Ahrefs is a search engine optimization (SEO) software suite that includes many features to help you perform keyword research, find and validate backlinks, and monitor your website’s technical SEO health.
It also lets you do competitor analysis, which can be incredibly useful for identifying high-quality link building opportunities. But it’s expensive — and, as a result, some people wonder if it’s worth its price tag.
Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
Keywords Explorer is a powerful tool that can help you find keywords and phrases that your target customers are typing into Google to look for solutions to their problems. It helps you find thousands of keywords, analyze their ranking difficulty and calculate the traffic potential of each phrase.
It also lets you see search intent data – the type of queries people using when they enter a keyword, such as ‘navigational’, ‘informational’ or ‘commercial’. This is a valuable metric to use when assessing the value of a phrase and can give you an idea of whether you should focus on it.
The biggest draw for Ahrefs, though, is its wide range of search engine data. While many key competitors only offer data for Google, Ahrefs gives you access to data from YouTube and Amazon too — a huge selling point for any serious SEO project!
This gives you a wealth of data about the search queries your competition are using to rank on Google, and allows you to create more targeted SEO campaigns. The ‘traffic potential’ score (pictured above) is especially useful, giving you a rough indication of how much traffic you could expect if you ranked for a particular phrase.
Another unique metric that you’ll find in Ahrefs is ‘Return Rate’, which shows you how often people perform searches on a given term over a month or year. The higher the number, the more likely it is that someone will search for the same phrase in the future.
These two metrics are incredibly important for any serious SEO campaign, as they can help you determine the relative competitiveness of any keyword phrase. As well as this, they can be very useful when determining the best keywords to choose for your site’s content.
In addition, you can filter your results by region if you need to focus on local SEO. This is great if you’re looking to target a specific city or country with your content, or if you want to find niche-specific topics to target.
In addition to this, you can also filter your results by domain, allowing you to focus on high-authority sites that are already performing well for certain keywords. You can then check their domain rating score, the URLs of their pages that are ranking for a certain term and more.
Backlinks
Having the right backlinks is one of the most important factors in how well a website performs in search engines. This is where Ahrefs comes in handy, as they provide a massive database of links that’s refreshed every 15-20 minutes, and they also have some other interesting tools that can help you build backlinks.
The most basic way to start building backlinks is to find a site or page that ranks well for your target keyword and approach them. It’s a fairly simple process, as you can do this in Ahrefs using their Site Explorer tool.
Once you have found a relevant page or site, you can use their ‘Referring Domains Report’ to get a list of all the domains that link to it. These can be sorted by different metrics (e.g. DR), and you can even filter for specific languages.
If you want to go a bit deeper, you can also look at the backlink profile of a domain. This will show you how many links the site has, and what their anchor text is. This can be very useful if you’re trying to build links from high-authority sites.
This can be a bit time-consuming, though, so you might want to set up filters that automatically sort the results by a particular metric. For example, you can set up a filter that will only show sites with ‘Russian’ in their URLs (which are notorious for link spam).
Another important thing to consider is whether or not the page or website in question is new. A brand-new page or website is more likely to have people linking to it if they’re writing about something fresh, so you might want to start looking at these pages as potential targets for your link building efforts.
Lastly, you can also use Ahrefs’ content explorer to discover what’s currently ranking for your target keywords. This will help you decide what types of content you can write to boost your rankings for those phrases.
Overall, it’s a great tool that’s used by many of the world’s leading SEO experts. It’s not free, but they do offer a 7-day trial so you can give it a go before you commit to any money.
Ahrefs Site Audit
Ahref’s Site Audit is a powerful tool that can help you uncover technical and on-page SEO issues that may be hurting your website’s ranking or the user’s experience. It also lets you identify your most effective keywords and backlinks.
It’s super easy to use and is becoming one of the best SEO tools on the market – run an audit to find out what’s holding your site back from search engine rankings. It crawls your entire website, provides an overall SEO health score and visualises key data in charts – all completely customizable for the client.
Using a combination of Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data, PSI analyzes your site’s speed index, first input delay (FID), first and largest contentful paints (FCP, LCP), cumulative layout shift (CLS) and total blocking time. It also gives you a score between 0-100, with a higher number meaning your site is functioning quickly and efficiently, and a lower score indicating there are errors that need to corrected.
Page speed is important to Google and users, as it affects your ranking, conversion rates and overall experience. It’s essential to have a fast and secure website to avoid the risk of your visitors leaving or being unable to access your website due to slow page speeds.
It also helps prevent security threats such as phishing, malware and hacking attacks. In fact, Google states that 53% of mobile visitors leave websites that take more than 3 seconds to load and recommends checking your website’s speed with PageSpeed Insights.
In addition to highlighting pages that aren’t fully loading, Ahref’s Site Audit will also tell you which pages are missing incoming internal links – this is an important issue because it wastes “link equity” and may lead to Google penalizing your site. It also highlights pages that aren’t fully loading due to HTTPS issues, which are more common than you might think.
It’s also a good idea to review the number of 404 pages on your site, as this is another common indexability issue that can be very detrimental to search engine rankings. To do this, simply go to the indexability report in Site Audit and check the number of ‘noindex page’ warnings.
Ahrefs Content Explorer
Content Explorer is one of Ahrefs’ most important tools, helping you to find top-performing content in any niche. It allows you to research over a billion pages and filter them by key SEO and social metrics, including organic traffic, domain rating, referring domains, traffic value and socially shared content.
It’s also useful for generating new content ideas and finding sharers and influencers to reach out to with your own content. In addition, it has a disavow tool that will help you to clean up a list of ‘bad links’ pointing to your site so that Google won’t consider them as ranking signals.
Keywords Explorer lets you search for keywords across the web, using a range of operators to make your searches more specific. You can also filter the results by domain, page rank and other parameters. It’s a great way to find the best keywords for your site and generate a list of potential targets for link building.
However, it’s worth remembering that this is a very niche-specific tool – it won’t be of much use to those targeting new markets. And it’s not cheap either – at $99 per month for the Lite plan, it’s not exactly a budget-friendly option.
So, if you’re looking to do some serious keyword research, you might want to consider another tool that offers more features and a more comprehensive suite of features. In this article, we’ll take a look at three such alternatives: BuzzSumo and SEMrush.
While it’s not quite as advanced as Semrush, BuzzSumo’s content explorer is a really helpful tool for finding popular and relevant content to promote on social media. It allows you to browse trending topics, identify high-traffic keywords, and even compile questions from forums and review sites like Reddit or Quora for further inspiration.
You can even find the most shared content for a given keyword to come up with a list of content ideas that you can then use to create a series of blog posts and tweets. And it can be a great tool for helping you to get ahead of the game and establish yourself as a thought leader in your field.
Recommended readings:
- The Best SEO Tools in 2022
- Where Should You Spend Your SEO Budget?
- What Are Backlinks?
- What is Keyword Research?
