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

Okay. So webinar should be getting live now. For people who are waiting, you should be able to join I see a number of people coming in now. Hello. Hello. For those that join in, you can say hi uh in the chat and where you guys are coming from. And if you're joining us on YouTube, you can uh join us in a Zoom link. There's a link that you can apply to join. You can join us there. Hi. You can say hi where you guys are coming from. uh logging in from awesome Amsterdam. Uh, I actually don't know what OZ stands for, but it's good to Okay, it's good to see you guys. And, uh, first and foremost, welcome to HRFS. If you guys uh are new users on our platform or perhaps even returning users on our platform, we're excited to see you here. Um, hopefully this webinar will be useful for you to understand a bit more about where things are, what you can do with them. uh especially if you get stuck uh what sort of resources you can um check out in order to uh further your SEO journey or marketing journey as a whole because now we're going beyond SEO in terms of our solution pro um the solutions that we provide. Oz is Australia. Ah okay cool thanks for joining in. I think it is like late afternoon in Australia. So I'm happy that you're able to join us in spite of that. Okay, without further ado, you guys can see my screen. I'll go ahead and go through our slides here. So if you have any questions while we're going along the the webinar, you can share them in the Q&A that is inside uh the Zoom application that I have here. We have a Q&A section. So please ask your questions there. We will answer Q&A questions at the end uh of the of the content that we're showing today. Okay. Um today's um webinar is an hour. Oops. Today's webinar is an hour. Uh we'll try to keep it within the hour. Uh but uh if there are any like questions that you have outside of like today's webinar material, we can answer them like afterwards after the the hour. We'll see depending on like how many people's questions we have uh here today. Okay, without further ado, let's begin with the powerful ways HRES can help you win more in search and AI. Okay, so you've just created an account on HFS. So what's next? This is like a common question people ask whenever they they log into your account and they go, "Hey, so I see this in my platform. There's so many tools. There's so many like projects and portfolios and reports, um, things that I can do, things to click around. I have no idea where to get started. I just want to like focus on how to improve my my brand, my website's SEO, or in this or like recently geo. Where do I begin? And while we do have a lot of different tools on our platform now since we've been developing so many of them over the years, um all of the tactics related to SEO and GEO can be put like roughly into three buckets. Okay, in terms of how to understand the data that can help you improve either SEO or go there a what are customers searching for or I mean in the case of geo prompting and what do they see? The second is what is working for my competitors and the third is what could third parties or which third parties could talk about me or my brand. These are the these are the kind of like rough areas that uh HRFS can help with, right? As well as a fourth one which is how is my own website or brand doing. So it's understanding both what's happening out there either on the customer side or competitor's side or in the third parties that are talking about either you or your competitors and then finally monitoring the performance of your own website or brand over time. Okay. And so you can see in each section I've put in like u different tools that are correlated to helping answer um the that are in each category and some like tools help to answer like more than one. So you see that I've tried to split them up here. Uh so so if you have some idea of like what different tools are able to to help you achieve this is like a very high level um overview of how you can understand HFS can help you and what the different tools do. Okay. So let's dig in. So the first section is what are people searching for and what do they see? Right? The main uh the first tool that you can like check out here is keywords explorer. So, um there are a lot of different keywords uh related uh tools and providers out there. I can show you some of the different features that HRES has that other tools maybe do not have that you can take advantage of. So, if you like to follow along, I'm logged in here on my platform in the dashboard and go over to keywords explorer and since we have quite often u we have a number of people here uh feel free to shout out your industry or like questions that your customers may ask like different keywords that you're working on today in the chat. We can use it as as an example. I see safety shoes. We'll do two examples here. Okay. Um Okay. I'm just going to take uh safety shoes and maybe vibe coding. So, let's say um safety shoes. And Michael, which market are you are you from? Like Michael Passet. Uh which country are you from? Netherlands and Belgium. Let's just put Netherlands for now. Okay. And um if you have I think it should be a standard or a higher subscription, you can ask AI to suggest more keywords uh related to safety shoes. So that I mean I can think about different keyword ideas myself or I can just quickly generate some here. So maybe challenges and pain points related to safety shoes. just to get some ideas here. Oh, they even generated them in Dutch. Cool. All right, that's probably useful for our case anyways. Uh, but I will not be able to understand, but let's just give a search and see what we can find. Okay, so you put in a bunch of different uh keyword ideas here. most likely many of them are very long, so they're not going to be a database. That's okay. Uh the English one does have basically 2,000 search volume per month. Uh let's go into the matching terms report to what and what this does over here is it'll look at all the keywords that you entered in and you'll say that are there any keywords in the ATS database that contains like one or more of these words. Okay. So, and we keep keywords in our database that have some minimum like search volume per month. So, um if it's in our database that means that there is more that like you know is a minimum number of searches like for example a lot of them are in the small ranges here 50 or 40 searches a month. You can see there are a lot of different keyword ideas. So in the slides here I I have like two different features that I can showcase to you guys today. And one is one of our newer features which is to filter by intents. Okay, let's say I want to look at only keywords that are branded. They have the like some brand in the in the search query and I think a lot of these are already going to be branded but like let's just filter out and see. Okay. Yeah. And so we get an idea of like people that are searching for particular brands of safety shoes. And you can see which are the the brands that are at the top here. In this case, you can see New Balance and Puma at the top. And then like some of the smaller brands at the bottom. Interestingly, small amounts of people search for Nike and Adidas usually not known for their safety shoes, but perhaps they have those. I'm not sure. Not in the industry. Uh but yeah, that's a good overview to see quickly filter out branded keywords. You can do the opposite and search for non-branded. You can do the same for local or non-local. And you can also filter for keywords um which have which are referring to different parts of the search funnel like people who are either trying to learn about safety shoes versus people are immediately trying to buy uh safety shoes. like the keywords that you'll be searching are different. So I can do and filter for transactional for example and see what sort of keywords show up. Right? So there is um quite the overlap because usually when people are searching for a brand in this case they're likely already searching for ways to