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Exploring your Ahrefs account

How to add and use portfolios

Video for this tutorial is coming soon.

Now that you’ve added your first project, it’s time to add your first portfolio.

A portfolio is a list of target URLs that you can group together to further analyze their metrics in bulk.

Depending on your plan, you can group up a list of URLs from up to 10 different domains and analyze their aggregate metrics on the Dashboard.

To add your first portfolio, click on the Create button on the Dashboard and choose Portfolio.

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Here, you can define the scope of each target URL—much like you would with a project. Then you can name the portfolio and share it with the appropriate team members.

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Once saved, the portfolio will be shown on your dashboard along with top-level metrics. Clicking on any of the metrics will take you to the corresponding report in Site Explorer.

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Here are some actionable use cases.

Track the performance of your competitors

Add your competitors’ websites to a portfolio to get extensive competitive intelligence insights:

  • See the top winners and losers in terms of their top pages and keywords: (Top pages report > Traffic filter: Improved)
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  • Check out the pace at which they acquire new links and referring domains: (Backlinks report > Dofollow > New backlinks > Status: Newly published)
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  • Study their paid ads and paid keywords to understand which ones resonate with your target audience: (Paid pages report > Keywords and Ads nested tables)
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Track the performance of your content writers

If you have an internal content team, create a portfolio for each content writer and track their performance over time.

For example, our content lead, Joshua Hardwick, has written 147 articles, which rank for 46,000 keywords that generate close to 250,000 organic search visits a month.

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Track the performance of the published content on your client’s website

If you’re an agency, create a portfolio of your published content on your customer’s website and track the percentage (%) of organic traffic and backlinks it has generated compared to the rest of the website.

The ROI of your content should be more transparent this way.

For example, if we were to group our free tools into a portfolio, we’d notice they generate close to 1 million organic search traffic a month.

That’s 30% of our total traffic of 3 million search visits.

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