8.4

Effectiveness

10.0/10

User-friendly

7.0/10

Features

9.0/10

Price

8.0/10

Support

8.0/10

Pros

  • Great for link building
  • You can research competitors
  • Keyword tool
  • Content analysis
  • Excellent SERP analysis

Cons

  • Limited for SEO report
  • A bit pricy

If you are looking for a good SEO tool for ensuring that your content will be seen and reached, Ahrefs may be just the solution you need. We will make a point right away that the tool has its strengths and weaknesses, which is hardly a surprise. However, depending on whether or not you can use strengths and handle its weaknesses might determine whether or not Ahrefs is the right tool for you.

Ahrefs is a critical tool even to get an insight into your competitors’ strategies. With this SEO tool, in fact, you can quickly research your competitors and understand what is happening in your niche.

Without further ado, let’s take a deeper look into Ahrefs SEO tool, and see what exactly Ahrefs has to offer.

ahrefs review

Ahrefs Overview

Ahrefs is a pretty much full-featured SEO tool. About Ahrefs pricing, you can get it for $82 per month if you choose its Lite plan and choose annual billing.

The tool is aimed at those who already have some experience with SEO tools, which is pretty obvious, as it is not as intuitive as tools created especially for new users.

However, if you already have some knowledge of SEO and SEO tools, then Ahrefs is a pretty good choice.

It features one of the largest indexes of backlinks that you can find of the market, with over 12 trillion backlinks, as well as 6 billion web pages crawled every single day.

It offers many other capabilities and features apart from that, including;

  • ad-hoc keyword search (one of our most-used features!!)
  • position tracking
  • SEO monitoring
  • competitive domain comparison
  • content-specific research
  • and more…

In other words, Ahrefs can be used for pretty much everything, although it does have some disadvantages, such as the lack of SEO reporting features or keyword management that some of its competitors have.

Another thing to be aware of is that Ahrefs dashboard is pretty bare-boned. Still, there have been interface improvements over time, and it has capabilities that go beyond what can be done with many of its competitors, so we believe that dealing with its downsides is worth it in the end.

In fact, Ahrefs is the only SEO tool we use constantly on a daily basis!

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at some of its aspects and see what it truly has to offer.

Alerts – Check you Backlinks in Real Time

Once you start using Ahrefs, you will notice a navigation bar located at the top of the screen, that offers access to several aspects of the tool. Apart from Dashboard itself, you will also find Alerts.

To access this feature, click on “More” >> “Alerts.”

Ahrefs review - Alerts

Alerts are a very useful part of Ahrefs, as they allow you to configure email alerts, and track things like backlinks, new keywords, and site mentions.

In other words, whenever you create a new backlink or keyword alert, all you need to do is click on the Add Alert button, enter the URL, desired keyword volume, country, and similar details. You can also add the frequency of email between weekly or monthly, and, of course, the address or addresses where the emails should go to.

How to set a new alert

From now on, you will be notified in your email inbox about any changes on backlinks or keywords and take immediate action as needed.

Adding and using alerts, in general, is pretty simple in Ahrefs, so you should not have any problems with that.

Site Explorer – Know Everything about Your Website

Next, Ahrefs has the Site Explorer, which acts as one of the three biggest and most important SEO categories.

Site exploring is pretty useful, and it revolves around adding an URL into the Site Explorer tool, which will provide you with an entire breakdown of the domain that you entered.

Ahrefs will deliver every custom metrics that it has; it will break down organic keywords, traffic, paid and organic search, and much more.

Ahrefs Site Explorer
Example of metrics returned by Ahrefs blog.

The Site Explorer also provides visualizations and interactive data, which are made with live data on referring domains, backlinks, pages, and it even offers a worldwide map of the search traffic, specifically where it is coming from.

Backlinks distribution map

You also get a so-called word cloud, which contains search terms that are attracting the most traffic, which is useful for knowing which terms you should use yourself.

Most used search terms

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

Then, you have Keywords Explorer, which is an aspect of Ahrefs that you will likely use the most.

After all, it is your goal to identify the best possible SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) in order to develop the best possible SEO strategy and rank your page as high as possible.

Ahrefs allows you to enter multiple keywords at once, and narrow the search by country. It won’t let you go further down and choose keywords per city, and if you need more localized results, this may not be the best tool for you.

However, if you are targeting the entire country, Ahrefs will do just fine.

Let’s see an example of searching for the keyword ‘Backyard games.” Click on “Keyword Explorer” and then type your keyword on the search field.

Keyword Tool

Once you do the search, you will find yourself at the keywords result page, which used to be pretty basic, but the tool did some investing, and the Keywords Explorer will now provide you with quite a detailed and responsive page. There are bar charts on search volume, clicks, difficulty and volume distribution, and alike.

Ahrefs keyword search results

There are also additional charts and tables that will break down SERP features, top countries by volume, and volume difficulty distribution itself.

To access this data, just click on the button “SERP” next to each keyword.

The ahrefs SERP metrics

In addition to that, there is also traffic share by domains and pages, as well as keyword ideas. You will find all these functions on the left sidebar.

You can increase the keyword metrics accuracy by clicking the Metrics tab, which is located next to the Overview. This will show you the metrics regarding clicks, search volumes, return rates, and more.

Ahrefs Keyword statistics

All in all, you will find that Keyword Explorer offers a lot of detail regarding just about anything keyword-related that you may need.

Ahrefs Pricing and Plans

Finally, let’s talk about prices and available plans. As you may know, Ahrefs is not exactly the cheapest solution out there. Its Lite plan will cost you $82 per month if you choose an annual plan, and $99 per month if you only renew your subscription on a monthly basis.

However, running a successful website without an advanced SEO tool like Ahrefs is tough. Once you learn how to leverage several Ahrefs features, most likely you will see a big difference in performances that totally justify the price you pay. After all, a website tool should definitely be included among the necessary costs of managing a website.

Do not forget that you can use Ahrefs to monitor even your competitors. You can understand and examine their marketing strategy which will allow you to be on top of the game.

Ahrefs pricing

Lite plan

The Lite plan supports one user and 5 sites you can use it on, as well as 300 keywords that you can track per week, and 25 domain crawls each day. However, you can only do three Keyword Explorer searches per day.

As you can see, this plan has quite a lot of caps, which is pretty limiting, overall, but still useful if you use it adequately.

Standard plan

Next, there is a Standard plan, which costs $149 per month for a yearly plan, or $179 per month for month-to-month renewals. This one offers significantly more, including 1000 tracked keywords per three days, 10 campaigns, 100 domains each day, as well as 50 Keyword Explorer searches daily.

Advanced plan

In the third spot, there is the Advanced plan, which is quite expensive, coming in at $332 ($339 month-to-month) on a monthly basis if you go with a yearly plan. It offers 25 campaigns, daily updates on 4000 keywords, 200 Keyword Explorer searches daily, and more.

Agency plan

Lastly, there is the Agency plan, which will cost you $832 per month if you purchase the annual plan of $999 month-to-month. It is the most expensive tier, but also the most rewarding one. It gives you hourly backlink reports, web-mention tracking in real-time, and keyword and content searches which have such high quotas that you likely won’t be able to fill them in a single day.

Conclusion

In the end, do we recommend Ahrefs as a good SEO tool?

This is a capital YES for us. (We would be lost running our websites without Ahrefs support!!)

We believe that it is a fantastic SEO tool if you are not a major corporation. It should do well for small or mid-sized businesses, as long as they can afford its higher prices.

Ahrefs generally has everything that you may need in order to get proper insights into all aspects of SEO, and it can help you place your site among the top Google searches.

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