Ahrefs: the essential SEO tool

Ahrefs is an SEO tool that delivers a large volume of data so you can build or monitor ranking strategies. It is often known for its backlink analysis, but Ahrefs is not limited to that.

Why SEO tools matter for a ranking strategy

Today, SEO, or search engine optimization, is an integral part of building a site if you want to optimize its visibility on the web. To put an organic-search strategy in place, you need to know certain online tools that spare you a tedious analysis job. Using this kind of tool regularly is one of the best strategies for ranking your site in search-engine results pages and therefore generating as much traffic as possible.

Ahrefs: one of the most powerful ranking tools

Every SEO consultant knows Ahrefs and uses it. This online backlink-analysis service, launched in 2011, has gradually become one of the essential tools in organic search. Useful both for web marketers who want to grow their audience and for people who work on link building across several websites, it lets you control link acquisition on the web. The analyses Ahrefs produces, if they are used well, help you optimize your site so it ends up in the first search-engine results.

Even though Ahrefs is known as a backlink-analysis tool, its only function at launch, it is no longer limited to that feature and is much more complete. A direct competitor of Majestic and SEMRush, this software is used for SEO audits, marketing analyses, content creation, and link prospecting. Ahrefs data can also be used to analyze other sites, such as those of your direct competitors, and to understand what makes them succeed on the web. Like most tools, Ahrefs offers certain essential features such as exporting data in CSV format or creating an analysis report.

Ahrefs, constantly fed with new data

All of the Ahrefs teams collect and store an impressive volume of data. They crawl the web continuously to feed a database that is one of the largest in the world. Every day, they discover 1 800 000 new pages and update the metrics of 72 000 000 pages. Today, its keyword explorer, a mini search engine that gives each keyword a search volume and more advanced metrics, covers 6.1 billion keywords.

Thanks to this regularly updated database, Ahrefs has become the essential tool for SEO experts.

To learn how to analyze the important information and turn it into concrete actions, see below some of the features this ranking software offers, and explanations of how to use them productively.

Ahrefs’ main features

Site Explorer

On the “Site Explorer” page, you can enter a site’s URL in a search bar to get information on its inbound and outbound link profile. On that page, a chart also shows you the site’s new referring domains and those it has lost. It also lets you see which anchors were used to link to the analyzed site.

Ahrefs creates several charts from its database on the analyzed site. Still on the “Site Explorer” page, charts are generated to represent the evolution of organic traffic, organic keywords, and the ranking of target keywords on the SERP. Ahrefs lets you retrieve this data from results pages all over the world. With Ahrefs, you can track the evolution of your site’s traffic in Morocco or in Japan.

Ahrefs’ “Site Explorer” page is not limited to these few tools. It would take a dozen pages to present them all. Nothing stops you from browsing the site and testing every feature, though.

Content Explorer

The “Content Explorer” page, a content explorer, displays the most popular content on the web, whatever the topic. Ahrefs lets you refine your searches using filter and sort functions. Language, the number of shares on social networks, or the search volume that matches your criteria will then be displayed.

Searches on the “Content Explorer” page can be filtered with different options:

• The “In content” option returns articles with the keyword only inside the body of the articles.

• The “In title” option lets you search for keywords in a page’s title.

• The “Everywhere” option asks the search engine to find the keyword in the title and in the body of the articles.

Content Explorer is ideal for finding a topic for a new article and for staying on top of trends in your field.

Whether you are a blogger or an SEO, “Content Explorer” finds the topics that are buzzing and that have strong traffic potential for your future articles.

Metrics and position tracking

Most SEO experts start their workday by looking at how sites are moving in the Google rankings. Ahrefs has made this check simpler with its “Rank Tracker” page, a dashboard that lets you monitor position changes on search engines and receive pointers on what to improve. You can analyze projects in progress, and you can also keep an eye on your competitors and their traffic.

The Ahrefs teams understood that the best way to make sense of all the “Rank Tracker” data is to make it visual. That is why they created 5 different charts that show a site’s progress at a glance:

• Visibility: a chart that shows the percentage of possible traffic thanks to the keyword your site is working. For example, if you rank in the first 10 Google results on a query you target, your visibility will be 100%.

• Average position: an average, from 1 to 100, relative to the ranking of the keywords you want to rank on

• Traffic: a traffic curve over a month

• SERP features: a view of what is present in the SERP for each keyword. For example, whether your site appears in shopping results on a given query or in AdWords results.

• Positions: displays the number of keywords that have risen or fallen in the SERP results. This chart shows Google positions from 0 to 12.

Alerts and notifications

Ahrefs also includes an alert system. It lets you set your criteria so you receive notifications about a site or a keyword. You can add alerts if you want to stay constantly up to date on how your site or your competitors’ sites are evolving. This feature makes life easier for SEO experts, who no longer need to check every day whether their work is paying off.

How much does Ahrefs cost?

Ahrefs is ranking software that is not necessarily affordable for an individual. Its first version is available at $79 a month for individual users and can climb to $399 for extra features. Per month, count a minimum of $499 for three users and $2 500 for twenty-five users. Those prices are justified by the quality of this online tool and the large number of analyses it delivers.

By using Ahrefs to maximize your site’s organic search, you increase your chances of publishing content that people will want to read and share. You can then become more visible on the web and increase your revenue.