pages on a website they don't have any links to target domain. So maybe Ringo, can you give the URL of your website please uh for a vantage? I guess it's avantage.com. Let's say it's a vantage.com. seems that most of them are not linking your brand. They're just mentioning it. So, this is a good way of finding uh websites that are linking to that are basically mentioning your brand somewhere. In this case, it is mentioning the CEO of this of this uh company, but they're not linking back to the website. Oh, maybe that's different then. But this is the way to do it. Does not look like it's linking to like the dimensions here are not necessarily linking back to a vantage.org, Yeah, you can see not being linked. So this is a good way to basically find websites that are um mentioning your brand or your product or your platform whatever it is using content explorer that either are not backlinking to you or in the in the age of AI you can see how they're talking about uh your brand. So in this case it's mainly talking about what the CEO is saying rather than uh information about what the brand does. So that's important to keep in mind. Okay, let's move very quickly here. So it's important to build these off-brand me um off uh page off- page mentions off-site mentions so that um AI has a basically overall understanding about your brand through other through the authorities of other uh other websites. Uh we quickly talked about this earlier already. Um how is my own website or brand doing? I think it's mentioning mainly mentioning about site audit uh which just to quickly o go over what site audit does. If you run an audit on your website like for example here for hrs.com I can see what other top issues that are available on a website. And by the way this is our own website. You can see that we still have a bunch of um issues here like that are broken and stuff like that. We by and large are constantly changing our website all the time. So like some things do break over time. So we continue to change them. But overall we have a reasonably good score and we continue to rank very well uh in Google. So having a 100% score and focusing all your time on this does not guarantee that you'll have great traffic. It's all the other things combined that you do in SEO that helps you get um grow more and more organic traffic to your website. Okay. So, it's good to have a overall good score, but like don't focus too hard on making sure that the score is 100%. Um, if you're not sure where to start, focus on these red issues here. They're the most critical ones. Things that like have broken JavaScript, things that are not loading. Um, broken pages. So, I can view it here. Yeah, all these broken pages you should focus on because they're straight up not accessible. Canonical issues. I think also sometimes we get horang issues. So, yeah, there you go. So, these are the more critical ones to fix first if you're not sure um where to go. And it's very um convenient because um it's a kind of like checklist way of making sure that your website is in tip-top shape on the technical side of things and so that you have at least your fundamentals covered and uh site audit like analyzing all the issues. This is available on every plan so you don't have to buy anything additional. Uh although if your website is like very very big then yeah you may need to upgrade because uh you may not be able to fully crawl it. Okay. web analytics. So this is something that we launched very uh relatively recently. It's free including for people who are not even subscribed to HFS. Uh it works like Google Analytics where you install like a JavaScript snippet in your in your website and whenever it loads we record where the traffic comes from uh and it is privacy first so we don't store any cookies when uh analyzing the uh traffic that comes to the website. It's fast uh it has a very nice way of organizing sources of your traffic. So here we actually have a dedicated section for AI search. So if you want to immediately see what are the traffic you're getting specifically from all these AI assistants, there's a very quick way to just filter for it here as an AI search channel and I can see here it's some like the most is coming from chat GPT then perplexity and some very few sources from Gemini and quad. And since this is already filtered out, I can also see which pages are being like um are being visited from these uh sources. Okay. So that's a quick way to analyze on my own website um how I'm getting traffic which is important to understand beyond uh just organic search and SEO today. Okay. Yeah. first 1 million uh sessions is free and then if you get a lot more traffic than that then yeah um you then need to upgrade. We have a bunch of like other additional tools here but I think I'm going to quickly pause you to see if we have any Q&A questions that need to be answered. I think the first one is uh Joseph. So he's saying currently so I'm going to answer this live now. Joseph is asking, "Currently, I'm using a free version of Hrefs. I have a website more than 5,000 pages. Wonder what package I should subscribe to unlimit this feature." Uh, okay. Um, 5,000 pages, more than 5,000 pages. You can start with light or st or or a starter. I think it does matter more about what like how big your website is. I think you shared it earlier. Did you share it earlier? You did? Yeah. M [clears throat] so you don't need a you just on a free plan you can see I think at least this page and by and large you have let's see how many pages you roughly have maybe it says here it doesn't say here okay most of your pages don't have backlinks linking to them if it's not more not that much more than 5,000 pages light plan would be a good starting place. I would not really uh recommend upgrading based on the size of your website. It matters more with what you're trying to do. So, uh if we go to the pricing page here, uh you can do pricing page or we can go to the main pricing page also. You can see uh what's included on every plan. Do you are you looking to build more mentions on other plat on like you know third party websites and so and so on in which and or are you looking to use more of the AI features that we