Ahrefs Review – The Pros and Cons of Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an industry-standard SEO tool with plenty of functionality, from researching keywords to discovering opportunities for backlink building. While best suited for SEO experts, even novice or part-time users can make good use of Ahrefs.
One of its key strengths lies in its ability to send alerts for backlinks, keyword rankings, and web mentions – something most other tools don’t offer.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is key to SEO, and Ahrefs offers several tools to aid this process. Their Keyword Explorer allows users to discover new keyword ideas quickly while also conducting competitor research and offering search suggestions. Furthermore, its average search volume feature shows which terms have the most competition within them and also displays information such as its search volume estimate and can help determine how competitive a term might be.
Businesses can utilize keyword research to craft content that resonates with their target audience and provides useful information, driving more traffic to their website and increasing conversions. Keyword research also helps businesses understand which queries their audience is searching for so that they can improve products or services accordingly.
SERP History provides an excellent way of seeing how search results fluctuate over time, and can help identify opportunities to boost organic rankings.
Ahrefs’ other essential tool, Site Explorer, provides backlink analysis which shows both the quantity and quality of links pointing back to a domain, along with top ranking keywords that help optimize SEO strategies.
Finding your way around this tool takes some practice, but once you do you can gain an edge over competitors by learning to utilize it. Furthermore, this tool can assist in identifying and solving website issues more quickly.
As well as these features, Ahrefs also offers various other helpful tools like Content Explorer and Rank Tracker that make it highly adaptable and can be utilized for many different uses.
Ahrefs offers several plans, with their Lite Plan being ideal for individuals and small businesses just starting out in SEO. Billed monthly, this plan costs $99 and grants access to Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer tools with up to 750 tracked keywords and 2,500 rows per report – plus some advanced features like historical data analysis and batch analysis.
Backlink Analysis
Ahrefs offers an impressive suite of backlink analysis tools. Utilizing them can help you uncover potential new link opportunities, identify competitor links and identify sources for high-quality links – information which will allow you to develop your own link-building strategy and enhance search engine optimization (SEO) performance of websites.
Ahrefs’ greatest strength lies in its ability to generate a list of all websites linking back to a page on your website, providing invaluable data that allows you to understand which pages are receiving the most search engine traffic as well as which require additional work or maintenance. Furthermore, this list also gives an in-depth breakdown of which anchor text types each referring website uses – making this an effective way of identifying any spammy links and eliminating them from your website.
Ahrefs’ ability to track changes in SERP rankings over time is another fantastic feature of Ahrefs that makes it useful in assessing whether or not your SEO strategies are working, providing insight that allows you to adjust them as necessary.
Ahrefs offers you a list of keywords ranking in Google search results for any term, making it possible to determine which keywords are most effective at driving visitors to your website and crafting targeted content marketing campaigns focusing on these high-ranking terms that likely correspond with demand among your target audience.
Ahrefs stands out among the numerous SEO tools by being both comprehensive and dependable, boasting a user-friendly interface and boasting an impressive feature set that digital marketers will find indispensable. It provides users with all they need for successful digital marketing strategies.
Popular SEO tools include SEMrush, Moz, Mangools, Majestic, SpyFu, and SEO PowerSuite. Each of these offers various features like keyword research, backlink analysis and rank tracking; but it is important to remember that none are all-encompassing; each has their own set of features that could prove helpful for specific tasks.
Site Audit
SEO audits involve conducting an in-depth examination of a website to analyze every element, from design and content, through technical elements such as security, navigation, and accessibility. Site audits are generally performed by experts in their respective field and can either focus on one page or all sites. Their aim is to identify any issues which could negatively affect search engine rankings while offering recommendations on how best to address these.
SEO agencies employ tools like Ahrefs, Majestic SEO and SEMRush to conduct site audits for their clients. Using these tools allows SEOs to analyze keywords rankings, competitor analysis and other essential data on backlink profiles – and identify technical SEO issues such as keyword cannibalization that occurs when pages target similar keywords on client sites.
To perform a website audit, first login to Ahrefs and select “Add project”. Next, add your website and choose which keywords to track – more keywords the better! After adding them all up, Ahrefs will show their ranking results along with any referring domains and number of backlinks each of those sites has.
Once your keywords have been entered into the tool, it will provide you with a list of top pages targeting each one, along with links back to your own website pages and details such as visitors, organic traffic and inbound links for each one. Finally, it will display their associated keyword as targets.
If any issues with these pages, such as slow loading times or the absence of internal and external links, are detected, corrective actions can be taken immediately to address them. While some issues may seem minor, others can have more of an effect on SEO than anticipated.
Be mindful that Ahrefs data may become outdated over time; when conducting an audit it’s essential to do your own research and cross-reference against other sources. Therefore, having a tool with regular updates can help mitigate this risk.
Reports
Ahrefs has earned its place as an industry-leader in backlink analysis and keyword research for SEO, offering an abundance of data. However, the software can be confusing to use when reporting SEO results; while exporting data may help build reports manually faster. Furthermore, unlike popular tools like Raven Tools, SpyFu, and Majestic which provide white label options to SEO agencies sharing automated rank tracking updates with clients or internal teams; Ahrefs does not currently offer such options either.
Ahrefs has many tools designed to assist with SEO beyond keyword and backlink research, such as Domain Explorer which gives an extensive list of pages ranking for a particular search phrase on any given website. This can help find any that are missing key elements such as meta descriptions or header tags (minor errors which could prevent Google from indexing an entire page) which might prevent indexation by Google altogether.
Additionally, this tool offers insight into pages and keywords they rank for in search engine results, including visibility, visibility changes over time, organic traffic statistics and CPC data. This can provide a great way of seeing if you are competing for relevant search phrases as well as identify expansion opportunities.
Content Explorer can help you quickly identify popular topics in your niche, which could serve as inspiration for creating fresh content or an outreach campaign.
Site Audit reports offer another useful resource to ensure site health, displaying all technical crawl errors and an overview of Ahrefs domain rating and URL rank for domains most often linked from them as well as frequent referring domains and popular pages on your site. They’re an effective way to quickly detect issues on your website such as duplicate titles, missing meta descriptions or broken links and should be utilized.
Ahrefs can also provide you with a list of the most valuable pages on a competitor website based on unique visitors and value of searches conducted. This can help you gain insight into which keywords and pages are driving most traffic to their website – so that you can develop strategies to outshout them and gain an edge against them.