Looking for a reliable tool to track and optimize your search engine presence? Ahrefs usually comes to the mind first (and in search results too)!
Ahrefs is a leading SEO tool that not only shows your current position in search results, but also shows opportunities to outrank your competitors and secure top positions.
In this comprehensive guide, I will give a brief introduction to Ahrefs and how to use it for better outcomes!
Ahrefs Explained
Ahrefs is an online tool used by website owners, search engine optimization workers and digital marketers. The tool gives users the ability to track the keywords any website is ranking on Google for.
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.
Ahrefs Features
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
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. This allows a user to take a look at the keywords a website is ranking for. This is great if you are building a new website and there is another site in the field you want to rank in. You can use this tool to help you find all of the keywords your competitor is ranking for, you can then use the Keyword Explorer option to create better pages than your competitor.
In addition, this tool will give you the backlink profile of other websites. This means you can see the other websites linking to a website and you can then contact those same websites and reach out to them to try and secure a backlink of our own from them. 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 2024 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.
