Ahrefs Review 2023
About Ahrefs
For many experienced SEO professionals, Ahrefs is considered to be an essential tool. As with most of the SEO tools available, it is web based and offers its users a suite of features, from its market leading Keyword Explorer and Backlink Database to its Site Audit function.
Subscriptions start at £79 per month.
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Ahrefs Details
Website –Ahrefs
Languages Supported – English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish.
- Pros
- Market leading backlink database
- Comprehensive Site Audit
- Market Leading Keyword Research Tool
- Cons
- Costly
Rating
Table of Contents
Introduction
As with most SEO tools, the intention is to provide its users with as much information pertaining to ‘market insight’ as possible and Ahrefs gives it to you in spades.
On sign up, as with most tools, you will be invited to create a project.
You will need to verify your ownership of the domain and Ahrefs gives you several different options to do this. You can either import the information from your Google Search Console or you can validate using an HTML file uploaded to the root of your domain, a DNS record or an HTML tag added to your header. All fairly straightforward for all but the greenest of users.
Once you have jumped through this hoop and the project is set up, away you go.
In this review, we will focus on the Site Audit function, Keyword Explorer and Backlink Database. It is worth noting though that Ahrefs also has a Content Explorer to give you an insight into what content is out there and ranking well, so that you can see begin to form ideas of your own. We will endeavour to add a review of this feature at a later date.
Features
Site Explorer
Clicking on the ‘Site Explorer’ link in the top bar of Ahrefs will take you to your site’s Dashboard. In here you will find lots of important ‘At a Glance’ information such as your Domain Rating, number of referring domains and backlinks.
As well as being able to see information about your own site, you can enter any other domain or URL in the search bar and see their information as well. This can be a really useful way of determining the strength of your competitors.
Look at the menu on the left hand side of the screen and you will find a raft of useful features and tools, although accessibility will depend on your subscription level.
Top Pages will allow you to see all of the pages that reside in your domain and analyse which are giving you the most traffic.
Site Audit
On completion of the site crawl, you will be given various scores and metrics gauging the starting point of your optimisation. After a quick scan of the user interface you will notice a series of tabs at the top of the page. Click into the ‘Onpage’ tab and you will be met with further scores, broken down into categories like: Tech & Meta, Structure and Content.
The ‘Tech & Meta’ section provides page response times, meta description and URL details. As the name would suggest, all this information pertains to what is often known as ‘Technical SEO’.
The ‘Structure’ tab offers information about both internal and external linking, anchor texts and redirections.
The last category is ‘Content’. This will highlight any duplicate content that might have slipped through the net as well as keyword optimisation, once your keywords have been set up. More on that later.
While Seobility offers a lot to it’s user, many will consider this to be an entry or beginner s level tool. More in-depth and powerful tools can be found with competitors such as Ahrefs and SEMRush.
Backlink Management
There is no denying that without a healthy backlink profile, you are unlikely to achieve a good rank for anything but the most ‘long-tail’ of keywords.
It’s fair to say that Seobility’s backlink checker is a little on the basic side. It lacks the filters, provided by other such SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush, like ‘Date First Seen’ or ‘Strength’.
Seobility does off a ‘Link Rating’ metric out of 100, with 100 being the strongest, however it is unclear whether this makes use of Ahref’s ‘Domain Rating’, Majestic’s ‘Trust Flow’ or whether it is based on an algorithm of their own.
You are also provided with information regarding whether links are ‘Do Follow’ or ‘No Follow’ and what Anchor text has been included.
Ranking and Keyword Monitoring
Within the ‘Ranking’ tab you will find the ability to add keywords to a list to be tracked against either your domain or a specific URL. This is a fairly standard provision with the usual information, like ‘Search Volume’, ‘CPC’ (Cost Per Click) front and centre, alongside a chart indicating the level of competition for each keyword.
All ranking information is helpfully rendered on charts allowing you to easily see your progress.
In this section you are also able to set up competitor sites, so you can track their visibility alongside and rankings compared to your own. This can be very useful when trying to get a feel for where you stand against your competition.
Finally, you will notice the ‘Ranking Optimisation’ section which, after recrawling your site again, will give you recommendations such as changes to headers and frequency of keywords in your main content.
Exactly how one should optimise content for a specific keyword is contentious in the SEO world though so all advice should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Pricing
There is no escaping that the cost of subscribing to a top quality SEO tool can be eye-watering and if you are only just starting out, then it can be a significant early expense. But Seobililty is the exception to this rule. At $50 a month for the ‘Premium’ account it represents an affordable option. The even better news is that the free ‘Basic’ account is open ended so there are no ‘7 day trial periods’ to be seen here.
Of course, the ‘Basic’ account has some limitations, you can only have one project running at a time, you can only monitor up to ten keywords, but for me the biggest limitation is that you only get a ‘preview’ of your backlinks. This basically means, Seobility will only show you three of them. As mentioned earlier, backlinks are essential to any SERP standing so this alone should pursuade you to sign up for at least the ‘Premium’ level account.
If you begin to love Seobility then there is also an ‘Agency’ level account at the more hefty price of $200 a month.
Overall
How useful you find Seobility will largely depend on your own level of experience with SEO and what type of work you do. If you are just starting out and you want to a tool to help you keep on top of some basic SEO, then Seobility definitely represents a cost effective way to just that.
However, if you are more on the experienced side and you are looking for a comprehensive, powerful SEO tool then you are probably not in the right place, and let’s face it, you probably already have a subscription to Ahrefs or Majestic.