Ahrefs: The Definitive Guide

What is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is an SEO software suite that contains tools for link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking and site audits. Most of the features inside Ahrefs are designed for marketing professionals.

In short: Ahrefs is an SEO tool designed to help people get higher Google rankings.

How Much Is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs’ pricing depends on the plan that you choose. And whether you go with monthly or annual billing.

(Unfortunately, their pricing isn’t super straightforward.)

Here’s a breakdown of Ahrefs pricing.

Ahrefs doesn’t currently offer a free trial.

Common Ahrefs Terms

Here’s a breakdown of the terms that you’ll run into as you use Ahrefs.

URL Rating (UR): The link authority that a webpage has. Calculated as a combination of the quality and quantity of backlinks that point to that page.

Domain Rating (DR): URL Rating applied across an entire site (this is basically the equivalent of Moz Domain Authority or the Semrush Authority Score).

Anchors: A breakdown of the most commonly-used anchor text in a site’s link profile.

Referring Domains: The number of different unique websites that link to the page or site you’re looking at. A high amount of referring domains correlates with higher rankings on Google.

CTLDs Distribution: A breakdown of a site’s links by top-level domain (.com, .edu. .de etc.)

Ahrefs Rank: A worldwide ranking of a site’s link profile. Like with Alexa ranking, the lower the number, the better the link profile.

Parent Topic: The broad topic that a keyword falls under (for example, “link building” falls under the Parent Topic “SEO”).

Traffic Potential: The amount of traffic you’d get if you ranked in the #1 spot for that keyword.

Keyword Difficulty: How hard (or easy) it will be to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword.

Also Rank For: A list of keywords that the top 10 results also rank for (for example, pages that rank for “content marketing” might also rank for “what is content marketing”).

With that out of the way, let’s get into the features!

Backlink Profile

To look at a site (or page’s) links, just pop a homepage or page URL into “Site Explorer”:

And you’ll get a dashboard with info on that site’s backlinks, metrics and organic traffic.

(More on that later.)

To deep dive into that site’s link profile hit “Backlinks” in the sidebar.

And you’ll get a full list.

If a site has a ton of backlinks, I recommend going to “Link type” → “Dofollow”.

That way, you don’t have to sift through tons of semi-worthless nofollow links.

For example, my site has 412,401 backlinks.

But if you only look at dofollow links, that number drops to 299,576.

Still a lot of links. But it’s a lot easier to manage.

I usually also hit the “One link per domain” or “Group similar links” button here.

That’s because, most of the time, you don’t want or need to see every single link a site has. It’s more to get a general idea of WHO links to that site and why they link to it.

And when you add the “One link per domain” or “Group similar links” filters, you get that information… without having to sift through as much noise.

So:

Now that you have a complete list of a site’s dofollow backlinks, what can you do with this information?

“Link Intersect”

This is a feature that not that many people know about.

Here’s how it works:

In the top navigation hit “More” → “Link Intersect”.

Then, put two or more competing sites into the fields:

And voila! You get a list of sites that are linking to all of the sites you put in.

Why is this helpful?

Well, if someone links to one of your competitors, it doesn’t tell you much. It could be because they have a relationship with that particular site. Or maybe they got lucky.

But if a site links to THREE of your competitors (and not you), this shows that they have a tendency to link to websites in your niche.

And if you use the same approach that your competitor’s used to get their links, they might be willing to link to you too.

“New” Backlinks

This feature gives you a list of sites that recently linked to your site (or a competitor’s site).

Why is this helpful?

Because it shows you link building opportunities that are working right now.

For example, here’s an old backlink to my site:

I got that link 5+ years ago. You MIGHT be able to also get a link from that page.

But as time passes, it’s less and less likely that person is going to go back to an old page and add a link. Plus, SEO techniques change all the time. Specifically, strategies get overused and no longer work.

This means that it’s entirely possible that the approach I used to build that link no longer works.

On the other hand, here’s a pretty new backlink:

The person that wrote that new article is going to be MUCH more receptive to adding your link vs. someone that published something 5+ years ago.