have? Uh if you are then you should consider standard but if you are still mainly doing more of the fundamental work for SEO to start with you can just start with light to begin with. That usually is where people go. And then if you find that uh your your consumption is not enough or you need specific uh features that available on other plans, then you can upgrade. Okay? You can do things you you don't have to be like committed to one like subscription tier to begin with. You can start small and and then see what you need and based on what you need, you can upgrade like portfolios. Portfolios is like something we didn't talk about today. Uh but basically it's a way of adding like a bunch of custom URLs that can be from any domain into one different project and uh one singular project and seeing their performance over time. So for example, this is on the standard plan. For example, I created a portfolio for the different help articles that I've updated over time in the past or for example my competitors. Put all my competitors into one portfolio. I can see overall how the industry traffic is trending and so far it's not great right but you can see that like if for example this is useful as a portfolio because I know that uh if I see that there's a dip in traffic I can see if all my competitors have a dip in traffic and to me okay like this is an industry trend people are just not clicking on topics related uh to this industry or that I rank for uh in the SEO space or the you know digital marketing space that's something that can happen, right? So, you may need this feature. If you like this feature, you can consider the standard plan or you feel like I'm not ready to get into that yet, then you don't have to upgrade just yet. So, I hope that helps. Uh, okay. Chris, please elaborate on the HS price plan. In addition, I'd like to clarify on the credits used per user. If the backlink reports cover over 30k backlinks, what minimum plan would suffice? Um, okay, let's There are two parts to this question. The first one is how credits work. You are most likely on the free or light plan if you're asking this question. Oops. credits. What actions consume credits? Okay, basically if you go onto a new report, I'm going to link this here because I can talk about it, but it's also good to see the whole list here about uh what actions consume credit. So if you anytime you open up a new report that consumes a credit anytime you add in a filter it consumes a credit. So let's consume one credit here together. So clicking on top pages that consumes a credit. If I this is one credit used. If I uh want to filter for location and I want to filter for uh pages that um have decline in traffic and I want to um maybe look for URLs that contain AI. So I put three filters together and then I click so show show results. That's one credit. Okay. So that's how it works. So in general that's how like um consuming credits work on our platform. If I go into keywords explorer and maybe I search uh let's say like just now we talked about like building materials, right? So let's say I want to look into products and tools related to uh building materials less than three words. Okay. Number of keywords here. Now I search. So I searched for 10 words at once. I've consumed or 20 words in this case. 20 words I consumed one keyword uh one one credit. That's one credit, but I've searched 20 keywords at once. Okay. If you don't want to be on a plan that consumes credits, be on the standard plan or higher. Standard plan does not uh pricing page. Standard has uh does not count uh see there you go. Unlimited credits per user. Okay. And this is within reasonable u margin. So if you if you start to purchase a standard plan but you share like your one login with like 20 people or something then you may find yourself locked out because that's like not uh you know we still have some benchmarks to make sure that like reasonable activity is being done by a user. If you use our platform in a normal way you should not get blocked. But yeah, standard or higher unlimited credits. So you don't have to worry about credits if the backlink. So then Chris's second question is if the backlink reports cover over 30 back links, what minimum plan would suffice? As in if the question is if I care about like 30k backlinks and I want to see and that's what I mainly care about. I believe the restriction here you must look at is rows per report. So 30k standard, this is max rows per report. Now uh there's something you should also know that if I go into the backlinks report and I put in a bunch of filters, right? Let's say I only care about backlinks that uh have a domain are only do follow and um have a domain traffic of like 2,000 for example uh and things like that. So I keep stacking these devar a DR of like at least 60. So I filter for these and I get a number here that is less than 30k. I still get to see all the results. Oh, I was almost there. Let's look for URLs that contain AI for the sake of today's example. Are there results? I think there will be. Yeah. Okay. So, I can see this whole report here. Even though the limit um even though the limit is like 30,000 um and like I'm filtering this one report like if I filtered it and it's like less than 30,000 I can see the whole report. I can also export the whole report. So that's what this line means by max row per report. Okay. So I hope that answers your question. So based on that you should see what is the plan that would make sense for you. But in general, I would recommend you looking at the specific tools and features that you need to decide. Um, Rita asks, "For a small wo with about 15 pages, what plan do you recommend? We want to write a blog twice a week based on keyword research and also make six more pages." You probably don't even need a plan unless uh you need keywords explorer. If you need keywords explorer, I would actually recommend with a website that small uh and and unless you plan to do a lot of like deep research and stuff like that, you can even start with a starter plan. Uh we don't have information about starter plan here, but we do have it Here starter plan. Okay. So we have a like like kind of like trial equivalent paid