Growth & marketing blog
Ahref’s DA metric is a widely accepted measure for the authority of a domain, similar to MOZ’s DR (Domain Rating). You don’t even need an account to check the DA of any domain. You can use Ahref’s free Website Authority Checker.
Just type in the URL of the domain and click the button—it’ll show you the sites DA, and the number of backlinks and linking websites.
Wisecut is kinda the “Descript for video”. (Even though yes, Descript does have video editing features too!) But Appsumo’s Wisecut for life deal is pretty sweet: for these prices is pretty dope, especially if you don’t do video editing every month, but still often enough to save yourself boatloads of cutting out “uhm” and word gaps
There’s a number of improvements Ahrefs rolled out last month, but my favorite is the new features you find in the Site Explorer overview.
For example, you can now see estimated paid traffic, referring domains, and number of pages in the top 100 SERPs, rather than just organic traffic.
In addition to that, you can also compare different domains.
Google started rewriting page titles in their SERPs, which in the SEO community has come to be lovingly called the Titlepocalypse (yup, it’s mostly site owners who’ve seen traffic decline due to these changes that refer to it this way). Ahrefs will now monitor these changes and show when Google rewrites the titles. (I’m not sure how exactly they’ll do this since Google seems to be rewriting the titles also not just based on the page itself, but also on the query the user searched for, and other dynamic factors, but I’m assuming they’ll go with the most common one.)
They also did updates to the keyword database, the one I found most noteworthy is that they’ve reverse-engineered more broad matches, which helps make keyword estimates more accurate. You’ll notice increases in Ahrefs search traffic estimations.
Here’s a full roundup of their updates:
When you’re lost for words, here are some cool thesaurus tools:
Duh, yeah. Obviously. But also, great, so it definitely deserves it’s place here.
I love how fast and simple this thesaurus is. It’s also very, very powerful. Look at this:
One thing that’s extra-cool about it is the filter function:
So you can filter for synonyms that rhme with a given ford, that have only 2 syllables, that start with a particular letter, etc etc.
This to me is actually one of my favorite ones, because it kind of works the way my brain works. You type in a word and it spits out… well, related words, that are sometimes synonyms or antonyms, but often also words that are neither, but yet in some way related.
In many cases, it’s the antidote to my “it’s on the tip of my tongue” problem.
(And just in case you’re wondering… it continues even further, but for the sake of giving you an idea of what that site is like, I guess this suffices.)
Now this is a sistersite of RelatedWords.org and ReverseDictionary.org, and it’s pretty hit and miss. But I still have fun with it at times.
(And yes, the list goes on much longer, but go try for yourself—you’ll get a feel for the tool when you play around with it.)
And of course, you can click on any of these words for a quick definition:
Overall a nifty tool!
This one too is very hit and miss, but I do like it because you come across these words that you’d never come up with otherwise. I mean, uxorious? I don’t think I’ve ever even read that word.
Think of it as a tool that converts sentences into words, or a kind of search engine for words.
A fun tool.
This tool simplifies texts. You enter a text, and it then tries to find unnecessarily complicated words and replaces them with simpler words.
It also provides some really cool stats:
And it gives you a great breakdown of parts of speech:
If you wanna go super-word-geek level 10, you can also switched to advanced view:
And there are even more teaching tools that enable you to learn words. When I discovered this, I was surprised that I hadn’t heard about it earlier, because quite frankly… it’s fantastic.
A quirky tool that goes: “What’s another word for ___”
It has a straight out synonyms section:
And a “See Also” section that lists commonly asked related questions
But my favorite feature is the “Nearby Words” list:
They also have a “how to use ___ in a sentence” section which will list a lot of sample sentences:
And rhymes, antonyms, and another cool one: word forms.
There’s a lot you can do with WordHippo—give it a go!
This is a dope Chrome extension that helps you rewrite sentences or paragraphs for different tones (casual, formal, etc). You simply install it in Chrome, highlight a section of text, and then hit the magic “Rewrite” button, and it’ll start generating rewritten versions.
Note that this is a paid tool, although they do have a freemium version with limited functionality.
This is a powerful thesaurus, and it’s faster than thesaurus.com—but it’s still cluttered with a lot of ads. I do use it quite frequently though.
One thing I like about it is that you can hover over any word, click “pronounce” and it’ll play an audio of the pronounciation very fast and seamless.
You can also click on the little toggle on the side of any given word to expand on the definition, and the overlap of definitions with the words you originally searched for.
It also has a feature that allows you to view idioms that express that word:
Or you can list phrases that are synonym to what you typed in:
Hopefully this satisfied all your thesaurus needs!
Dropbox just released a beta version of Capture—which is basically a Loom alternative.
Loom is great, but with the free plan you’re limited to 25 videos and 5 minutes per video. Personally, I don’t use Loom enough to spend $100 a year on it, so I end up deleting Loom videos—which is fine for the kinds of Loom videos where I just want to show someone a quick way of doing something specific.
Every once in a while though I want to show a specific process that will be used by multiple people for a long period of time, or I give a project walkthrough that includes meaningful context which will matter for future reviews for long-term initiatives, and then deleting these videos is not an option.
I’ve used YouTube for these videos that I want to be permanent in the past, but then you end up with having your videos across multiple platforms. If Dropbox’s capture holds up, it will be my default option for video walkthroughs. So far my experience using it was pretty smooth, so I do recommend you give it a try!
Semrush just launched a new Backlinks Analytics tool that they’re making available for everyone to use completely free until 2022.
Their backlink database is winning the market:
With their new backlinks analyzer, you can check out what backlinks your competitors are getting, find linkbuilding opportunities, and apply filters to slice and dice the backlink data based on any criteria that will be most insightful and actionable to your needs.
What’s more, you can export all that data into XSLX, CSV or PDF
My favorite tactic:
Check your competitors’ content that got the most backlinks and consider covering these topics on your site.
There’s a lot more I could say about this, but the best advice I can give you is:
I’m a huge believer in the power of learning from your competitors. Once you’ve identified companies that are targeting the same audience you’re going after, and they’re doing it well… doing a bit of detective work can be immensely valuable.
But it can also be immensely time-consuming, especially when it comes to staying on top of what they’re doing.
Fortunately, there’s software to help you minimize the time-consuming, tedious busywork, so that you have more time for high-impact meaningful work.
One of these tools is an app called competitors.app.
This app makes it easy to keep an eye on changes your competitors are making. Some of my favorite things about it:
They also have a simple keyword competitor tool that you can use for free, but tbh I think that does more damage than good.
I tried it and the results it returned where abysmal. In one instance it didn’t return any results at all, and in another instance it returned a handful of keywords that will make anyone who’s ever used any kind of competitive keyword research tool just close the tab and walk away.
I get that they’re putting the page out there on the site so it can gain some traction on Google, but I wonder if they’re not doing themselves a disservice. If I’d be a prospect arriving at their website cold, and I’d try out that free keyword tool, I’d draw the conclusion that their own app is probably of similar quality and not sign up.
(Which would be a huge mistake, because the app itself is pretty dope, and much better than that weaksauce keyword tool.)
Their pricing is reasonable and starts at $9.99/month:
They also offer a 15-day-free trial, which is neat, and if you’re at all interested in learning from your competitors, I’d definitely encourage you to sign up and play around with it.