Since 2010, Ahrefs has assisted marketers in developing their brands and increasing their sphere of influence. As a result, Ahrefs is now recognized as one of the top platforms in the world for marketing research and search engine optimization (SEO). Along with a comprehensive library of educational resources, like this guide to finding link-building possibilities, this Singapore-based SEO platform with a strange name provides more than just an "all-in-one” SEO toolset. SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate.

It also has a Facebook group where marketers can interact and exchange knowledge. Ahrefs aims to help companies rank higher and generate more visitors. Its customer base ranges from tiny bloggers and entrepreneurs to some of the most prominent names in the world, including Facebook, Adobe, and Uber. Website owners may test our Ahrefs's’ whole toolkit for free, and the company provides a variety of subscriptions and services. 

What Is Ahrefs?

The wordplay Ahrefs's’ name is inspired by essential phrases used in website building. The "a” element in HTML code indicates a hyperlink. The most crucial component of that tag is its HREF element, which stands for Hypertext Reference and indicates the destination of the link –that is, the website you want to visit. In 2010, Dmitri Gerasimenko, the firm creator, created a primary backlinks index, which gave rise to Ahrefs. That served as the foundation for Ahrefs's’ first offering, Site Explorer, a backlink analyzing tool. 

Since its inception, Ahrefs has grown to become a well-known supplier of statistics and tools for SEO marketing. Its web crawler can review up to 8 billion websites daily, and its array of tools for competition research, link checking, and keyword analysis, among other things, gives customers the resources they need to create and oversee an all-encompassing digital marketing plan for any kind of brand or company. 

Ahrefs Terminology

URL Rating (UR)

The URL Rating (UR), calculated using a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100 to assess the website's backlink profile, indicates how strong the target page is; higher ratings are regarded as superior. 

Links that are both internal and external are also considered, although they are given varying weights. 

Given the significant positive correlation between the URL Rating (UR) and Google rankings, it stands to reason that sites having a high UR score will rank better in organic search results. 

If you are acquainted with Google’s PageRank process, you should have little trouble understanding URL Rating (UR). This is because they calculate URL Rating (UR) using the same basic PageRank principles. 

The relevance of the logarithmic scale I mentioned before is that moving from UR 20 to UR 30 is much easier than moving from UR 70 to UR 80. 

Domain Ranking (DR)

Domain Rating (DR) has a straightforward function: it uses a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100 to assess the strength of a website’s backlink profile, with higher rating counts being considered superior.

The "link popularity" measure may also be used to gauge a website's likelihood of ranking well in Google searches.

Given that links from websites with high “link popularity” are often more significant than connections from websites with low “link popularity," this statistic is excellent for link prospecting. 

Natural Keywords

An organic keyword is a term that is used for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes to draw free visitors. Pay-per-click (PPC) keywords are those that are bid on via sponsored search marketing campaigns; they are in contrast to organic keywords. 

By inputting a URL into Ahrefs's’ Site Explorer, you may examine the total number of keywords for which a website, subdirectory, or URL ranks in the organic search results. 

While freshly discovered search queries are added to the keyword database monthly, around 16-20% of all Google searches are still relatively new. 

This suggests that rather than your site starting to rank for more search queries, the increase in organic keywords you observe for your website will be directly related to the growth of the database. 

Volume of Keyword Searches

We must clarify that search volume, not user count, refers to the quantity of searches. If, for instance, three workers search for" “stock rai"e” two hundred times, we will count it as three employees searching for a total of 600 searchers.

An additional crucial but sometimes disregarded component of the meaning of the term" “on average."

As you can see, seasonal variations in the demand for specific search queries exist.

Consider the term" "Halloween Part," which may see spikes in demand in October before plunging in November.

Please remember that, depending on the area, search volumes are mainly unique.

Most keyword analysis tools show search volumes for the United States by default. But it’s more to your liking; you can always change the location by finding out how many searches are made in the UK, Australia, Canada, or another country. 

Key Word Complexity (KD)

One parameter that causes a lot of ambiguity in our market is Keyword Difficulty (KD). But first, let's learn about its capabilities. 

Plotting the results on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100 involves calculating a weighted average of all the domains that link to the top 10 ranking pages in order to get the Ahrefs KD score. It makes no allowance for any other circumstances. 

Consequently, the final result provides a reasonable approximation of the number of referring domains needed to rank in the top ten for the term you have chosen. 

This is stated in clear English, just below the KD ratings in Keywords Explorer.

Return Rate (RR)

The unique measure known as the Return Rate (RR) is exclusive to Ahrefs.

The number of times an individual searches for a specific term over the course of 30 days is shown by the return Rate (RR). 

It includes a few sub-parameters, notably RR1, which shows users' likelihood of searching for the phrase once again during the next 30 days. 

However, RR2 doesn't suggest that users look up a specific term twice or thrice a month. It only indicates that there are more searches for the second term than the first.

Cost Per Click (CPC)

Cost per Click, or CPC, is a complicated and wildly variable measure that changes when businesses spend more or less on advertising. As the name implies, CPC shows the typical cost of a click on a sponsored search result for a specific phrase. 

This is why we always advise using Google AdWords to get the most current and trustworthy CPC rates for your list of target keywords, as Ahrefs information is sourced from this platform. 

Organic Traffic

This measure computes the monthly traffic from organic searches that a website, subsection, or web page receives. Put simply, it is the quantity of traffic that originates from search engines like Google or Bing. 

Value of Traffic

This measure shows how valuable organic traffic is to a website. Let's examine an example to further understand.

Assume your website receives 600 monthly visitors via an organic search for any term at a $10 cost-per-click.

Thus, it will cost us $6000 ($10 * 600) if we bid on this term in Google AdWords to purchase 600 visitors.

Ahrefs Rank (AR)

All websites worldwide are raked using the Ahrefs Rank algorithm, which evaluates each one according to the quality of its backlink profile.

Therefore, the website with the most muscular backlink profile (Facebook.com) receives Ahrefs Rank #1; Twitter.com receives Ahrefs Rank #2; YouTube.com receives Ahrefs Rank #3; and so on. 

What Is Possible With Ahrefs?

In this comprehensive Ahrefs Site Explorer tutorial, we've included a few bullet points on the services offered by the tool. Let’s now discuss each of them individually. 

Conduct Audits of BacklinksLet's’s first discuss backlinks before delving into backlink audits. A link from another website to your website is known as a backlink. 

Imagine that someone has included a link to your website in their blog. In this instance, you have a backlink from them. 

What exactly is a backlink audit? It involves evaluating the links on your website to see how beneficial they are to your site overall. As previously mentioned, backlink audits are necessary to prevent Google penalties. 

In other words, your website may be unsafe if it receives a large number of backlinks from a low-quality website. Backlink audits assess these hazards. 

Connects Prospecting

Link prospecting is the practice of identifying websites that produce material that is comparable to your own. The issue now is, why would you take that action?

The simple approach is to get a link. To obtain a backlink, you should share your article on related websites.

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Conduct Research on Keywords

As the name implies, keyword research is the process of seeking popular terms and phrases that might help our content rank higher in search engine results.

Keyword research's main goal is to drive traffic to your website. Ahrefs Site Explorer is a really useful tool for this.

Verify, Assess, and Examine Rivals

You need to keep up with what your rivals are doing rather than simply creating content based on the keyword you've found.

Ahrefs does more for you than help you locate keywords. By employing comparable terms, you can compare and assess your rivals' performance. It expands the possibilities for your content’s originality. 

Monitor Specific Keywords

The tool offers excellent rank tracking. You can monitor the rise or decrease of any term at any moment. We'll talk more about how this occurs later. 

Monitor Your Organic Visibility

Tracking keywords doesn't help. You must constantly monitor your visibility. In addition to Google Analytics, Ahrefs allows you to verify your visibility organically.

How to Utilize the Complete SEO Toolkit from Ahrefs

A WordPress plugin and a keyword tool for Bing, one of Google's primary rivals, are just two of the many supplementary tools and capabilities that Ahrefs offers, in addition to its five core services for enhancing search visibility. 

Site Explorer

The descendent Ahrefs initial backlink analyzing tool is called Site Explorer. Numerous tools are available in the Site Explorer interface for evaluating the functionality and searchability of any rival website. Among them are: 

Research on organic traffic shows the keywords and traffic volume that a particular website ranks for. According to Ahrefs, it tracks more than 150 million Keywords in the US and more than 150 other nations.

Banklink study, which, when any URL is put into the Ahrefs Site Explorer, displays the “backlink profile” of any website. With over 14 trillion links, Ahrefs has the largest active backlink database in the world and the quickest backlink crawler on the market. Increasing the number of backlinks pointing to your website is a tried-and-true way to improve website traffic potential. It may also raise the domain rating (DR) and individual URL rating (UR) of specific pages on your website. 

Paid keyword research may disclose which keywords a rival website is bidding on and whether they are purchasing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Marketers may also get the cost-per-click (CPC) for sponsored search results for any particular term with Ahrefs’s assistance. 

Site Audit

The Site Audit tool offers information on a website's on-page SEO performance. It can crawl every page and provide an overall SE “health score” that identifies various SEO issues and suggests solutions. The Data Explorer shows that every page in the Site Audit tool has over a hundred distinct data points. 

Content Explore

Ahrefs's’ Content Explorer looks at content that performs well on any website and provides metrics showing the number of social shares and referring domains, traffic value, and proportion of traffic from organic search. This tool offers over a dozen filters to fine-tune content searches and a variety of charts for examining traffic data. By incorporating pertinent data into your content, you may enhance visitor experiences and hence drive traffic. 

Tracker Rank

Rank monitoring lets users monitor the ranks of Google websites in 170 countries by entering a list of competitor URLs, relevant countries, and keywords. This method of ranking sites enables you to examine pertinent information in interactive graphs that let users monitor the website’s SEO success over time. One of the related tools is the SERP Checker, which provides a summary of a keyword’s SERP rankings across 243 countries. 

Keywords Explorer

The query of phrase that appears at the beginning of a Bing or Google search contains keywords. With over 7 billion keywords and regular updatesAhrefs's’ Keyword Explorer is powered by the third-largest keyword database in the world. This program generates keyword suggestions, fine-tunes search volume, and displays the approximate amount of clicks for each term based on clickstream data. 

AI is used in modern keyword research to get quicker results. With only one phrase entered by the user, Scripted’s AI-powered keyword research tool may almost instantaneously recommend keywords based on other data points and emerging themes in that industry. In addition to enhancing the readability of your blogs and complementing your content, organic keywords also improve search engine result page (SERP) ranks.

Additional Ahrefs Functionalities

Ahrefs provides several other tools that are entirely free to use for your website and its core toolkit. These include keyword tools for YouTube, Amazon, and Bing. The plugin, which is free to download and install, gives Ahrefs capabilities to any WordPress website and concentrates on keyword performance in written content. 

Ahrefs Academy and Educational Materials

SincAhrefs's brand is built on a mission to make SEO understandable and approachable for everyone. The firm also provides a substantial library of educational materials on SEO and related topics. Many free SEO lessons and instructions may be downloaded from the Ahrefs Academy. However, not all course materials are accessible to all user levels, even if many can be accessed with a free Webmaster account.

The Ahrefs blog provides frequently updated articles on SEO tactics and hot subjects, including content marketing, multi-channel marketing, and online privacy. These blogs may educate novice and experienced marketers alike about Ahrefs's features, help them comprehend SEO, and help them decide on their marketing strategies more wisely. Additionally, there is a Facebook group called Ahrefs Insider, although access to it is restricted to those who have obtained their Ahrefs login credentials.

The Ahrefs Help Center provides more than 300 help articles addressing often-asked issues about the company's tools and services, providing further information on using the platform. Ahrefs does not provide phone assistance, thus customers are forced to depend on the internet to get the solutions they want.

Ahrefs Plans and Prices

Ahrefs provides a free set of Webmaster Tools, but only if you can demonstrate that your website requires them. Put another way; you can only evaluate the quality of your website and that of your competitors for free if you can demonstrate that you are the website’s owner. 

Ahrefs offers premium plans ranging from $99 per month to $999, with savings available for those who pay for the whole year at once. The plans are classified as Lite, Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise. Each plan has many varied limitations, including the number of keywords you can evaluate, the number of users who may access reports, and the number of reports you can generate. 

You may choose a single “power us"r” for any plan, regardless of cost. Any power user receives 500 monthly credits, which they can use to create a single report. You can add an "inactive user," who can each pull five reports or pay extra, ad a "casual user, who can draw twenty more reports if these credits run out.

Ahrefs API

You should be aware that each tool has a database where it keeps the data and that access to it is governed by rules and laws. Ahrefs API is only a means of accessing its database; it's nothing special.

Ahrefs Advantages

1. Offer an adaptable user interface.
2. Ahrefs provides both extensive and high-quality data.
3. Any marketing professional would find their keyword analysis to be a delightful pleasure.
4. The little information that is provided throughout features and columns is quite beneficial.
5. Provides a ridiculous user experience.
6. Features such as "Link Intersect," "Content Game," etc." "Competing Domaim's" not only assists but also directs you.
7. This tool is unique because of features like Content Explorer and many more.
8. Regarding adaptability, the site audit functionality outperforms solutions designed specifically for site audits.

Ahrefs Drawbacks

1. Rank tracking less often.
2. Unrelated and capricious keyword suggestions.
3. Traffic statistics may be updated more often.
4. It needs to be clarified to refer to the domain feature; additional filters may be included there.
5. Reports with several graphs shown in one view might be challenging to read.
6. No smartphone version is available.
7. It costs a lot.
8. Because of all its functions, the user must be well-versed in the tool.

Alternatives to Ahrefs

To find out more about the top Ahrefs substitutes, continue reading!

Semrush

Cost: $129 per month to start. 

Let’s start this list of Ahrefs rivals by discussing Semrush. Semrush is your best option if you're searching for an SEO tool with characteristics comparable to those of Ahrefs. With the aid of an SEO toolkit from Semrush, you may perform important activities that enhance your website's search engine optimization.

SEO Audit

Cost: Free

Are you looking for an Ahrefs alternative that might assist with your present SEO audit? If so, you should use SEO Checker. This tool is a great choice for companies looking to assess and enhance their existing SEO efforts. 

Ubersuggest

Cost: As little as $29 a month

Are you trying to save costs without sacrificing functionality in an SEO tool? If so, one of the best Ahrefs alternatives to try is UberSuggest. Compared to Ahrefs, which has a monthly starting price of $99, this product is more reasonably priced at only $29 monthly. 

Moz Pro

Price: $79 a month to begin with

Moz Pro is an alternative tool similar to Ahrefs. If you're looking for something a bit less expensive than Ahrefs but still provides all the essential tools you need to run your search marketing, this is a fantastic alternative. 

Mangools

The monthly price starts at $19.90.

Understanding SEO is daunting, and using the tools may sometimes take more work. Mangools, a rival of Ahrefs, is a suitable option. They provide community resources and customer service to help you use their SEO tool.

Conclusion

Best wishes. You've arrived at the Ahrefs site explorer help page, which covers every feature you may encounter while using this enormous program. You may always experiment with other tools to expand your understanding.

But if you have carefully followed this instruction, I'm sure you've covered all the micros and macros relevant to your research. Please decide whether or not you need Ahrefs.

The price is unclear and less competitive than that of certain rivals regarding the restrictions offered. For instance, Moz offers 5,000 reports monthly, even with its most basic package. StillAhrefs's keyword restrictions are usually comparable to those of other options.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use Ahref for free?

Yes, you can use Ahrefs for free with their limited access tools like Webmaster Tools, Keyword Generator, Backlink Checker, SEO Toolbar, and more.

What is Ahrefs software used for?

Ahrefs software is used for various SEO tasks such as keyword research, on-page SEO, link building, backlink analysis, content audits, and monitoring backlinks to improve website SEO performance.

Is Ahrefs a good SEO tool?

Ahrefs is considered one of the best SEO tools in the industry, offering a wide range of features like keyword research, backlink analysis, site audits, and more. It is trusted by marketers from leading companies and provides valuable insights to improve search traffic.

Which is the best SEO tool?

Ahrefs is often regarded as one of the best SEO tools available due to its comprehensive features and reliable data. Other popular SEO tools include Moz, SEMrush, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console

Is there any free SEO tool?

Yes, there are several free SEO tools available like Google PageSpeed Insights, Answer the Public, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs' limited access tools that can help improve marketing strategies and website performance

Can SEO be done for free?

SEO can be done for free using various free SEO tools and techniques available online. While some advanced features may require paid tools or services, many essential aspects of SEO can be effectively managed without cost

Who is the CEO of Ahrefs?

The CEO of Ahrefs is Dmitry Gerasimenko

Is Semrush free?

SEMrush offers a limited free version with basic features like domain analytics and keyword analytics. However, to access more advanced features and data, a paid subscription is required

How to create backlinks?

Creating backlinks involves strategies like guest posting on relevant websites, reaching out to influencers for collaborations or mentions, submitting websites to directories, creating high-quality content that naturally attracts links, and engaging in broken link building tactics among others.