buy safety shoes. Uh but I can see over here that like there's some people are looking for like light safety shoes, safety shoes, women, different kinds of things. So this is a and and how this filtering works is actually we analyze the SER the search results and see based on the results what are the intents most like uh most likely referring to. So Google tries to match keywords with like uh the results based on what they think the intent is. So if there are a lot of product pages in the search results then it is more likely related to transactional versus informational which could be like Wikipedia pages or something like that. Right? So it's a useful feature for you here. And we saw earlier so let's clear this filter for now that you can cluster by parent topic. So this is another feature that allows you to do uh what is the difference between the different intents? Okay, I'll quickly answer this. You can hover over the difference here. So commercial is they're at the sort of deciding stage of what to buy. So they're looking for information to compare different brands, different models, maybe different uh uh different outlets, even that could be like on the commercial side. Transactional is like they're looking for specific I want to buy so and so. Yeah. So, if there are things on our platform you're not familiar with, a lot of our uh headers here, well, not these, but uh like for example, these headers, you can hover over them. They have information about what they're about as well as like supporting documents uh articles if you want to learn more about them. Anytime you don't like understand something, this is like um you can see if these things show up first. Okay. Uh so, parent topic, the question is what is parent topic? parent topic is a um is a I think I would consider it a metric in HFS where we where it is the top. So for example, we take uh for in this case like Puma safety shoes, right? For example, the parent topic for Puma safety shoes is also Puma safety shoes because what we do is we look at the top search result for um for this keyword and we see which uh keyword is driving the most uh traffic to that page. In this case, it's Puma safety shoes. And what that does is that uh I think the other keyword that I picked later on might have a better example than this, but like it basically it is likely that if you rank for this keyword, you're also likely to rank for all these other keywords, right? So like it helps you find like a more dominant topic that you can put your efforts into uh ranking which then allows you to rank for like the other less um I say less popular keywords. So and Google will often like when you try to put in efforts to rank for one particular keyword you don't usually you don't only rank for one keyword you rank for multiple. So these multiples like in our case we can see that they typically share the same parent topic. Okay. So that's how we find that's how we find like related keywords for a particular uh topic. Uh let's give an a different example with v coding. Uh Anton Mosharo where are you from? V coding a very popular Dubai. Okay, interesting. Uh, Dubai. Well, it should be UAE in this case, right? So, we can see what is the popularity. Not much. Keyword difficulty unknown. So, we don't have a SER for this yet. If you don't see like uh if you need to manually update the SER for certain keywords, this is available only in a standard higher plan, but it allows you to see okay, United States. All right, let's do United States. So, let's see United States instead 58,000. A lot more, but I mean it's a much bigger market. So, so similarly, we can go into any of the keyword idea reports here because this is just the the the statistics for one keyword. Then I can look at multiple keywords that have either vibe or coding in it, which is going to be many. And like I can again stack on multiple of these filters to filter down. So for example, I want to see a lot of these are like of keywords of very small search volume. So let's look for uh keywords that have uh a global where I can filter for it. Global volume of at least 500 or yeah 500. Let's take it or global search volume 500. Yeah. So now we filtered it down to 37 keywords. And from there I I know that because in this case it's a more it's a less specific market uh like localized market specific keyword compared to maybe other keywords like vi coding something that happens like around the world. So like if I want I can filter for a minimum global volume. So I can only pick the keywords that um other places are searching for too, right? And and uh similarly I can stack on like the intents that we saw earlier. So maybe I want to look for uhformational keywords which I think most of them would be but in this case a lot of them don't have SERs updated. Yeah, I think most of these are it's not a entirely good example here, but maybe I can show you how clustering by parent topic looks like. Okay, they all have they all have the same parent topic because all the SERs are not updated. All right, let me try to do something here just to help us see. So interest I thought vibe coding would have more search volume but I guess not uh or like different different keywords related to search uh to vibe coding so I guess not not yet people are not catching the train just yet let's update just to just to give an example I will take the examples that you guys are sharing here uh for other parts of the platform so don't worry Guys, uh, while we're waiting for this to load, Ronan Turner asks, "What about keyword suppression? Leverage keywords that will push down negative PR. Would love some tips around this." Uh, I'm sorry, Roland. This is actually the first time I've heard of keyword suppression, so I may need to circle back. uh to you guys later once I maybe check with my team they might know a bit more about this at least here we don't really know um so I've just updated the search for many of these keywords so now I think we can try to see if we can cluster so we have a number of different keywords here that are in different clusters right I guess all right never Fine. I'll check in with our team later. In this case, there's only one cluster. All right. Uh let's move on to the next uh way of understanding what people are searching and where and and understanding what they see. So, I will have to mention our tool brand radar. I know this is an add-on that you will not have on your base plan, but I'll show you some parts of it that at least a number of you guys would have access to in Brand Raider that are not related to AI tools. Okay? So, I'm going to quickly like and and if you want to have an idea of what the AI side um search side looks like, you can try these demos. All of these will be able to support um all the platforms here. So you can see like uh information about which AI overviews or AI modes are mentioning uh what keywords are are causing uh the the brands Tesla, BYD, Riven, Elucid to show up either in the keywords or the responses either the prompts or the responses. And if I want to dive down deeper, you can look into uh AI responses here. Okay, this is just to quickly like show you that you can have a look at what the AI search parts of Brand Radar looks like even if you don't have the add-on. So, but I want to show so earlier someone was looking at uh let's look at pet insurance. So, in this case I'm just going to put in pet insurance, right? Um, I don't know companies that provide pet insurance. What are some pet insurance companies? Pet insurance companies. Okay. Uh, thanks. Thanks, Louise. Let's just put that in. So, pet um I'm going to assume I'm going to just put this one petity. Oops. as the main brand. Now I can suggest some competitors here. Looks like these are the competitors. And by the way, anytime you enter in your brand, you can add in like different uh name variations. Sometimes these are typos. Sometimes these are for example, if a brand has acquired other brands that you consider them in the same entity like the different sub companies of the same mother company here. And you can