trial equivalent plan that you can that you can consider if you have a very small website and you can use like a limited subset of um of our tools and if you run out of this you can consider the light plan. Let's say if if you if you find that your usage is more than what starter plan has then you can consider the light plan. That's probably how I go about it. Uh any other questions? So far there are no other questions from the chat from the group from the audience. [snorts] Yeah, you're most welcome, Amita. Okay, then uh I will quickly go through this last section. HS can do more than SEO. That's what we're trying to u help our fellow marketers like you provide as we continue to push out more and more tools than we ever have before compared to the last few years. We now have we met I already showed you guys portfolios, but we also have social media manager. This is also free. uh even for people who don't have a subscription but the number of posts you make are limited based on your plan. Uh the number of accounts you can connect are limited based on your plan. Uh but it is basically a way that you can plan and schedule and optimize social media posts. Uh right now we allow you to connect for Instagram, Facebook, uh LinkedIn and something else. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. uh I can't remember but we have quite a number of platforms that we support. We look to support more. We also look to support things like tracking uh paid spend uh running ads within the social media manager if you're running ads on your posts. So these are all features that like will come very soon the social media manager but it's currently free on your plan. You can try it out to basically organize and optimize your social media posts. you have like AI features in it to help you optimize the copy, things like that. Uh you can definitely check it out now. Like whatever plan you have, you have some level of access to this. You can go check it out. If you want to know where it is again, go back to all tools and it should be where is it? There you go. Marketing social media manager. go check it out. Oh, okay. And now we have analytics that we provide. So uh right now we don't have anything because I've not really set it up but you can definitely uh see basically what is the audience you get. So we're constantly adding new features to this. I'm like finding it quite interesting and useful at least for my personal needs. And if you manage multiple media accounts for your brand or your company this is definitely something you can check out since you already have a nature of account. Uh, somebody asked a question. Somebody asked two questions. Yeah, Twitter. Twitter. Yes. Thank you, Amani. Yes. Um, Marcel asked, "Is HFS accreditation still free?" I think it has always been free. As long as you pass the exam, you get a certificate and you can uh show it to people. Yes. Thanks, honey. Okay. Uh let's portfolios we talked about just now. Group up to 1,000 URLs from 10 different domains up to 10 different domains and you can view their performance in single report. Very cool for things like analyzing um different uh like like you can even put like authors like maybe your blogs done by different authors, you can put them in one portfolio. You can do it for different languages. You can do it for different markets. uh you can just split it up as different portfolios. That makes it helpful to see okay overall for like different campaigns or like the performance of a specific author's blogs, how is it doing over time? It makes it a lot easier than having to calculate this manually and separate it out. Okay, we're at the end. Uh thank you for everyone who has asked any questions. This is your final time before I end the webinar. If anyone else would like to ask any questions or see something uh demoed on the platform otherwise um so far thank you for all your questions and your participation. Uh I my email will be sent out in the follow-up email for uh to this webinar. However, if this is regarding like you're looking into more information about sales stuff like that, a faster way to get help is um our live chat. So, if you have not accessed it yet, here is the way to do it. Go to help.h.com. I'm going to put this in the chat. This is our help portal. At the bottom here it will be you can access our intercom chat where you can send our support team a message and you can ask anything. So and I'll show you initially you'll get a response from AI. You can say that I want to talk to person. So let's say I want to ask a question about I want to know more about brand radar. Okay. First response you'll get I think it's AI. There you go. So Finn will answer first. So this is a bot. But if I don't want to talk to a bot, I can say talk to a person. I think it'll give you an option. No, you have to say talk to a person. Okay. And that and then um basically that would trigger Finn to get in touch with our team. You can see now our team is being activated. So now someone will come and answer your chat. Okay, this can be related to pricing, sales, what features um are available on the plan. I don't understand this. I see a bug. Anything. We have live chat. It's available uh 24x5 and limited uh responses on weekends. Okay, without further ado, if there are no other questions, I'll go ahead and end the webinar. Thank you so much for joining us today. Um, at the end of this webinar, um, you will, if you close the the window, you will see a survey show up and, um, you'll have some questions about your experience today on today's webinar as well as overall on our platform. Things that we can improve, things that you like. Please share your feedback so that we can improve future webinars and overall content for you. uh to make your journey at HFS a great one. Okay, so please fill out the um survey. I look forward to hearing from you guys. And again, if you need to watch the replay for today's webinar, it'll be on our YouTube channel. You'll get a link to that uh and in a follow-up email sent to you. And uh I hope you guys have a pleasant rest of the day as well as the weekend coming up. Thank you so much again for joining us today. I'll go ahead and end today's uh webinar.