Bottom line? “New” backlinks can help you identify fresh link building opportunities that you can tap into right away. They also help you see what’s working best in terms of link building right now.

Keyword Overview

When you enter a keyword into Keywords Explorer, you’ll notice a bunch of cards above the fold:

This is the “Overview” section that gives you a high-level overview of the term that you just searched for.

If you’ve ever used a keyword tool before, most of this stuff (like search volume and keyword competition) should be familiar to you.

This overview is helpful when choosing a keyword for SEO… or quickly deciding between two different keywords.

But what makes Keywords Explorer helpful is that you get to also see a keyword’s number of clicks:

Cost per click:

And “Clicks per search”:

Why is this stuff important?

Or, put another way: what’s wrong with just looking at a keyword’s search volume?

Here’s the explanation:

As you’ve probably noticed, Google has been adding more SERP features to the results every year.

Things like Featured Snippets, “People also ask…” boxes, additional ads, video carousels, and more.

Thanks largely to these new SERP features, according to Sparktoro, “no-click searches” are up significantly.

This means you can’t just go by a keyword’s search volume anymore. You also need to know how many people actually click on the organic results. Because in many cases, these two numbers are completely different.

For example, take a keyword like “Mount Everest height”.

According to Keywords Explorer, that term gets 9.6K searches per month.

But those 9.6K searches only result in 1.6K clicks.

This is why many SEO professionals now focus more on “Clicks” over traditional search volume.

SERP Overview

At the bottom of the page you’ll see information on the pages that rank in the SERPs for the keyword you’re looking at.

First, you have “SERP History”.

This is a breakdown of how the rankings have changed since Ahrefs started to collect data on that term (this starts in 2016 for most keywords).

That way, you get some context around how pages have come and gone from the first page.

You can also see how much the results tend to fluctuate over time.

As you can see above, the keyword “link building” has been pretty stable over the last 3+ years.

(And it’s been super stable over the last year.)

But if you look at a keyword like “creatine”, the results are all over the place.

Why is this helpful? Well, if you see a SERP that hasn’t budged over the last 12 months, the chances of you coming in and mixing things up is pretty low.

(Unless you have a super authoritative domain.)

On the other hand, if you come across a volatile SERP, that means that Google hasn’t found 10 results that they like yet. Which means you have a chance of cracking the top 10.

In addition to SERP History, Ahrefs also breaks down the 10 results based on Domain Rating, URL Rating, number of backlinks and more.

This is your typical SERP breakdown for SEO. The only interesting feature here is the “Top keyword“ column.

This shows you the keyword that brings that page the most organic traffic. In most cases, it’s the keyword that you’re analyzing. But in many cases, you’ll uncover a keyword that you wouldn’t have even thought of searching for.

For example, when I search for “SEO tips”, literally 10 out of the 10 results all have “SEO tips” as their top term.

Not super useful.

But when I search for “how to do SEO”, I get a list of top keywords that I may not have otherwise found.

Keywords Explorer Mini-Case Study

Let me walk you through a real-life example of the Ahrefs Keywords Explorer in action.

A few years ago I was debating whether or not to target the keyword “SEO Audit”.

And to help me decide, I popped that keyword into Ahrefs.

This single page gave me pretty much everything I needed to make a decision.

Specifically, I looked at the keyword search volume:

And in my industry (B2B), 4.8K searches is a pretty solid amount. So that was a good sign.

Next, I saw that the keyword difficulty was 61. And that I’d need backlinks from “134 websites” to rank in the top 10.

So the keyword was competitive. But not insane. Another positive sign.

Next, I looked at “clicks” and “clicks per search”.

And these two metrics told me that 91% of people that search for that term ultimately click on an organic result.

Another great sign.

Then, I saw that the average cost-per-click for “SEO audit” was $19.

This told me that this keyword has a strong commercial intent. In other words: people that search for this keyword are likely to convert.