also put in like for example the URL pet jevity. So I assume this is pet jevity.com wait.co.uk. There you go. All right. So then you put in the URL here. Oops. update. Okay. And we explore it. So if you don't have access to this, it's okay. What we're looking at is search demand here. And so we get to see as a whole what the search demand looks like for search queries. I think in this case, this is for all locations. So we're not even filtered for a particular country here. This is something you can do in brand radar that you can't do in keywords explorer is to see like the search demand and uh of different entities across multiple countries. So brand radar can provide that right and you can see here like overall small number of uh keywords that that contain so this is number of search queries. If we want to look at search volume that might be different though. Yeah, there you go. You can see that the currently the dominant brand here is nationwide, right? So then I can see what all the search queries are. Now I think it's filtered for a country but like before you can see it for all countries and now you can see okay for a particular brand uh what are the keywords that are related to this brand? Um, oops. Let's go back very quickly. Search demand. Don't know what happened there. Okay. I had to change this because uh I don't know it was not kept earlier. These are not uh some of these are not There you go. All right. I think there was nationwide earlier or something, but I'm not sure if Nationwide is actually a real pet insurance brand. Okay. So, so that's uh that's something you don't need to add on to see basically the number of search queries and search volume of those queries per month. You can also see them as a more accumulative number. And from there, you can see the trends of like how often people search. It looks like everyone bumps up. like in this case you can see in a way has some seasonality because people are more likely to search for uh information about the insurance I think on an annual basis to purchase for their pet that seems to make sense. Uh if you have standard or higher plan you can also see web visibility so you can see um how many pages contain or mention particular brands. So this is your way. So if you do not have uh the Brand Raider AI add-on uh AI indexes add-on, you can see the pages and the number of pages that uh mention different brands and how they trend over time. Why does this matter is because the brand mentions on external pages is a critical factor of how likely you are going to show up as a generated answer in AI overviews, AI mode, uh chat GBT perplexity. So that's a that's a factor we see that's quite consistent across all these different platforms. So you should see how either your brand or your competitor's brand is being mentioned in what kind of pages right you can see them trending over time. I think there was a lot of effort that was being pushed out and then like then that has come come down a little bit in the recent uh months. Okay. And of course you can click to see further information. I can see which are the pages. I can also filter for a lot of these filters are in fact very similar to content explorer uh which is a different tool which is basically the same. So these are all the pages that HS has ever indexed and we are trying to see mentions for this particular keyword right and then on top of this we can like filter for specific languages and platforms we can also say I want to see all I think minus true panon.com right so over here you can see that you can uh remove mentions of particular keywords me. Um you can filter you can do like advanced filters using uh these uh operators here. Minus site equals okay minus site. So this lets you see pages that are notion but contain the keyword and that gives me ideas of places where I can get my brand uh either mentioned so this could be your competitor or this could be you auditing your mentions of your brand on other websites. Uh is this all about AI search visibility? Mentions matter also in SEO. uh it's just that uh in the past back links also matter like quite a lot. So you have to not only have other websites mention your brand, it should be backl to your website. So you can this this a tool like this for example is very good at uh finding pages that could mention your brand but maybe they're not backlinking. You can check out the author or reach out to the website owner and say hey like I see that you guys mention our brand. Why don't you like share a link to us so people can find us easier? That's something you can do. Okay. So that is for monitoring brands performance in web and AI search using brand radar as a very quick overview. What to do with these insights? These like learning knowing what are the pages that show up for the things people search for allows you to plan your content strategy. So if there are a lot more if people are searching for things with your brand in it or with your competitor's brand in it to either learn more stuff you can consider building pages that are more around um educating your audience or if they're going straight into like buying things. You can see for example we saw earlier uh like light safety shoes or safety shoes for women. These then form like the categories of your website uh that you can structure to to better answer the queries that people search for. content formats. So if we go back here uh some of these so let's say um there are questions about I'm going to give you a sneak peek here. So let's say people are asking for best pet insurance for miniature dash right. So you can see that like one of them is actually a Facebook post as as the links that AI is being used uh that that is referencing and you say but constants I didn't buy this add-on. So how can I search for this uh using a different tool that doesn't require the add-on? So you can actually go to uh if I go to site explorer. So, I'm just going to put in pgeevity here just to give an example, right? Oops. We have a quick overview of like the different uh citations that are in these uh either in Google AI overviews or soon we'll put in AI mode and uh other and and like one that's coming up soon is also Reddit. So you can go into organic keywords and you can filter for SER features AI overview. So this won't show you what the AI overview result contains like the what is the generated text but it will it can will show you uh for example the citations. I can show you how this works. So you see here that there's a AI overview or this one pet shure pet insurance. So I open up the SER. Where is the AI overview hiding somewhere? Here it is. So I can see the citations here. So in this case it's just they're just citing like the the the front pages. But sometimes this is Reddit, sometimes this is YouTube. So this tells you that um these are the other platforms that are also being used that you're you should be present on when trying to uh grow visibility for your website or your brand, right? And uh it also helps you understand like what are the topics that you should be talking about. So sometimes you think that you can uh create content about something a particular area but you see that people are not searching for it. So then you need to check out what things people are actually searching for otherwise you can create the content but it will not serve the demand. Uh as well as explore new markets and product ideas. Sorry go ahead. Uh explore new markets and product ideas. So sometimes while you're doing your keyword research, you might come across like new areas uh like new queries that people are are searching you may not realize and this becomes like new opportunities for you to grow uh like because people are already searching for it. So maybe you can see if you can serve that demand. uh there are some questions here about AI search and uh like kind of in general I will answer these at the end. So I hope to to sort of go through the webinar content before I can get to it. I hope that's okay. So please stick around later on. So the second section is what's working for my