Ahrefs is an online tool used by website owners, search engine optimization experts and digital marketers. The tool gives users the ability to track the keywords any website is ranking on Google for. Thus, users can quickly see which websites are performing well in comparison with their competitors.
Ahrefs offers the following features:
- Keyword searches
- Website organic keyword rankings
- Traffic value
- Referring domains checker
- Track new and lost referring domains
- Keyword volume checker
- Internal backlinks
- Internal link anchor texts
The aim of this BravoTech guide is to explain what Ahrefs can offer its users as well as walk you through how you can get the most out of it.
Ahrefs Explained
Tools such as Ahrefs have their own website crawlers which crawl Google keywords and then report them back to the host. This allows them to collect information on all websites which have Google rankings.
It is possible to use Ahrefs without paying a subscription fee. However, you will not be able to use many of its tools. If you are a new customer, Ahrefs does sometimes give out a one month free trial, which we would always recommend taking. In our opinion, the best option is to take the lite subscription which costs approximately $99 per month.
The Lite plan is the least expensive plan and is primarily used by individual site owners. There are a few other Ahrefs plans available, the most expensive being the enterprise plan which is purchased by larger agencies with dozens to hundreds of employees. The enterprise plan allows multiple users to be logged into the account at the same time.
Keywords Explorer
This tool allows you to research different keywords. It gives you an estimation on how often each individual keyword is searched for per month. This is not limited to Google, either. The Keywords Explorer tool can tell you searches for certain keywords on Amazon or Youtube as well as all of the main search engines.
We can take a look at an example from UK gambling affiliate website SlotsHawk.com, which has a page ranking specifically for new slot sites related keywords. According to Keywords Explorer, the keyword new slot sites receive 2,000 searches per month on Google in the United Kingdom. However, similar keywords also have similar searches per month.
Users can therefore use this feature to plan content pages on their websites with the knowledge of knowing exactly what users are likely to be searching for.
Site Explorer
Another popular feature of Ahrefs is the Site Explorer. The user can see the keywords for which the website ranks. This is good when developing a new site and other site has to be considered. With this tool, you can get a list of all the keyword your competitors rank for. The second step would be to use Keyword Explorer to build good pages superior to those of your competitor.
Moreover, it will provide you with the site’s backlink profile. In this case, you may view the sites that linked to the site and then reach out to these same sites for your own link building purpose. Although Google has recently come out and stated that the strength of backlinks as a ranking factor will drop, backlinks are still an important factor when it comes to whether a website ranks well or not.
Site Audit
All Ahrefs users who pay for a subscription will be able to do a site audit on their own website. Ahrefs will analyse the entire website and give it a final score out of 100. This tool basically crawls your site to see if there are any internal linking errors or similar. Once the audit is complete, you can then fix them yourself.
Depending on what plan is being used, users have the option to create multiple projects.
Calendar
The calendar feature is a good one to track daily keyword rankings. Each day Ahrefs will tell you which keywords have moved in rankings and which have been lost. This makes it very easy to track the progress of individual websites.
This tool ensures you can evaluate a site across a short or long period of time.
Final Words
We sincerely hope that this article has helped you to decide whether or not Ahrefs is the right tool to use for you and your website. Ahrefs in 2023 is slightly worse to use compared to the past, as they have introduced a credit system. Ahrefs lite will allow you to use 500 credits for the subscription price. Every time you click on something, it will use up one credit. As you can imagine, your credits can soon be depleted.
However, despite the credits system, Ahrefs is still one of the best tools on the market and has a good UX layout. Other similar tools include the well-known SemRush.
