Ahrefs review
Last updated: March 2023
- One of the most popular link analysis tools on the market
- Full suite of competitor research tools – analysing keywords and pages as well as backlinks
- Complete set of tools to grow your search traffic, research your competitors and monitor your niche
What is Ahrefs?
Ahrefs originally made it’s name as a backlink analysis tool, quickly becoming one of the ‘big 3’ alongside Majestic and Moz’s Link Explorer.
Ahrefs is synonymous with reliable and extensive backlink data, and has now extended its offering to provide a wealth of competitor research data.
What does Ahrefs do?
Ahrefs now offers a wide range of marketing, research and monitoring tools, and updates its offering on a regular basis.
The main areas it can help you with are:
- Backlink analysis
- Keyword research
- Rank tracking
- Competitive analysis
- Content research
- Web monitoring
Ahref’s Site Explorer tool is perhaps the most useful, and is where you can access the full backlink data of any website or URL as well as insights into the keywords driving the organic search traffic to the site/URL.
Site Explorer is a powerful competitor research tool that combines three tools into one intuitive interface:
- Organic traffic research – Identify the keywords that your competitors are ranking for and which pages/content bring the most traffic from search.
- Backlink checker – Discover which websites are linking to your competitors and measure the quality of their backlink profile.
- Paid traffic research – Learn whether your competitors are doing paid search advertising and where they funnel their paid traffic.
Organic traffic research
Simply enter the website address of your competitor into the Site Explorer, and Ahrefs will show what keywords are bringing the most traffic to the site overall, the specific URL you entered, or the subfolder.
If you want to get an insight into what traffic your competitors are getting from organic search, and which specific keywords are driving the traffic, this is one of the best tools on the market.
Backlink checker
The first stage of many successful link building campaigns is analysing the backlink profiles of your main search competitors.
Using Ahref’s Site Explorer tool, you can quickly access all the links pointing to a competitors domain or specific page/subfolder, and see metrics like Domain Authority, anchor text and surrounding text and when the link was found all on the same screen.
Ahrefs has the fastest backlink crawler in the industry and boasts the world’s biggest index of live backlinks (over 15 trillion links), which makes for an extensive dataset for backlink research.
How much does Ahrefs cost?
There are four different pricing packages for Ahrefs, offering greater access to their extensive dataset the more you pay.
The packages are:
- Lite – £79 per month
- Standard – £159 per month
- Advanced – £319 per month
- Enterprise – £799 per month
Ahrefs Lite
The entry-level package is for one user and gives you five campaigns to monitor. You can track 300 keywords, run one site audit per month (with a limit of 10,000 URLs) and run 25 URLs per day on Site Explorer.
Ahrefs Standard
Again this package is for one user but gives your 10 campaigns to monitor. You can track 1,000 keywords, run 10 site audits per month (with a limit of 10,000 URLs) and run 100 URLs per day on Site Explorer.
Ahrefs Advanced
This package is for three users and gives your 25 campaigns to monitor. You can track 4,000 keywords, run 25 site audits per month (with a limit of 1.25m URLs) and run 2,000 URLs per day on Site Explorer.
Ahrefs Enterprise
Designed for online marketing agencies, this package is for five users – although more can be added if needed – and offers the greatest access to Ahref’s dataset.
For more information on the different pricing structures and what the different packages offer, visit: https://ahrefs.com/pricing-plans
- One of the most popular link analysis tools on the market
- Full suite of competitor research tools – analysing keywords and pages as well as backlinks
- Complete set of tools to grow your search traffic, research your competitors and monitor your niche
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About the Author
Luke Glassford is an SEO expert with over 15 years’ experience.
During his time working in SEO, Luke has set-up an SEO agency, worked as an in-house SEO for a major national company and managed his own successful SEO consultancy - using a lot of different SEO tools along the way!