What is the fastest way to check the organic popularity of a long list of websites?

If you’re actively researching the players in a specific vertical, e.g. publishing, it’s very handy to know how to quickly check the organic popularity of the sites on your list. 

1° Create your list of websites

First, of course, you need a list to analyse. Earlier today, I found a list of digital publishing startups compiled by the author Michael Bhaskar. You can view it on Google Docs. 

2° Sanitise the list 

Then I needed to clean the list to keep only the URLs. I copied the full list and pasted it as values (unformatted) in a Google Sheet. I applied a formula in the first cell of the second column to clean the content of the first cell (A1).

=right(A1,(len(A1)-(find("http",A1)-1)))

I dragged down the formula across all cells to the bottom of the second column and ended up with a clean list of URLs. 

3° Batch analysis on ahrefs

Then I copied the list and pasted it into the batch analysis tool on ahrefs. 

In a few seconds I got a detailed analysis of the first 200 domains on my list (if your list is longer than 200 entries, you’ll need to run multiple batch analyses). I sorted the list by organic traffic in descending order. 

Here’s an excerpt of the result. 

 You can apply the same process for any kind of list you’d like to analyse: a list of Amazon affiliate sites, a list of Shopify-powered e-commerce websites, a list of SaaS tools, etc.

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