And based on those numbers, I decided to create this post optimized around “SEO Audit”:

Organic Keywords and Organic Traffic

Ahrefs’ “Organic Keywords” and “Organic Search Traffic” features reveal all of the keywords that a domain ranks for… and how much search engine traffic that site is getting right now.

You can also see how these metrics have changed over time with this chart:

To be honest, there isn’t much actionable stuff you can do with this data. It’s more to benchmark where a site is compared to your site or other competitors.

The real value comes from the complete list of keywords that a competitor ranks for:

You even get an estimate of how much traffic they’re getting from each term:

So if your site has a similar Domain Authority, you have a good shot to rank for these keywords too.

In many ways, this shortcuts the entire keyword research process. Instead of typing a bunch of random keywords into a tool, you get a site’s entire keyword profile presented to you.

Example of How I Used This Feature to Find an Awesome Keyword

As you may know, my site is in the SEO and digital marketing niche.

And because my site has been around for 6 years, I’ve pretty much already covered the major keywords in my space (like “link building” and “on page SEO”).

Which is why I’m always on the hunt for marketing keywords that aren’t super obvious.

Thanks to the Organic keywords feature in Ahrefs, I was able to find one.

First, I put a competing site into Ahrefs.

And when I looked at their top keywords, I found a term that had a high search volume and a high CPC.

So I decided to create a blog post optimized around the term: “how to write a press release”.

Even though press releases are related to SEO, it’s one of those keywords that would have never come to my mind without being able to reverse-engineer another site’s keywords.

Find Highly-Shared Content

This is the main reason that people use Content Explorer.

All you need to do is pop a keyword or topic into Content Explorer…

…and you’ll get a list of articles that got tons of shares on social media:

If a specific social media network is important to you, you can sort by shares on that specific site:

Otherwise, you just want to scan the list to get a general idea of what’s working. Or to find a specific piece of content to use for The Skyscraper Technique.

Find Republished Posts

There’s a little dropdown tucked away in the top left-hand corner of the screen that lets you find content that’s been republished.

(In other words: content that someone updated on the same URL.)

This can give you a better idea of why a specific piece of content did so well.

For example, when I searched for content related to “SEO tips”, I noticed this result got a ton of shares.

And when I hit the “republished” feature, that post is still the #1 result in Content Explorer.

This tells me that this page has been regularly updated and relaunched over time.

Competing Domains

This report gives you a list of domains that are trying to rank for the same terms.

For example, this report lets me know which sites are competing against me in Google’s organic search results:

So I made a note to hate those sites. 🙂

But seriously, this feature isn’t super useful to use for your own site. After all, you probably already know your SEO competitors like the back of your hand.

Competing Domains is more helpful if you just launched a new site or you took on a new client.

That’s because this report can show you the SEO landscape for that site.

For example, you can see if the competitors are rinky dink blogs… or Fortune 500 companies.

You can also check out the “Best By Links” report for some of the competing sites.

That way, you can learn what types of content work best in this space.

Site Audit

This is basically a toned-down version of Screaming Frog.

To use it, pop in your site’s homepage:

And give the site auditor time to do its thing.

(Depending on how many pages your site has, this can take a few minutes to several hours.)

When it’s done, you get a thorough technical report on all of your site’s pages:

Including pages that are redirected, blocked by Robots.txt, or that have a noindex tag applied.

Alerts

Alerts are helpful if you want to stay on top of a site’s links and rankings.

That’s because you can ask Ahrefs to send you an email every time you or a competing site gets a new backlink… or starts to rank for a new keyword.

Easily Find Broken Links

Ahrefs takes a lot of the grunt work out of Broken Link Building. That’s because Ahrefs shows you all of a site’s broken links:

(So there’s no need to run Check My Links a million times.)

Best By Links Growth

This shows you pages that are getting links right now (specifically, within the last day, week or month)

Super helpful for figuring out what people in your industry are linking to.

Find Guest Post Opportunities

Did you know that you can use Ahrefs to find sites in your niche that accept guest posts? Well, you can. This video walks you through the steps.