competitors. So we have a lot of uh competitor analysis tools here on HS because um we scrape the whole web with uh with our very like the fastest SEO crawler across SEO tools. So we really do have an index of like many many pages uh in the world as long as they allow us to index their page. This allow allows us to check for changes that happen over time. So, uh I think someone else I'm going to take someone else's uh category or um is Rasvan here. Razan Hoda, sorry if I'm not saying your your name correctly. Maybe you can share your website. Show your website. Maybe we can give an example. Yeah. So hopefully you allow HFS to Why can't I copy links to index your website? And if you do, looks like you do. What we can do is we can do page inspect. So we can go into the top pages here and all the way at the end there's an inspect here. So let's say in this case you're comparing two years apart. I want to see the changes. I click on inspect tool. I can see that basically there was a using using a tool like this I can basically see what has changed over time. uh there was a change in essentially branding of of the website, right? It looks like you've um changed the wordings here and stuff like that. This is very useful because you can uh compare this with any changes in traffic. I think uh at the overview that we give this option to show uh over time changes that were made to the website. And this gives you an idea of for example if there was a bump in in traffic. You can go to any of these uh circles here and view the changes to see if they correlate the changes correlate with uh the increase in traffic. Okay. So this is this is one of the ways to to analyze things. Similarly for drop in traffic maybe you have like a page or um a page or a blog that you're working on that used to drive traffic and it it dropped suddenly. You can see that maybe there was either some um changes to the page that were unintentional. Uh same for your competitors and they may have tried to make some changes uh and then they have dropped in traffic. You can analyze to see what has changed and see whether or not this is something that you should do or should not do. That's something that our tool helps you do. uh find gaps in your content strategy in seconds. Okay. So, I'm going to take uh this website. So if you don't know that there is one uh tab here in site explorer called opportunities and it's a quick way to look at different opportunities uh which is like tactics and SEO uh that at least we have used to to like pretty good effect and help you uh find ways to improve your content or your pages in some way or form. So in this case I was showing the content gap tool in competitor analysis. This is uh opportunity number three. Okay. So uh this report if I click this it would look at the top 10 competitors for this website and it'll put it into the competitor analysis tool immediately. This takes a bit of while because they got to fetch uh the top 10 competitors for the website you enter in and then load the report. And it'll look at the keywords that the competitors all these competitors here what they rank for that the main website utila.io does not rank for. Okay. Okay. So you see that there are a number of uh keywords here. Most of them some of them have some brands some of them related to different chains. Uh if I want to maybe filter out uh fire so I saw some keywords related to Fireblocks. I don't think I want to rank for someone else's brand. I have no interest in doing that. What I can quickly do is see what keywords that at least two competitors rank for uh that I don't rank for. Why is this useful is because then I can look for two competitors are most more likely to rank for like industry related uh rather than just their own brand. So now I have a list instead of 2,000 keywords I have 89 keywords. That is a much easier list to go through. There you go. Then I have some ideas of what um these websites rank for, what kind of keywords here that they're getting some at least some visibility in a search for and this basically becomes content ideas or categories that I can create on my own website. Okay, that's how you use uh this content gap tool. Uh the other thing you can do is something that I shared earlier which is to see which overview site your competitor's pages. You can also do this for any SER uh any uh SER feature. So let's go back to the and in fact you can do it in multiple tools. Any tools that have like organic keywords in it you can filter for particular SERs. All right. So let's clear this filter here. Uh at least I'm going to say in the top 10 at least in the top 10. Okay. So I can filter this particular report as well as others. So anytime I see this uh feature for search feature here, let's say I want to look for uh keywords that fil that rank for just give a quick overview here. I mean I can just fil um filter to see where overview AI overview shows up. Um I can also filter for example uh videos. Maybe I want to consider if uh what video ideas might be useful to create if that is another channel you're working on. So I So here I can see keywords where like the video SER feature shows up which implies that people are looking for videos to watch rather than just seeing like plain results. Here you go. Okay. Uh, and this is shows up in the SER. So, they don't necessarily rank for it, but videos show up. So, like if you want, you can look into the SER here to confirm that uh the centralized applications. People also ask, I think you have to open up. So, this one has AI overview showing. I want to look for something that has videos. Okay, let's remove uh this one and see the if the video SER shows up, which looks like not that many keywords. So, a lot more keywords are generating AI overview answers and Google seems to increase that day by day for for different industries and stuff. Okay, only three keywords uh have videos as answers. That's interesting. Sorry, it's taking a while, but yeah. So, so this is basically if the report loads, you'll be able to see it. But so, so this is basically a very useful way of using this competitor analysis tool. If you have not tried it out, please try it out. Uh I believe it should be available for light or higher I think. Yeah, there you go. Here's an example. So web 3 software videos. So you can see like the different videos that being showing up in the in the SER results here. Okay. So that's an easy way to to kind of filter through keyword ideas of your competitors. to see like what what they are ranking for not ranking for and these are basically ideas that you can take for for example in this case this competitor is ranking position one that's a lot of if if not traffic it's visibility uh brand visibility for what is quite fundamental uh terms for uh this person's industry okay uh discover your competitor's most linkable assets uh can I get someone else to share their website please. Someone else that we have not uh covered higher bound. Yeah, fastest fingers first. So let's this one higherbound.io. Let's put that in. Now I want to look at competitors uh competitor's best linking asset. So, I'm going to put in your website. Copy. I'm going to put in your website and then find your competitors. Okay. And there are a few ways to do this. We have one uh report here. Sometimes you can check uh have a look at but like if you don't rank for many keywords, then this shows up. Huh? Yeah. Your website doesn't rank for any keywords. So you were not able to generate this report if you don't rank for uh organic keywords. All right. Yeah, I'll have to probably take the next person. Sorry, Kumar. We will uh maybe show show your website for a different use case here. Maybe this one does. This one does. All right. This looks like a I'm not sure what your website does, but uh we will soon find out. Let's click the organic competitors report. Okay. So, what this report does is that it takes organic keywords that um that your website ranks for and basically it looks for other websites that have like a large overlap of organic keywords that like rank and this helps