Ahrefs Review: The Swiss Army knife of SEO toolkits

Ahrefs features you’ll love

• 🧰 Site Audit

  This is essentially a technical health check for your site.

  Pressing ahead without it potentially undermines all the work you put in to your research and creating content. If you’re site’s not perfectly indexable and optimised for Google, people will struggle to find it.

  To use Ahref’s Site Audit, simply put in your domain. If you’re website is light on content the results will be with you in a few minutes.

  

  Ahrefs is much, much stricter on potential errors and warnings. My site got a score of 64% (vs. 84% on SEMrush), picking up:

  • Canonical tags that point to redirected URLs
  • Some missing meta descriptions on summary pages
  • Need for more internal links to important pages
  • Some page titles that were too long

  Most importantly, Ahrefs tells you how to fix each of the issues and what best practice is. You can also click on any URL in Site Audit to see all the data that our crawler collected for that URL.

  

  Despite finding the Ahrefs Site Audit report incredibly useful, my only criticism is that it goes OTT on charts. Stick to highlight and prioritising issues and providing step-by-step fixes.

• 🔍 Keyword Explorer

  Anybody with an Ahrefs subscription is likely to live in the platform, with Keywords Explorer probably their most-used tool.

  As the SEO oracle, Ahrefs is sitting on top of a wealth of keyword data and experience. 10.2 billion keywords, 10 search engines and 171 countries to be precise.

  That’s your key to finding out what people are actually searching for in your niche and who’s quenching their thirst with relevant content. Ahrefs covers all the standard results you’d hope for, including SERP features (e.g. featured snippets, Adwords ads, shopping results, etc), search intent, similar terms to compete on and calculating the difficulty of ranking for each keyword.

  

  However, it’s nothing free tools can’t do these days if you’re only concerned with Google.

  The real value in Ahrefs lies in its unique features built around its users, including:

  • Estimating the number of backlinks you’ll need to rank in top 10 for a given keyword
  • Going beyond search volume with estimated ‘clicks’ for each result, helping you to identify true user intent and build a fuller picture of traffic potential (below)
  • Showing what’s jumping to the top of search results as a featured snippet and therefore pushing organic results down (SEMrush bundles all results together so there’s no way of knowing that top result is actually a snippet)
  • Seeing the full history of SERP results to see how long the featured results have held those spots and how hard they are likely to be to displace
  • Expanding your hunt for keyword opportunities in YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu
  • See the ranking history of any website for any keyword to help you to understand the reasons behind any gains/falls
  • Hide keywords you’re already tracking in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker for added clarity
  • Get alerts for any new keywords you and your competitors rank for

  

  This is whole level of analysis that other tools simply can’t match, making Ahrefs the Keyword kings.

  

• 🗺️ Site Explorer

  Good artists copy; great artists steal. So too SEO pros.

  Ahrefs’ Site Explorer is the best tool I’ve seen for keeping tabs on your competitors and demystify their content strategy. A counter attacker’s dream.

  

  You can study a site in isolation or head-to-head against its peers for intel such as:

  • Find out the hot keywords behind the majority of their search traffic… then hijack them for your own site
  • See all your competitor’s backlinks… then filter for white hot guest post opportunities, resource listicles, podcast interviews and more
  • Discover the most shared and linked-to content… then create better, more linkable versions
  • Compare the estimated traffic of multiple sites
  • See how much top pages of any website contribute to their organic search traffic (e.g. 34% of traffic to Ahrefs Blog comes from just 4 pages!)
  • Find content gaps on your own site that are driving traffic to others… then get to work filling them

  

  These features tick the usual SEO tool boxes but where Ahrefs’ Site Explorer really comes into its own is its ‘new’ and ‘movement’ filters for all of the above. With special tabs and its unique email ‘alerts’ feature, Ahrefs makes it as easy as possible to spot keywords and content that’s taking off on your competitors’ sites.

  

  When you’re looking for any advantage you can get, this is a real superpower.

  I’ve used it ride the wave on some great content ideas and spot new marketing tools in niches that were starting to get traction. Open goals I would have otherwise missed.

