Ahrefs is an SEO suite that became extremely popular over the past few years. It contains multiple tools for competitor analysis, including link building, keyword research, rank tracking, technical site audits, an explorer for content ideas and more.
Ahrefs started as a link index software for link building, but it most definitely has advanced a lot ever since. It offers a few different packages, that all offer the same features, just more rows of data for those paying more. Starting at $99/month (or $82/month if you’re paying 12 months up front). While Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free demo account, it does offer a 7 day trial for only $7. It is one of the most affordable SEO tools, with a very clear positive ROI.
Used by SEOs of all levels, from juniors and beginners, to advanced SEOs at some of the top online companies.
Direct Competitors
SEMRush, Moz Pro
Best known for:
- Link index with multiple filtering options.
- Keyword research, on both local and global scale.
- Competitive Intelligence: Keywords, pages, subfolders that work for competitors.
- Number of keywords a website ranks for.
- Traffic Value.
- DR (Domain Rating) per site.
We love it for:
Large Link Index, with the ability to filter by link types
Ahrefs allows you to see a list of all backlinks, or just an example from every domain. Filtering the links by DR (Domain Rating), Follow or Nofollow tag, by TLD, date, or domain’s organic traffic.
New, Lost, Broken backlinks.
With the Backlinks profile, you can find new links added by date, links that were lost, and also broken links per domain. You can of course export every list, and track your backlink profile over time. The broken links are URLs you should fix, and the same report for your competitors, is often a low hanging fruit you should try and get your hands on.
Top Pages
The top pages report shows you the most popular pages a domain has from a Search traffic point of view. It’s extremely powerful since it shows you which pages work the best for your competitors. You can then dive deeper and get the estimated search traffic to every page, its monetary value, and the number of different keywords that URL ranks for in the top 100 search results. As always with Ahrefs, you can dive even further, and get a full list of all of these keywords, per page.
Competing Domains
Every competitive research begins with a mapping of your direct and indirect competitors. From an SEO point of view, we think that Ahrefs does the best job with identifying SEO competitors because of its large keyword data. Ahrefs checks which other domains are rankings for the same group of keywords, and lists every site’s top competitors.
Site Audit, probably the best for small businesses and freelancers
Ahrefs offers a simple yet effective crawler that can easily handle every small to medium size site. Perfect for small to medium-sized crawls, and provides great insights into errors, pages that need to be fixed, 404s, broken pages or images, duplicated items, and so on and on.
Graph with number of keywords a site ranks for on 1-3, 4-10, 11-100 over time
One of our favorite features of Ahrefs is this graph it offers for every domain under the Organic search report. In seconds, you can understand the search visibility of a domain over time, what happened during the last Google update or changes to the site, and how the rankings are distributed. And what’s the ratio of rankings 1-3 to 11-100 for your domain?
Link Intersect: Provides you with the sites that link to your competitors, but not to you.
Link intersect visualizes link gaps between your domain, and your top competitors.All of these are linking to ALL of your top competitors, but not to you? This is something to check out. These might be low-hanging fruits.
Missing Features
- Referring traffic data
- Total traffic data
- Site category grouping
Pricing
- Lite – $99/month
- Standar – $179/month
- Advanced – $399/month
- Agency – $999/month
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