you. So, if you don't know what your competitors are or you say like, "Oh, I don't have that many competitors. I don't know who's competing with me in search results." Uh, this is a quick way to find examples of your competitors that do. Meanwhile, I'm going to check your organic keywords so I can quickly find some competitors here because this report typically takes quite a while. Unfortunately, it generates it runs through a lot of data. Let's do non-branded keywords. Intense. There you go. Let's do nonbranded. This is like another way to find competitors here. Call center scripting software. So maybe I can look at this. Looks like a competitor. Dialpad.com. I hope I'm right. Yeah, looks like they are a competitor. So let's put their website in. Okay. Uh I'm going to duplicate the tab here. Duplicate. but in their website instead. And now I'm going to let's just take the whole domain just in case. I'm going to look at this report here. It's called Best Buy links. I want to see the pages in my competitor's website. They're attracting the most uh back links. I can filter this off for let's say I only want the best links. So I don't care if there are particular pages in my competitor's websites that like attract a lot of like lowquality backlinks. It's not interesting to me. So I can turn this filter on if I wish. And so okay so you can see that it mainly it is there like landing page uh but also glossery terms. So reports about video conferencing. Okay interesting virtual phone number from business. This is like a free tool. Looks like a free tool. So, um information information about a particular aspect of uh IVR system. I'm not sure but and then like these are listicles. So, I just found out the different ways that uh my competitor is attracting links. They are useful glosseries. They areformational articles. Uh they are free tools, right? different listicles. So this this is basically a way in which if if I want to build back links for my website, I can check to see what is working for my competitors, what what is attracting the most backlinks for them and see if I can a make something similar, b make a better version of my competitor, or c maybe there are some of these like areas that they're not covering as well, but they're similar. Now I can create pages for that. Right? So that's why a report like this is very useful. This best buy links report. Okay. Uh what to do with these insights? Yeah. Can you make a better version of their best work? Is there a customer segment that your customer that your competitors don't like cover as well? So you saw the best pages. You saw the the keywords that they rank well for. Are there certain keywords that they don't seem to cover? That's your opportunity. Is everyone doing thing A? Is everyone always creating the same boring like free free tools or like the articles is saying the same thing? Can you say something different? And of course, last one is are there some pages or changes that they made to their website that don't make sense? Don't follow them. Okay, so that's what you can do with information like that. The third is which third parties could talk about my brand. So this is like aides from you, a sites for your competitors, other websites in the web should be talking about you and ideally in in ways that are relevant to your business. They should be mentioning what your product does or maybe you're where your business is based or the benefits of it or sometimes even like the the pros and cons about it. People in forums should be talking about you. So which forums and under what categories? These are things that if they talk about you it matters. It builds like brand visibility across the web for SEO. It also builds um brand visibility for generative search. So these are both things that are um important. So earlier uh we're using brand radar. Uh you can see citation. So, um I think let's uh can someone give more of like maybe brands or even like industries that you're in, but I think mainly brands that you want to see. Gooden energy.co.uk. This is like a energy provider. So, your brand is good energy. All right, let's go into brand radar here. Sustainable energy. Let's see if AI knows that. Looks like AI understands that your brand is about sustainable energy sources. So, they have found some competitors for you. Let's explore. uh in this case we can see all right there's like topics and whatever but there's a section here about top-sighted domains so this is something that we see very often which is that like even for like hres for example the top websites being cited about a particular brand is often not the not the brand website itself it's YouTube it's Wikipedia it's Reddit and stuff like in this case octopus managed to get quite a number of citations that's quite impressive Yeah, that's quite impressive that it got cited at the top here. But a lot of times it's like none of these um are good energy.co.uk. They're not bulb energy. They're not ecotricity. So it really matters that you build a presence of your brand on other pages on other websites. Other entities should be talking about you. Uh right. So some of these could be like Wikipedia is here and it's being uh referenced when talking about different brands. So you have to keep that in mind. Um it could be government websites, it could be uh review websites, it could be uh partner like contractor websites could be talking about different brands. So these are these are different websites which you you should take into account. You can reach out to them and say and find opportunities for reasons that they should talk about your brand. Maybe it's a new product you pushed out. Maybe it's analysis you want to make uh that's that people customers might benefit uh learning about certain facts about like choosing good products or or like um pitfalls people commonly make. These are all conversations that like if that perhaps your all these third party websites in your industry would like to hear more about and that's how like different ways you can pitch yourself in. All right. So this is so this is the case for and then I mean in this case you can filter through the different uh AI uh indexes but let's look for web visibility right so this again like that we showed earlier is mentions that are outside in this case it's mentions that sometimes includes your competitors but I can filter this out later if I want by putting in the the URLs of each compet uh competitor website here and to help filter out like so I can only see like thirdparty websites, The Guardian, Express, uh, Independent, all these like PR websites, Business Green is something that seems to be industry specific and not just the same like, uh, news websites, right? These are these are places that like likely will that you can consider to see whether or not they're worth uh spending energy to to get mentioned or to for them to talk about you and and like it's better than just building brand visibility on a website that has nothing to do with what your industry like nothing to do with your industry, nothing to do with what uh your company does. Uh what other example I wanted to share? It's the next one. I believe competitors key authors. So let's go back to let's pick one uh competitor here. I think I saw Eosree or let's do Octopus Energy because there were so many like references that were being made citations from Octopus Energy. Bum bum this one. Okay. Let's look at So let's go to their site explorer. Okay. And let's go to authors, anchors, linking authors. Which are the people that link to Octopus Energy? We see it's Arsenal Media, Tom Christie, Jonathan Rogers. So, you can see, oh, last two years. Let's do uh let's look for last three months maybe. Okay. Jade Wright Car Carlos Simone. So these are like the authors here that you can check out. You can also um check out how they link to octopus energy. the website says. Okay, this looks suspicious. Let's filter out for best links only. Okay, that's better. So, you see that a repeat like that the same links like repeat a lot of times a little suspicious. Let's look for