Online marketing is not rocket science, but it’s not easy as well. Even after months of extensive research and applications of various techniques, one may still end up with the question “Why is my site not ranking well?” Outranking everyone else is an arduous task, and the best way to do this is to dive deep into what others are doing. Learn from your mistakes they say. But I guess it is better to learn from others’ successes and mistakes. Ahrefs is a powerful toolset that lets you do this and more.
With Ahrefs, you get to know what your competitors are doing, what keywords they are ranking for, what sites link to these keywords, and all other steps that they are doing so that you can improve them and make better strategies for your own campaign.
TOOLS
Ahrefs comes with amazing tools to get you ahead of the game.
- Site Explorer
- Content Explorer
- Position Explorer
- Position Tracker
- Crawl Report
Let’s get to know what these tools do.
Site Explorer
This tool allows you to choose a specific URL or root domain for link research. Just by looking at Site Explorer’s results, you will find an overview of the most recent 45 days through Ahref’s crawl history.
On the results page, you will see stats such as total referring backlinks, IPs and subnets, backlink types pointing to the site, unique domains, link breakdown of domain extensions, anchor text breakdowns, and link charts.
Aside from the overview report, there are other research options to choose from in Site Explorer. Here some of them:
New Links – In this tab, you can find newly discovered links back to a previous month or inside a current month. Choose whatever day you want and get a list of linking URLs, anchor text used for the link and target link page. This can help you reverse engineer a link building campaign from your competitor.
Lost Links – The lost links report can help you find links that your competitor has dropped. From here you can contact the webmaster to check if you can earn the link for your good use.
Anchor Text – This report lists the anchor texts from external links. You will see the pages being linked to and from the site that you are investigating.
Crawled Pages – With this report, you can see crawl stats like
- Page URL and Title
- Crawl date
- Page size
- Internal links
- External links
This report is most useful with widely known internally linked-to pages. You can also check how these pages are structured.
Referring Domains – Simply enough, this report is the referring domains and number of links coming from that domain.
SERP Positioning – Ahrefs also provides ranking data for keywords. The data generated come from Google and Yahoo/Bing.
Content Explorer
This tool helps you find the most popular content. You can conduct your search by filtering by backlinks or shares and date range. Learn how your competitors’ content works and check out the difference between them and yours.
Position Explorer
Here, you get to know what keywords your competitors rank for so that you can use them to your advantage. Furthermore, you can see which of their pages bring traffic so that you can mimic whatever they are doing. And if you are spending a lot on PPC but you feel you are losing out on expenses, you can uncover your competitors’ PPC strategy with this tool.
Position Tracker
Aside from learning about your competitors’ performance, you need to know where you stand as well. With position tracker, you can track your keyword rankings, local rank, mobile rank and overall ranking history.
Ahrefs Labs
Under Ahrefs labs, there are several more useful tools for your SEO campaign.
Apps – Developers are welcome to create apps based on Ahrefs data and showcase them under the Apps menu. These applications can be used by other subscribers to extend their capabilities further.
Ahrefs API – Here is where developers can develop their apps based on the data available from Ahrefs.
Ahrefs Top – Is a free tool to check the domain position based on Ahrefs’ data.
Domain Comparison – Under domain comparison, you can compare up to 5 websites and check their referring domains and IPs, backlinks, backlink types, and graphs of changes.
SEO Toolbar – This toolbar allows you to monitor metrics for pages and domains. It lets you instantly assess URL and domain rating, total backlinks, total referring domains, social media metrics, and detailed info on pages and domains.
Quick Batch Analysis – This tool lets you generate several backlinks reports at the same time by entering a list of domains and URLs. Batch analysis lets you compare metrics and analyze URLs.
DATA INTEGRITY
You need not worry about data integrity. Every twenty-four hours, Ahrefs crawls over five billion pages. That means an average of 60,000 pages per second. During this cycle, the data on four billion backlinks gets updated, metrics for over two million root domains are re-computed metrics for two trillion URLs are updated as well.
For each of the five billion crawled pages, the backlink quality and quantity are both computed. Social shares data is gathered technologies used to build them are verified.
How does Ahrefs manage all these? With four thousand CPU cores, ten petabytes of storage, 50 terabytes of RAM and a dedicated team that thinks in an above average way, anything is possible.
HOW WILL I BENEFIT FROM AHREFS?
There are three things that I like about Ahrefs.
- Speed
- data export
- report filtering
It is amazing to see the response time so fast all the time. Being able to easily export data makes it fun to work with, and report filtering lets you customize the data that you want to be shown. You do not have to work with your exported data to customize and slice and dice whatever you need. You can do that right out of the website before even exporting the data.
WHO SHOULD USE AHREFS?
As we mentioned earlier, search engine optimization may not be rocket science, but it sure is not as easy as baking a pie. After months of trial and error, you may still find yourself wondering why your site is till not ranking. You need good data to help you move forward. This is what Ahrefs is all about. Learn not just from your mistakes, but from other people’s ups and downs as well. Ahrefs is for everyone who is running an SEO campaign and has a head for useful data.
PRICING POINT
There are currently three paid plans with prices depending on campaigns, rows, tracked keywords and level of tools included. For beginners, there is a newbie plan which is free and lets you familiarize yourself with the tools available. However, the capability of these tools is limited. Here are the pricing points for the three paid personal plans.
| LITE | STANDARD | ADVANCED |
| $79 /mo | $179 /mo | $399 /mo |
| 3 Campaigns | 10 Campaigns | 30 Campaigns |
| 250 Tracked Keywords | 750 Tracked Keywords | 2,500 Tracked Keywords |
| 5 Million Rows/mo | 30 Million Rows/mo | 125 Million Rows/mo |
| * used for report generation and CSV exports | * used for report generation and csv exports | * used for report generation and CSV exports |
| Site Explorer | Site Explorer | Site Explorer |
| Positions Explorer | Positions Explorer | Positions Explorer |
| Content Explorer | Content Explorer | Content Explorer |
| Keywords Explorer | Keywords Explorer | Keywords Explorer |
| SAVE $158 Annually | SAVE $358 Annually | SAVE $798 Annually |
In case you are wondering, you can change your plan anytime you want whether you want to upgrade, downgrade or cancel your account. There are no hidden charges nor will you be asked to sign a contract for a long term commitment. There is no free trial for the paid plans, but there is a 7-day money back guarantee.
For agencies and enterprises, there are also packages for optimized performance. Here are the three high requirement packages:
