We love digital 0330 353 0300
Ahrefs started out back in 2011 as an SEO tool focused on backlink analysis. Today it is used not only for backlink intelligence but also for SEO audits, content marketing analysis and link prospecting. We have written this guide on how to use the tool to get the most out of it.
Since then, Ahrefs has become a data powerhouse, with its database containing over 532 million keywords alone, as seen on its big data page. Sheesh…
Due to the amount of information available and the functionality on offer, Ahrefs is best suited to people who will be using it most days:
For people with a casual interest in analysing domains, there are other tools more suited to a lower budget.
We cannot deny that Ahrefs is not cheap and a quick search will surface many disgruntled digital marketers complaining at the ever increasing cost of the subscription service. There is a free version; however, it is extremely limiting and lacks many of the features you will likely require from a tool such as Ahrefs.
Ahrefs allows you to customise your package to your needs by offering various add-ons and offers, there are three basic tiers:
As mentioned, Ahrefs offers a large selection of add-ons and other tools so it’s definitely worth looking at their Plans and Pricing page to see what works best for your own needs. Here at Koozai, we pay for Ahrefs but this only makes up a part of our toolkit, as we believe it’s best to never place all of your eggs in one basket.
Ahrefs started as a backlink analysis tool, but over time, the team has been able to make use of the massive data set they have acquired to provide other means of analysing the data. So now you can analyse your backlinks, review keyword ranking positions, keyword research and content analysis. Much like the digital marketing industry itself, Ahrefs is constantly adapting and it is always looking to increase their tool-set on offer. This includes adding the brand radar that aims to help measure brand visibility across the AI landscape.
To get to grips with what is on offer, a guided tour will help highlight the functionality available to you.
Once you have successfully logged in, you will meet your dashboard. You can set up ongoing projects whereby domains you specify are monitored for changes in the Ahrefs set of metrics:
Domain Health is an Ahrefs score that takes into account conformance to SEO aspects such as accessibility, crawlability and metadata violations.
URL Rating works as a proxy for something like Moz’s Page Authority. As with these types of metrics, these tools do not represent an official score but a benchmark, so they should be used as a guide only. What is useful about URL Rating is that it provides a comparison based on 30/60/90/180-day intervals and colour codes green/red depending on how well the current domain compares.
Similar to URL Rating, Domain Rating shows the Ahrefs’ assessment of your domain. As I mentioned above, be careful not to put all your eggs in one tool’s score as this is just an estimate.
The Back Links and Referring Domains data show any gains or losses in backlinks or referring domains there have been over the previous four weeks.
Organic Keywords will show you the number of keywords your domain is ranking for. In our case, we have the amounts for the UK and US.
In the Rank Tracker tab, you can review keyword ranking performance for specific keywords you’ve chosen to target however, these require being set up to track. As you can review keyword movement when reviewing sites, we recommend only tracking a very few key terms per site as each plan has a limit on how many can be tracked. Once on the dashboard, you’ll see a summary of all keyword movements and changes in ranking groups, for instance positions 1-3 and 4-10, alongside your ‘share of voice’ which is the share of your target’s organic search traffic compared to the total organic search traffic for all tracked keywords.
Click through and Ahrefs will give you a keyword specific report. Here you can set updates to ‘weekly’ or ‘daily’.
Desktop and mobile positions, as well as the top-ranking page for the keyword, are reported on. As with most Ahrefs reports, this is exportable if you prefer to use Excel to manipulate the data.
Content Alerts are covered below in the Content Explorer section. This area of the dashboard allows you to view any alerts you’ve set up for a subject and lets you set up more.
Upload your pre-existing disavow file here and add to it as you navigate the Site Explorer tool and identify domains you wish to add to your disavow file. Saves on the cut and paste.
This is a very useful and simple interface that allows you to set up email notifications for the following:
You can also specify what issues (All/Critical/Non-Critical) and which backlinks (All/New/Lost) you wish to be notified of each day, week or month.
After you’ve familiarised yourself with the Ahrefs dashboard, you can dive into the Ahrefs toolkit.
This is likely where you will interact the most. Simply copy and paste the url of the page or site you want to view into this bar and press enter!
The resulting page will feel like an assault on the senses with what seems like 100 data points, line graphs, bar charts and doughnut charts. You will find not only a dashboard but additional tools found both to the side and above the site explorer bar
Let’s break it down a tad.
On the overview page, which you are sent to by default, you will find all of your headline metrics such as Domain Rating, URL rating, Search metrics and AI citation overview. By playing with location and time scales, you can see quick comparisons such as ranking changes over the last two years and how many citations you have received.
The dashboard has evolved over the years and as digital marketing grows, so does the dashboard. As you scroll down, you will see a number of condensed reporting tabs named ‘General, backlink profile, Organic Search and Paid search’ which do as they say on the tin.
Each report serves a specific purpose but let’s explore some of the graphs you can find in this area.
Here you will find the Ahrefs organic positions graph, which shows a general overview of the site’s keyword rankings over time. This helps give you a quick visual understanding of performance as the graph breaks down the different performance categories with colour groups.
On the same page, you can also see the ‘Organic Traffic’, which comes with a variety of filters and parameters that you can set, such as flicking between impressions, traffic and traffic value. We recommend that you always take traffic data directly from Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 when possible, as this is only an estimation, and accuracy can vary.
The Referring Domains data visualisation under the backlink profile tab puts that massive index to good use by plotting new and lost link quantities at the page and domain level. Using this report, you can gain a quick overview on your backlink profile by identifying not just growth or backlink losses but also see where your backlinks are coming from geographically and what your most common anchor text is.
