Ahrefs SEO platform review

Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool designed to help website owners and digital marketers improve their online visibility, track their SEO progress, and conduct detailed competitive analysis. At its core, Ahrefs offers keyword research, rank tracking, backlink tracking, content research, and site audit capabilities. 

In fact, by providing detailed insights into search engine rankings, website performance, and content optimization opportunities, Ahrefs even helps you devise and execute effective SEO strategies. 

But what about its user experience? How do you use its extensive features? What about the Ahref pricing model? In this detailed review and guide, we'll break it down step-by-step and explain its core features and how you can make the most of it. We'll also talk about its customer support, and if it’s worth it for you or not. So, let’s get started.

• You can sign up to Ahrefs here.

Ahrefs: Plans and pricing

Ahrefs has four different plans targeting their users’ different needs and bandwidth. Here are all the plans, along with their features and pricing:

1. Lite Plan

The Lite Plan, priced at $108/mo, is ideal for solo marketers, freelancers, and small businesses who are just starting with SEO. It comes with access to all core Ahrefs tools, like Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and Content Explorer. Users can easily manage up to 5 unverified ownership projects for regular site monitoring and track up to 750 keywords with Rank Tracker. 

However, on the downside, it has limited access to site audit features, allowing up to 100,000 crawl credits per month, and supports exporting up to 500,000 rows/ mo only.

2. Standard Plan

The Standard Plan costs $208/mo and caters to SEO professionals and small to medium-sized businesses who need more in-depth analysis and data. This plan includes all features from the Lite plan and lets you manage up to 20 unverified ownership projects and track up to 2,000 keywords with its Rank Tracker feature. 

Plus, the plan provides access to more comprehensive data sets in Site Explorer, including full site structure and broken backlinks, and allows exporting up to 1.5 million rows per month. You also get 500,000 crawl credits every month. 

3. Advanced Plan

The Advanced Plan, priced at $374/mo, is designed for SEO agencies and larger businesses who want extensive data and reporting features. It includes all features from the Standard plan plus more advanced tools. Users can manage up to 50 unverified ownership projects and track up to 5,000 keywords with Rank Tracker. You get up to 1.5 million crawl credits per month for site audits and increased data access, including historical data and in-depth analysis options. The export limit extends up to 4 million rows per month.

4. Enterprise Plan

The Enterprise Plan, available for $999/mo, is great for large enterprises and organizations with bulk SEO needs requiring custom data, reporting, and support solutions. It offers a customized solution to fit the team’s needs, including up to 100 unverified ownership projects management and tracking around 10,000 keywords with its Rank Tracker. 

This plan offers up to 5 million monthly crawl credits for the most detailed site audits and maximum data access and export capabilities, with up to 10 million monthly rows. With the Enterprise plan, you even get access management, audit log, API access, SSO, and directory listing for enhanced security and team collaboration.

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Ahrefs: Features

 Site Explorer

The Site Explorer is a powerful tool for analyzing a website's SEO performance. It presents insights into organic search traffic, backlink profiles, and paid search activities. Apart from its core purpose, Site Explorer presents several advanced features that help in the analysis and strategic planning of SEO experts.

For example, if you want to analyze your competitors' best-performing web pages, you can do it under “Top Pages.” This tool goes through a specific website and lists down the top-performing pages that are getting the most traffic. Through this, you can create several strategies for targeting the right keywords and ranking along your competitor's popular articles.

Our next favorite feature is the "Outgoing Links" report which presents a list of where a site is sending its traffic through external links. This can help in identifying potential partnership opportunities for your website or even ensuring that outbound links are to reputable and relevant sites, which is super important for maintaining a site’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).

Apart from that, Site Explorer's "Content Gap" tool lets you compare your site's keyword profile against those of your competitors. It simply identifies keywords for which your competitors rank but your site does not. This is such a useful tool that even the talented SEO experts at TechRadar use it.

The fun doesn’t end here. You also get an "Internal Backlinks" report, which analyzes the internal link structure of a website and helps in optimizing site architecture for better crawl ability and distributing link equity effectively across pages. Lastly, it also provides a "Broken Links" report, identifying both broken inbound and outbound links. Fixing these links can improve user experience and site health. 

 Keywords Explorer

Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer not only excels in providing detailed keyword metrics and suggestions but also offers several other features that enhance keyword research and strategy development. For instance, it includes a "Keyword Difficulty" score, which helps users quickly assess how challenging it might be to rank for a specific keyword based on the strength of the current top-ranking pages. This score is calculated using a variety of factors, including the number and quality of backlinks pointing to the top-ranking pages, making it a reliable indicator of the effort required to compete.

It further helps you understand the reader behavior with the "Clicks" data, which estimates the total number of clicks that the search results for a keyword receive. This metric is super useful as it goes beyond mere search volume to give an idea of actual traffic potential, considering factors like SERP features that might affect the click-through rate for organic listings.

Additionally, Keywords Explorer offers a "Return Rate" metric, which measures how often people search for a keyword again. This insight is valuable for identifying keywords that could bring recurring traffic to your site.

We also tested its SERP analysis features that show the presence of features like featured snippets, site links, and image packs in the search results for a keyword, providing pointers on how to optimize content to achieve these high-visibility positions. And to top it all, Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer even integrates with other tools available on the platform. This helps you transition from keyword research to site audit or content exploration, making it a great solution for anyone looking to enhance their SEO and content marketing efforts with data-driven insights.