like real human beings here. Um, and again, it's only just a click of like filtering out for best links. That's a feature you can do in HFS. So you can say that they are looking for okay they write for a magazine they're in a particular forum right so and then like you can look into these pages to see how exactly they're being linked okay so this is a way and then like so you can also like follow them so these are like real people uh which you can check out maybe reach out to them on their socials to see whether or not in what ways that they they write about particular energy brands and where they're present on on different publications. These are the publications they're on and you can see yeah businesschief.eu. You can see um what angles they like writing to and see if you can pitch to them specifically ways in which uh your your brand can be mentioned. Uh this one we kind of covered earlier. I we're running short of time so I want to go faster but uh let's go quickly to the next section here. How is my own website or brand doing? So one that I think many of you guys would have already started is your site audit for your website. This is uh very straightforward tool. We basically compile lots of different uh so so we're currently in a section of understanding how your own website's doing. Right? So that's what site audit helps you do. It helps you look into uh what are the technical SEO issues that you have in like we there are a lot of articles that sort of cover like that we cover about the different technical issues that matter but a tool like site audit makes it very easy to analyze because you can just we help you um audit for over 170 different issues here. If you want to see the full list it's actually under all issues. Um they're all tracked. So this is like full list of like different issues that are being found at different like severities. And if you don't know which one to focus on first, uh you can focus on the red ones, these error ones, the broken links. They they they have the highest severity which usually has the biggest impact to indexibility as well as SEO as a whole, right? So you should fix your broken pages. You should fix your broken links. Uh, and if there are particular issues that you don't know too much about, so for example, you don't know what a herf lang is, you can check out why and how to fix at the top here. It has information about what this issue is about and like suggestions about how to fix it as well as oftentimes an additional article that goes into more detail. Okay, sorry Louise. Uh, one of those brands is called green energy and some of those are mentions just using that term rather than referencing the brand. How do you filter that out? Uh, unfortunately it's not too easy to filter that out because your the brand is green energy which is also a concept. It's kind of currently we're looking into ways to do this because like for example Apple as a brand is also a fruit. uh and like it really that really depends differently on uh in in search. Uh so it is a problem but it's we don't really have a good way of filtering for brand versus concept versus item. Yeah, tricky naming. So got like you have to like some part of it it's still manual. You have to go through and see what things how to how to go about things. Sanjay, I'm I'm seeing that you're sending links here. Again, we will answer these um queries that not related to the webinar at the end in the Q&A. Okay. So, site audit, it's a honestly a no-brainer. Um just run an audit if you can on your website and these are like your lowhanging fruits of like finding quickly finding like issues that you can fix uh on your website to to at least make sure that your website is technically sound fix. So this is patches. I will not we don't have time to go over it today. Uh so I will skip through that. Uh web analytics is another free tool. This is like even if you don't have a paying subscription, you can check this out. Uh it is basically the uh our version of Google Analytics. Uh the differences are a you get to see data like within minutes not days. B uh it's privacy privacy first so there are no cookies so you are GDPR compliant and C I think in my like or at least we think that we uh provide a very simple way of filtering through and creating reports. So here I have the web analytics for uh for one of our websites blogger jet like immediately on one page you can quickly add filters you can uh for different uh kinds of pages or geography or browsers systems like it's a lot more um simple to use than perhaps other platforms because all the options are just there. We also provide a very quick way to understand the AI search uh traffic that you might be getting which uh most websites do get these days. You can see that the highest that we get is from chat GPT. I can even filter that down. So now I have channels AI search. I want to see what kind of pages chat GPT ising uh sending uh traffic to and that is to tools to monitor brand mentions. Google shows uh top 100 results, how to questions some of websites, things like that. So within just a few clicks, I can drill down and dive deeper to analyze what is the traffic, what kind of pages that chat GBT is sending traffic to without any like sort of like confusing configurations or views and stuff like that. Okay. So um if your website has less than a million events per year, it is free forever. So you can check out there's more to this, but this is just a quick overview about like how this uh free free um tool works and like how you can use it for for analyzing your own traffic. wait a can do more. So recently we have pushed out a few other tools that you may not know about that's actually not really related to either um geo SEO too much. One of them is uh social media manager here. So you can connect your So let's say if I want to connect let's make a new post here so I can show you. So in one place you can basically post uh from all your different uh social media channels. Currently we support Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. And you can also do this um with like different team members as well. And from here you can schedule your different posts. You can preview how they will look like. You can also um edit them in drafts before they get posted. And it's basically a an additional tool which um you depending on your plan, but even the free users get some um number of accounts that you can add. The higher your subscription, the higher number of posts and channels you can connect. And we're working actively to add more features to this because we know that in the in like the geo age, visibility on multiple platforms matter a lot. So we are providing tools to help with that in the long run. Okay. So definitely check it out because you can I mean you don't need your plan should support any of your plans that you guys here have any of them would support this uh social media tool. It's just how many posts you can make and how many channels you can connect. The more if you need more and what your uh plan has you can consider upgrading. So that's one of the uh tools that we pushed out recently. So you can check out uh um and see if it works out for you. The next is um there are al also other tools that we pushed out recently but um I will not cover them um today like for example if you're a local business you can check out like a Google business profile monitor uh but we'll maybe cover that in a different webinar uh we have different tools that help with reporting so we have you can see that there's all kinds of different data sources that connected here what if I want to generate reports so I can monitor um customize the way that I understand my data in a more like uh configurable fashion and we have you can do that with our reports tool which you find here from the dashboard down here to reports and I can give an example here I think not this one maybe this one where uh I help to monitor the traffic going to our help portal So these are all just different widgets which you can add from the top here. In fact, you can add them from multiple websites. So let's say you are handling multiple uh websites for a client or you own multiple websites for your brand. You can add them all on a single page and they can be added from brand radar and site explorer rand tracker and Google search console if you have it connected for your for your website. Okay. And each of these have like different widgets have different configurations like you can configure the the website. You can also configure they're filtered for specific links as well as the granuality things like that. And you can drag and drop. So I can really move this around so that it shows me exactly what I want to see on a single page. Okay. Um I think everyone should have at least one report that you can create. So you can check out this feature if you like. So it's not it's not specific to like something into geo SEO specifically but it helps you with basically your day-to-day management creating of reports and of course then you can print to PDF after. Okay. So these are like the other tools that we have in HFS. Okay. So we are at the hour. Um, so far for everyone that helped to um, join today's webinar, I hope you found it useful. I will now proceed to answer Q&A that have been piling up steadily. Okay. Uh, let's start with the question people searched about. Uh, yeah. Sorry, Ronan. I'm not sure about keyword suppression. I have to check back with our team, get back to Tips for someone getting started with brand new website. Uh, start creating. Sorry, not this one. new websites. You should focus on finding a niche in your industry that is not being like completely overwhelmed by the existing big players that are there. Uh I actually use brand radar once to do something like this. But we have the so for let's I'll just show you what I did. Okay. So, let's say that I want to put in a bunch of different competitors and I wanted to explore. So, what I wanted to do is I wanted to see um what are the search queries that no none of my competitors are in. So, I can actually filter out through this here. So let's say I want to do this in AI overviews. I want to see. So I'm going to do a proxy here where I filter for doesn't contain Puma. So I want to say like doesn't contain, doesn't contain, doesn't contain, right? And then I can even filter this as like uh maybe basketball. So, I'm looking for uh discussions mentions keywords that like don't mention my competitors at all. And this gives me an idea of like what sort of keywords have uh that are that are discussing that are in the basketball space but do not mention my competitors. That's a niche that as a like small business I can get into. Right. So, this is this is something that I would probably use. But like if it it doesn't necessarily have to be a brand. It could also just be under like analyzing each of my competitors and seeing what sort of like market segments that they tend to target and see if there are um different niches that they are not serving as well. Like these are good opportunities for new websites, new brands. You have to do things differently and then you create content around it. And then you make sure that your messaging is around that untapped underserved niche and you reach out to other websites to build backlinks and mentions that are that's too much data guys. Oops. So like then I look into um other websites that are that are able to that are interested in talking about this underserved like um niche that my website is good at or my brand is good at serving. Right? So then then you have a reason for other people to talk about your brand and not the big incumbents. So that is what you kind of have to do if you're like starting out now. If you're a small business, if you're a small website, okay. Um [Music] it's kind of disjointed because I was hoping you guys would use a Q&A thing, but most people just asked these questions in chat. We have to go through it kind of quickly here. what about the move to AI search results? Should we look to tailor SEO to trigger a better rank of AI search results? So we vcoded this website chat GPU versus Google. This is a website that we made because we wanted to see okay um you know traffic is down but I mean or rather clicks from organic search is down but how much traffic is really getting pushed uh to AI from AI assistance versus traditional search and it looks like even Bing is higher than any of these AI assistants here. In fact higher than all the AI assistants combined. By and large, people are still searching in traditional search engines. So that's not to say it's not uh that the traffic of AI assistance is not important. Uh in fact, we uh recently launched a a data study that shows that um the traffic that does come from uh AI search can sometimes be better. like there's longer they stay at a website longer, they click through the pages more, there's more of a intent to learn more about the brand and things like that. By and large, at least that's what we see. But you can see like percentage- wise in terms of actual numbers of clicks, not that many. So, whatever you do, don't there's no currently no reason that you should give up on SEO entirely and go straight into AI search for whatever reason. you may just sacrifice all the efforts and traffic that you could otherwise get. Okay. Uh, hope that answers your question, Ronan. Jacob's question. Well, Jacob left, so I will answer this question for everyone else that's still here. My understanding is that the language should reflect your customers language and search behavior. Yes, in general, that is true. Uh, people read summaries like Gemini and often double check, cross-examine other platforms. Yes, I mean that's true. I mean that's just how people try to learn about something as well. So that's not a question actually. Okay, that Jacob's just making an analysis about how people search today. And yes, they are um in fact there were a few people in the SEO space that tried to analyze this in detail where they really uh monitored the the search behavior of people when they're trying to do different tasks. They found that people really do click on the links that are cited by AI overviews for example and they would click and double check to make sure that the what AI overviews was actually saying is like reflected by real people that are um like where of which created the content that AI was citing. Sanjay asked multiple times how to get more traffic for websites in real estate. I don't know. Is this like a particular development real estate? Is this a are you a real estate company? Are you um lots of questions here that depends on it still goes back to the fundamentals of like what do people search uh when they're trying to like maybe look for let's say you are marketing for a particular development or a building or something like that right you can search for the building name here or you can search for like uh by I don't know uh let's say this is I'm searching for US, right? I want to buy a lakehouse. So, I'm not looking for a particular development, but that that's what people search. They're looking for best place to buy a lakehouse. They're looking for where they're saying, "How should I buy? What is the best time?" So if you do something similar for whatever industry that you're in to try and answer these questions a I think these in fact like pages that answer these questions is a page format that AI uh tends to prefer uh to site from but also these are like if you help to answer these questions you get brand visibility just by ranking at the top for um providing answers for the ways to do things and then the better pages win. Typically, you know, the more helpful your page is, the better uh you're you're likely to rank as people find it useful. So, that's this is like the shortcut way of like create create useful stuff on your website to help people buy real estate. Okay, same can be said about many other industries. Of course, there are like, you know, caveats and stuff like that, but as a general rule, that that tends to be true. uh this is not really the platform for you to get very specific um