Once you’ve familiarised yourself with the overview page reports, it’s time to dive into some of the tools on Ahrefs. We’ve gone through some of our most used and most helpful tools below that can help provide even more insight or find additional opportunities.
This is a clever little bit of kit. With the Link Intersect tool, you can plug in a set of sites (up to 10) and Ahrefs will return the domains that are linking to all of the sites submitted. Just for those of you who are new to Ahrefs, the competitive analysis tool covers several areas so do not be alarmed if you see the page below after clicking on ‘link intersect’.
Do this for a number of your competitors to see where you should be getting some exposure. As with most reports, this is exportable.
The Quick Batch Analysis function, found under the ‘all tools’ drop-down menu, is really useful for identifying competitors and linking opportunities.
Simply drop a list of URLs into the box and Ahrefs will return the following metrics for you to analyse:
Though it’s not an exhaustive list of what you will find, these are the most helpful metrics for the majority of digital marketers. You can then export this data for further analysis and get a clearer picture of not just who your main competitors are, but where you sit in your list of competitors.
If you have set up a Dashboard for a site, you can gain access to a Crawl Report, which provides an analysis of your domain that lends itself neatly to SEO. To access this simply click on ‘Site audit’ in the top nav and click on the site that you have set up to be crawled.
The Crawl Report lets you review SEO elements within the Ahrefs interface. If you’re aware of dedicated crawler tools such as Sitebulb and Screaming Frog and their SEO capabilities, the Ahrefs functionality will seem limited. It does, however, give you a good overview of some of the key SEO elements to optimise and serves as another quick checkpoint when reviewing your site performance.
With the ever-useful Export function you can extract the following:
By using this for your site or that of a competitor, you can assess the accessibility of your site’s content, internal duplicate content levels and metadata optimisation.
There is plenty of ground that can be covered using this type of data.
Ahrefs’ Content Explorer tool makes use of the massive data set of pages to help research content by topics and keywords.
Ahrefs offers 4 refinements of a query, allowing you to search for content pieces in the following ways:
On top of this, you can filter results based on a date range, language, and you can include or exclude a specific domain. Dig deeper and use the advanced search functions to produce a highly specific search result. Industry standards like site:domain as well as specifying the exact string using “” work but you can refine your search even further.
Another neat feature to look at – especially for a seasonal topic – is the Pages over time feature. Here Ahrefs breaks down the number of documents it has found in its index related to your query by up to ten years. This can be refined through the pre-set date filters or the custom date picker.
Ahrefs Keywords Explorer provides a view of a domain’s organic and paid keyword strengths.
To find the keywords explorer tool, just look at the top menu bar and you will find it in-between Site Explorer and Content Explorer. This tool is where you will likely find yourself a lot of the time as you use it to perform keyword research, research topics and gather data or further insight into certain terms.
When you add a term, or list of terms, make sure to select the correct region before clicking search (This is a beginner error that catches everybody out from time to time). This ensures that you’re looking at the relevant data for the correct client or market.
Once you’ve clicked search, you will be presented with a dashboard which can be a bit overwhelming at first but lets walk through it together, to help get your bearings.
Overview: This gives you the whole picture, including:
This gives you the big picture data, allowing you to understand how much search opportunity there is, where the demand is and how difficult it will be to compete for that term. That’s great for identifying one term, but what if you’re looking for other terms and insight into user search trends? Well Ahrefs has you covered! Just scroll down and you will see Keyword ideas including:
As part of keyword research, you will want to tap into these areas, especially when looking for matching or related terms. You can do this by clicking on the category in the left-hand menu.
Depending on which option you clicked on, you will see either related, exact matching or loosely related terms. On this overview page, you will find not only a series of filters that let you narrow down what keywords you see, but also a breakdown of all results based on categories.
In the example above, you not only see all terms matching ‘SEO but you can also see the various topics that fall into that, such as ‘agency’ and ‘tools’, which represent two completely different types of search intent. This helps you provide keyword research that not only shows the opportunity for growth but also helps you refine that research down into relevant terms that match the same intent as your site.
With AI becoming increasingly more prevalent in the search landscape, it’s become more important than ever to ensure that your strategy aims for quality and not quantity of clicks.
You may be wondering where the most common tools and areas we spend our time are, as everybody has different needs and requirements. As an agency, we manage a variety of clients, so using the site explorer function is where we spend most of our time. The tool itself has a lot of additional tools built into it, so here’s a few that you will benefit from exploring:
The organic search segment gives you all you need to know about your keyword performance, and allows you to analyse and break down both weaknesses and opportunities. To understand how we do that, we need to look at the various aspects of the organic search segment
Ahrefs is no different to all third-party tools, in that its data is only an estimate and doesn’t contain the level of accuracy of the source, such as Google. Like us, they are also at the mercy of the Search Engine’s whims, which was seen when Google updated its scraping rules.
Google updated how its search results pages handle the num=100 parameter (which previously allowed tools to scrape 100 results per page instead of the default ~10). After the change, Google either ignored the parameter or limited its effectiveness, meaning tools could no longer pull large batches of results in a single request.
We also see the same limitations with AI, in that the channel is still extremely new and data is very limited and unreliable. Many tools have AI related reports such as ‘citations’ etc but again, take this data with a pinch of salt.
So there we have it – Ahrefs has evolved since its backlink analysis beginning by building some useful tools based on that massive index they’ve built over the years. It’s a great tool, which is why it has become an industry standard; however be cautious not to rely entirely on it as you could land in a sticky situation with a client or your boss.
There’s no doubt that Ahrefs has invested a lot of time into building a suite of tools useful to digital marketers. It doesn’t look like this is slowing down anytime soon, as they continue to add to their suite each year so make sure you always keep an eye out on what’s new and what’s upcoming.