Site Audit

Probably this feature is like that doctor who tells you what’s wrong with your website in terms of SEO. Site Audit scans your entire site to find out everything from technical SEO problems to content-related issues. Plus, it doesn't just highlight what's wrong, but it also delivers actionable tips to easily fix those issues.

To test it, we gave it a sample site and it got back to us with various helpful insights such as broken links, missing alt tags, slow-loading pages, and much more. It even categorized issues into errors, warnings, and notices based on their potential impact on our SEO, making it easier to prioritize fixes. What we loved even more is the visual representation of data, through charts and graphs, which gives a clear perspective of the current condition of the website.

The competitor analysis feature is another key component, offering the ability to track competitors' backlink growth and keyword rankings. This competitive intelligence can inform strategic decisions and help users stay ahead in their niche.

Additionally, if you want to track your competitor's backlinks and keyword ranking, you can use the Competitor Analysis feature. It gives a detailed insight into your peer's SEO strategies and helps you in staying ahead in your niche.

Rank Tracker

If you want to monitor your website's ranking for targeted keywords on the SERP, you can use the Rank Tracker feature present in Ahrefs. It's particularly useful for tracking the effectiveness of your SEO strategies and understanding how changes in your website or external factors influence your rankings.

First off, Rank Tracker can help you track your website’s ranking positions across different search engines and locations, presenting insights into how well your pages perform in various regions. This is crucial for businesses targeting a global audience or aiming to improve their local SEO. It further provides updates on ranking positions, showing whether your site’s rankings for specific keywords have improved, declined, or remained stable over time.

It further helps you level up your SEO game by offering visibility and traffic forecasts based on your ranking positions. These projections can help you estimate the potential traffic you might gain from improving your rankings for certain keywords, making it easier to prioritize SEO tasks. Not just that, you can see which keywords trigger special search results like featured snippets, local packs, or knowledge panels. 

 Content Explorer

Content Explorer focuses on analyzing the performance of your website’s content across different topics and niches. It guides users on content creation, outreach, and strategy decisions by explaining what content resonates with your readers and earning backlinks for your site. As you open the tool, you need to enter the website to analyze its content. Once searched, it provides many insights about the content, including the referring domains, page traffic and its value, URL Rating, organic keywords, and social shares. 

What makes it even easier to understand is the graphical representation of the metrics along with the timeline to help you further understand the behavior of your website’s specific content. While we ran a scan for one of our sites, it gave us the entire data along with useful metrics. We even sorted the list in various formats like relevance, domain rating, Twitter shares, and date, which made the list even more helpful. 

After doing the proper analysis, we even tried exporting the list for other team members, and Ahrefs did it seamlessly in a .CSV format, where we also had the option to choose the number of rows we wanted. Plus, if you run a website with multiple languages, you can further analyze the content based on different languages, giving a good summary of the website’s content map.

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Ahrefs: Interface and in-use

Like a lot of software these days, Ahrefs is used through a web browser, and we like the robust online interface, however it has no dedicated desktop program or smartphone app. The web app puts a ton of information into each page, with explanations for important features available via convenient info-bubbles. You can rely on The Dashboard to give you an overview of your projects, with each of the five core components having its own landing page. Finally, most elements provide more info via clickable links making them interactive for greater insights into the many graphs, charts, and metrics. 

Ahrefs: Support

If there’s one thing that Ahrefs does best besides SEO, it might be its customer support. It offers robust support through 24/7 access via email and live chat, ensuring users can find help whenever needed. 

Although I keep going back to their support team quite frequently, I asked them about their latest link intersecting feature recently, and within minutes, a team member assisted me with it. 

Moreover, the platform's Help Center is packed with detailed articles, guides, and FAQs for self-service assistance, while a collection of tutorial videos and webinars provides visual learning options for users at all levels. 

Ahrefs also has an active online community for peer support and hosts sessions for direct feedback to the development team. This comprehensive support ecosystem helps you navigate the platform's features, resolve issues promptly, and maximize your SEO efforts.

Ahrefs: The competition

Ahrefs provides similar functionality to other major SEO tools like SEMrush and Moz, and they all offer similar price points for basic plans. Historically Ahrefs has been the more expensive option, recent pricing updates have made it more in line with its competitors.

Carefully consider which features and data limits work best for your budget, because different products prioritize different features at different price points. SEMrush’s basic plan, for example,  offers 10 times the page crawls as Ahrefs’, but no API access or historical data, unlike the latter. 

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Ahrefs: Final verdict

If your primary focus is building a robust backlink strategy, conducting detailed site audits, and diving deep into competitive analysis, Ahrefs is a clear winner. Its extensive backlink database and detailed site audit reports offer invaluable insights for improving your website's SEO performance. Ahrefs' strength in finding your competitors' strategies through its Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer tools can give you a competitive edge in your SEO game.

For businesses and professionals prioritizing link building and detailed analytics on backlinks, along with a strong toolset for keyword research and site audits, Ahrefs provides an equally comprehensive solution. Its user interface is designed to accommodate both seasoned SEO experts and those new to SEO, which makes it a versatile choice for many.

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