SEO advice here if you're looking for that. What is the benefit? So, Rebecca asked, "What is the benefit of having the the AI index add-on? Uh what can it do to standard package can't please?" Um, the Brand Raider AI index add-on is the only way is the only place that you're able to find the generated responses that we have cached for all these uh prompts that were entered in like uh these responses. So like for example, we did for let's look at like the ones from Perplexity because we saw a lot of AI overviews today. So you can see that if you put in how much does the PS5 cost into perplexity they respond with images they respond with like information about uh what's the price range as expected they give links uh different notes many many links are provided here right this gives an idea of like what um these AI assistants are responding with so you're not going to see this a not anywhere else in in the ATF and B uh not at the scale that any other tool is providing because we provided for lots of keywords prompted it. So yeah, you can search into AI assistant if you don't pay for this that's fine like you can search into your AI assistance now and for like search your brand or search things questions about industry and see what AI responses and you can do it regularly to sort of audit and see how they respond. But by and large, if you want to see basically a whole trove of like responses to see how like things uh AI varies in response from from uh topic to topic within uh your your industry, this is this is uh the add-on is very useful in helping to see that. Uh Razban asked how can we find, fix and prevent keyword cannibalization issues. So remember that I showed you this opportunities uh report here. So currently I'm inside explore on the tab here there's an opportunities report. Cannibalization potential cannibalization is one of the opportunities. It's over here. Okay. And we have a blog that goes into detail about this. But what you can do is what this uh report filters for is uh pages that have multiple URLs ranking. So like hs.com is ranking for multiple pages in this case five or more. Six or more related backlink checker, right? And so you can check to see what these six um pages are. In fact, there's a lot pages. Oops. Uh let's let's give a less confusing example. Let's go for uh this one. Let's let's look for this one. Make this sound better. So we provide like some free tools out there about uh for for AI rewriting. And uh here we have two particular tools. In this case, they're not cannibalizing because they're just keeping their positions like one at the very top and one like like in somewhere in the top 10 or top 15. They're not they're not fighting with each other. There are sometimes you'll be able to and this is the only way that you can reliably see canalization is really just to check over time. Yeah, sorry. We have a lot of we have to find keywords that don't have let's let's filter for non-branded keywords here. Let's this would help speed things up. Too many keywords, huh? Uh how to check back links of We might have Yeah. So here we have a bit of cannibalization. You see that like sometimes this this page is at the top then this page is at the top then this page is the top. This is like a case of cannibalization here. Fortunately I found it very quickly for you guys to to see. Um you can see it was happening here. I think we more we fixed it later on uh closer to today. Still a bit of camelization. You see that they're fighting in positions. So this is how um if you this is how you'd analyze for canalization and see if you need to merge the pages or differentiate the pages so that they talk about like serve like very very different uh search intents instead. Can you give some best practices on using chat GPT linked with HS via API? We don't have time to cover that today. Uh I know you I think you're talking about like the MCP server. So Hrefs does support MCP server. Um all paid subscribers now should have some limited functionality on this where you can basically use uh connect with the HRS API via your favorite AI assistant tool to ask them to pull metrics for you, create graphs for you, create tools for you. Okay. Uh, right. So, it's available on all paid plans starting from light. This is the tool he's talking about. Most likely, Ra Razan, I think most likely you're talking about this. Uh, I don't have time to cover it today, but I've done things like just create um analysis. I put in like five competitors and I say please analyze their top keywords and their top pages and see what are the common uh SEO strategies that they use and as well as plot them on the graph. Right? This is something you can just add into um uh claude or something like that. Chat GBT currently has issues with its MCP connection. So if you find issues with that and you're trying it out uh they have issues with all connectors not just ours. So um currently I think claude still works but yeah um it's it's a still relatively new tool. So um that's a good thing a good suggestion to create like we may create articles to cover like best practices and good uh use cases of the MCP server. Uh Louise asks what are your thoughts and recommendations now that Google is limiting results so that sites like HFS can't crawl for rankings beyond the top 10. they want to hold their competitive advantage. It seems like I mean after um Google stopped allowing it to be easy to crawl the first 100 pages like people were noticing that chat GPT's uh responses changed they were not using Reddit as much. They were they were seeing that the changes with other platforms as well. So, we don't know yet. We're like Google's really trying to to clamp it down. Uh we are trying to find opportunities to uh still fi like uh monitor rankings for and we'll try different options until we can find something that is reasonable that still allows you guys to really monitor what happens beyond the first page. Sorry, not sure. Like we can't really answer more than that. Uh in specific to lowhanging Q um lowhanging opportunities though, our report finds positions between four to 15. So anything beyond the top five. So if you are position top eight or like top 11 or something like that, these are still things you can work on. You might be able to focus on these lowhanging fruits first u versus looking at pages that are maybe ranking at positions 40 or 50 which currently um visibility is not that great. Yeah, most welcome. And uh Talver asked were they before the recording. So currently we're live streaming to YouTube. So after this you will get emailed uh most likely tomorrow a copy of today's deck as well as uh the link to the YouTube recording uh for today's webinar. So then you can go back to whatever position you like to see any tool being mentioned or or covered use cases that we talked about. That's a good place. I think that's all the questions people shared. Huh. And we're a little over time but not too over time. Anyone else's final requests maybe to see certain tools questions? Do you like to be covered? Good question so far actually. So some of these I'll share with our team to see whether or not we can create like helpful resources around or to take into account when we continue to develop our tools to be more useful for you guys. Okay, crickets in the chat tells me that there are no more questions to be asked and so um then I will bid you guys farewell. One final note is that when you close this today's webinar, you will get a survey that you can fill out. Please fill out the survey because it lets us know how well we did today as well as uh it's your place to share feedback about platform maybe future webinars you'd like to see. Uh please do that so that we can improve webinars in the future for you guys and hopefully you join us in the next one. Okay. So without further ado, I think I will bid you guys all farewell. Uh have a good weekend and uh hope to see you guys in the next webinar, workshop or future uh opportunity opportunity to meet and uh thank you for joining us today. Okay, take care. Have a good one. Bye.