Ahrefs Review

Ahrefs is another popular SEO software suite that comprises many useful tools for link building, keyword research and other SEO related tasks. Ahrefs was originally launched in 2011 as a tool to analyze backlinks but over the time, the number of tools that it contains has increased and stands at about 20. Ahrefs is most well-known for the scale of operations that they are carrying out. The ahrefs database for backlinks is updated every 15 minutes and the crawler processes up to 8 billion web pages every day. That is more than a third of what Googlebot does, so you can imagine the scale of operations, which for an SEO tool is enormous. As discussed earlier, ahrefs now consists of some 20 odd tools to help digital marketers; however, our focus would be the five major tools that are related to SEO. These tools include;

1. Site Explorer
2. Keywords Explorer
3. Site Audit
4. Rank Tracker
5. Content Explorer

Let us now discuss each of these in detail;

Site Explorer

While most other tools have a lot in common, in my opinion, this particular tool stands out the most and might give ahrefs a competitive advantage over other software suites. The site explorer tool in ahrefs is a culmination of three powerful SEO tools in a single interface. These three tools include organic traffic research, backlink checker and paid traffic checker. While these three tools might sound ordinary, but combined together, they form the most comprehensive of all SEO tools, the ahrefs site explorer. 

The site explorer tool works in a way that all you need to do is type a domain name whether it’s yours or your competitor’s, ahrefs will show you everything there is to know about the domain. From how many keywords the website is ranking for, to what each keyword is and how much traffic each keyword is bringing. This is what is known as the organic search feature of the site explorer tool. Similarly, it also helps you dissect a website for its backlink juice. Repeat the same process and click on the backlink profile section and ahrefs will provide you with everything there is to know about a website’s backlinks from its world’s biggest index of live backlinks (over 14 trillion links). Finally, ahrefs will also show you if your competitors are buying PPC ads or any other kinds of ads and if so, what keywords are they bidding on?

Ahrefs site explorer

Keyword Explorer

Ahrefs keyword explorer is while similar in nature to many other SEO tools such as MOZ or  SEMrush, it does however operate differently and more than checking a keywords competition and other important metrics, it works in a way to generate new keyword ideas. By making the use of appropriate filters on the keyword explorer tool, you can have access to any set or combination of keywords from the world’s largest third-party database of keywords with almost 7 billion keywords in it. The cherry on top is that these keywords and the database is not limited to the US like in the case of most other software suites. Instead, the database comprises data from 171 countries around the world, so no matter what locality you are targeting, ahrefs has got you covered with keyword ideas and effective SEO strategies. Similarly, the database is also not limited to Google or any other single search engine; instead, it supports 10 different search engines including YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Baidu etc. Apart from all these competitive advantages, ahrefs also shows all the important metrics including accurate search volumes collected using clickstream data, keyword difficulty score, clicks, and other advanced SEO metrics such as clicks per search, % of clicks and more. 

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

Site Audit

The site audit feature in ahrefs provides an overall SEO health score of your website after crawling every single page that is publically available on your website. It also visualizes key data in charts, and flags all the potential issues and on top of them provides recommendations to fix those issues. 

The site audit tool is pre-set to check websites for 100+ pre-defined SEO issues. These issues include performance (slow pages, too-large HTML or CSS), HTML tags (missing, duplicate or non-optimal length of title tags, H1 tags and meta descriptions), social tags: (twitter cards and incomplete or missing Open Graph tags), content quality (unconsolidated duplicate pages, low word counts), localization, incoming links (detecting orphan pages, issues with nofollow links), outgoing links (broken pages, detecting links to redirects), resources (JavaScript, CSS and issues with images), external pages and many more. 

Ahrefs Site Audit

Rank Tracker

The ahrefs rank tracker tool is built to help you monitor your website’s ranking on the Google SERPs on desktop and mobile across 171 different countries. Rank tracker is an important ahrefs tool and analyzes your SEO efforts as compared to those of your competitors and helps you identify the gaps in your strategy. The rank tracker gives you a history of visibility i.e. what percentage of the clicks on your website are from organic search traffic. It also records snapshots of your progress over time. The rank tracker utilizes 13 unique features on the basis of which it ranks your website against that of your competitor. These features include;

1. Sitelinks,
2. Featured snippet,
3. Top stories, 
4. Thumbnails,
5. Image pack,
6. Adwords top, 
7. Adwords bottom,
8. Knowledge card,
9. Shopping results,
10. Knowledge bottom, 
11. Tweet box,
12. Videos and
13. People also ask. 

Ahrefs Rank Checker

Content Explorer

The content explorer tool of ahrefs is also of a very unique nature as it helps users generate new content ideas as well as helps them get access to the most popular articles on any given topic. You can apply all sorts of filters to narrow down your research for example; organic traffic, referring domains, domain rating, traffic value and social shares. So once you have applied any of those filters, you end up with the finest articles on top and using those articles not only can you generate new content ideas but also get first-hand knowledge on your product. Once you have gone through their content, you can identify their keywords and reverse engineer the content strategy being utilized by your competitors.  

Ahrefs Content Explorer

Main Free Guides:

• Business Models
• Business Strategy
• Business Development
• Digital Business Models
• Distribution Channels
• Marketing Strategy
• Platform Business Models
• Tech Business Model