Ahrefs is a modern SEO software suite which is designed for marketing professionals. The digital marketing tool is most useful for people who are attempting to increase rankings for their websites. In short, Ahrefs.com is popular for Search Engine Optimisation specialists.
Ahrefs offers the following features:
- Keyword search tool
- Keyword analysis
- Backlink analyser
- Competitor analysis
- Site checker
- Site audits
- Historic and current website rankings
The main aim of this guide is to provide an overview of the Ahrefs tool as well as a walkthrough on how you can get the most out of it. Ahrefs is an excellent tool which is easy to use once you get to know the ins and outs of it. In this guide, we will be learning how to use Ahrefs and what can be gained from using its various features.
Getting Started
It is possible to use Ahrefs without having to pay a subscription fee. However, you will not be able to use the majority of its tools.With that being said, Ahrefs does sometimes offer 30 day free trials for new users. There are four different plans which are available: Lite, Standard, Advanced and Enterprise.
The Enterprise plan is primarily for larger agencies which require numerous employees to use and work with Ahrefs’ different tools. The Enterprise plan starts at £799 per month. A one man show who works alone on their own website will be able to get away with the Lite membership plan which costs £79 per month.
Site Explorer
Perhaps the most used tool of Ahrefs is its Site Explorer tool. This tool allows users to get an in-depth look at the backlink profile and search the estimated traffic of any website on the internet. Ahrefs has its own crawler robots which help to build its huge database. These robots crawl websites on the internet so that they can store information on its keywords and backlinks. Ahrefs estimates the amount of traffic generated by keywords and then applies this to their backend in order to compile a comprehensive report to its users. Below, we have noted exactly what information users get access to via the Ahrefs Site Explorer:
- The total backlinks of any website
- The total referring domains of any website
- Number of organic keywords the site ranks for
- Estimated organic traffic of any website
- Estimated traffic value of any website
- Ahrefs own URL and Domain ratings which are based on the quality of a websites backlinks
The Site Explorer tool is available to users on all Ahrefs plans.
Keywords Explorer
The Keywords Explorer tool allows the user to see the estimated search volume of a keyword. Keywords range from search engine results to the estimated search volume of an Amazon or YouTube keyword. This tool helps users to know how much traffic volume they can expect to receive if their page ranks highly for a certain keyword or keyword cluster. The tool also gives information on similar keywords. Ideally, a single web page, for example, would rank for multiple keyword terms.
We can look at one example from SlotsHawk.com, which has a page ranking for the keyword high RTP slots. As well as its main keyword, Ahrefs tells us that the page also ranks for over 100 other similar keywords which are shown below via the Site Explorer tool.
The high RTP slots keyword itself has 1.1k global searches per month, but matching terms such as high RTP slot games and high RTP slots UK also have a high number of searches per month. Therefore, users can use the Keywords Explorer tool to plan content pages so that they can ensure the page has the best possibility of ranking for as many similar keywords as possible. This is essentially an analysis tool for all keywords.
The Keywords Explorer tool is available to users on all Ahrefs plans.
Site Audit
The site audit tool allows the user to add his/her website to Ahrefs as a project. Ahrefs will then analyse the entire site before giving it a health score out of 100. Essentially, this tool crawls the website to spot if it has any internal URL errors. Once complete, the tool will specifically state if there are any errors which the user can then fix themselves. Depending on which plan is being used, the user has the option to create numerous ‘’Projects’ (each website is its own ‘Project’. This ensures that companies/agencies can include numerous websites and keep them all separate from one another.
There are plenty of tools which go into much more depth when it comes to auditing a website. However, Ahrefs does a decent job, in our opinion. The site audit tool is available to users on all Ahrefs plans. However, in order to audit several of your own sites, you need to get the Advanced or Enterprise plan.
Rank Tracker
The Ahrefs Rank Tracker allows users to track a certain number of specific keywords. This makes it much easier to keep track of valuable keywords which users are either aiming to increase their rankings on or looking to keep as stable as possible. The Rank Tracker is simple to use. The only real downside is that Ahrefs crawlers are sometimes quite slow to update. For users who are tracking less than 20 keywords, it is often easier to do the manual search yourself.
The Ahrefs rank tracker is available to users on all paid plans.
Wrapping Up
This guide has provided you with the required knowledge on Ahrefs different tools and how to use them. I hope this guide was significant for you.