• 🔗 Backlink research

  Links are the ultimate currency. Building them up is important because they are the single biggest influence on Google rankings. Put simple: You can’t rank without them.

  Ahrefs has some strong tools for unearthing quality links and disavowing harmful ones – particularly when combined with its filter for ‘new’ competitor links. Ahrefs lets you set-up with email alerts for both, meaning you’ll get a ping in your inbox every time there’s significant backlink action on your competitor’s site. Move fast enough and these backlinks are yours for the taking!

  

  Ahrefs can also send alerts every time a broken link is found for content relocated or dropped from your competitor’s site. This is an opportunity to step in and offer your own page as a solution.

  However, this is all pretty standard stuff for the premium SEO tools…

  Ahref’s real backlink superpower comes in the form of its more advanced filters.

  “Domain ranking” and “URL ranking” stops you wasting your time chasing inconsequential links. The next level of refinement can help you to filter out even less valuable “nofollow”, “sponsored” (advertisements, sponsorships) and “UGC” (user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts). It’s this focus that will make you a spectacular link builder.

  

  But any outreach you do will be manual. One MASSIVE shortcoming of Ahrefs is that it has no webmaster outreach tools, unlike SEMrush. I’m going to assume that Ahrefs is aimed at heavyweight SEO professionals, therefore they’re probably using another tool for this, however for people like me it’ll creates a lot of additional work or means taking out a separate subscription for a dedicated outreach tool. Hopefully it’s something they address in the future.

• 📚 Content Research

  Quality content is handsomely rewarded, both in Google’s organic results, and in terms of sales.

  Ahrefs isn’t perfect on the content front but what it lacks in terms of SEMrush’s content creation tools, it more than makes up for in terms of research.

  The Ahrefs Content Explorer is a fountain of great content ideas.

  Build interesting, rank-worthy content around your target Keywords and get added inspiration from knowing what’s already working for others. Enter a topic or keyword and you’ll get a list of the most shared and linked-to content for that keyword.

  

  Once you know what’s hot, the key is to ‘borrow’ those ideas, tweak them, and make something even more useful. That last point is the most important – make sure your page answers the question it ranks for!

  Another neat trick that Ahrefs powers is Content Gap analysis at a URL or subfolder level. Why is this important? It means you can compare like-for-like content with competitors, so if their pricing page is working harder than yours, for example, you can find out why. Or if their blog is driving more traffic, you can trump their top articles.

  Two unique Content Research features to Ahrefs

  Ahrefs is also building new features around latest and greatest tricks of the SEO trade. Correct me if I’m wrong but I haven’t found another tool that can do the following:

  1. Find the republishing dates of articles, in order to hunt down out-of-date pages of lots of backlinks
  2. Find all articles written by a single author, revealing likely guest posting opportunities

  

  Ahrefs is one savvy SEO tool built the input of tens of thousands of SEO professionals. Coming to it late you can soak up all that expertise and use it to your advantage!

• 🔝 Rank Tracker

  Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker is your holding pen for your target keywords.

  The basic plan has a 1000-keyword limit (double that of SEMrush) across 5 projects. However, Ahrefs’ inability to track keywords reliably means it’s still catching up to SEMRush where it really counts. Keywords that my website is >100 for were shown as ranking on P1 in Ahrefs – a quick Google search shows I’m not the only person to have experienced this.

  Assuming Ahrefs can fix this, there are two Rank Tracker features worth mentioning. Ahrefs gives you easy access to the SERP features you rank for and the interactive graph showing your ranking history over the last six months.

• 💸 Paid Keywords research

  Ahrefs has three deceptively simple tools to shed light on a competitor’s entire PPC strategy.

  Use it to see what keywords your competitors are bidding on, the ad copy they’re running, the cost-per-click they’re paying and where they’re sending people. Then use all that info to inspire and enlighten your own paid plan.

  One extra hidden within these tools include Ads History, to see who has been reliably using that keyword to drive lucrative paid traffic over a long time. The thinking being that if it’s working for them, it can for you too.