Data studies

Not every piece of content we create is designed to rank in Google. In fact, we have plenty of articles like this that get almost no organic traffic.

Data of Ahrefs article that gets very little organic traffic

Why do we still create them?

These articles are mostly data studies, and there are three main reasons why we create them:

Thought leadership – These studies educate, inform, and enlighten people in our industry on how things are (or where they’re heading). They lend numbers and credibility for what marketers want to do—convince their bosses to invest in SEO, show stakeholders where to direct resources, etc. This, in turn, makes us top of mind.

Show off our data – The core of our product is data. These studies help “flex” our data muscles.

Linkbait – These studies usually attract tons of links as other publications quote them.

Here’s how you can do it:

A. Find an interesting topic

You can’t just create any data study and expect publicity. It needs to be interesting—or at least interesting to people who may cite them (e.g., journalists).

One way to find interesting data is to find topics that people are already talking about subjectively and create objective data to address them.

Dividing the workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on their strengths. The improvements are similar on desktop and mobile. Most of the focus in 2021 was on mobile results.

For example, a popular question in the SEO industry is, “How long does it take to rank in Google?” And almost every blog post that tried to answer this question based the reply on subjective experience.

Excerpt from blog post giving a subjective answer

So, in 2017, we conducted a study using our data to answer the question. It remains one of our most popular data studies and has since generated a total of 3,200 backlinks from ~1,500 unique websites:

Data showing Ahrefs' study getting tons of backlinks and referring domains

Another tactic is reconducting popular but outdated studies. Here’s how you can find these studies:

Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer

Enter a search term like [industry] + “study,” [industry] + “survey,” [industry] + “research,” or [industry] + “data”

Set the filter to an “intitle” search

Set the Published filter to an older date range (e.g., 2010-2015)

Sort the results by referring domains

For example, doing this for the SEO industry surfaces a few studies we can recreate that already have thousands of links: