Ahrefs Review: What Did I Think Of This Much-Hyped SEO Platform?

I review Ahrefs and explore its data analysis capabilities and other powerful features such as backlink analysis, competitor analysis, site audits, and more. I also explore Ahrefs pros and cons so you can decide whether it is the right SEO tool for you. Let’s look closer and discover if it can take your business to new places.

In today’s digital age, having a solid online presence is crucial for any business, regardless of size. An SEO tool is often vital when optimizing your website for search engines. Ahrefs is one of the leading SEO tools and definitely one to consider if you’re looking to boost your organic traffic and outrank your competitors. Whether you’re starting your digital marketing journey or an experienced SEO pro, Ahrefs benefits many businesses worldwide.

Ahrefs Review

Product Name: Ahrefs

Product Description: Ahrefs is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool that has a range of comprehensive features for websites to improve their online presence and success.

Summary

Ahrefs is an SEO and digital marketing tool that helps users optimize their websites for search engines. It has lots of features to help you boost your organic traffic and outrank your competitors. From backlink analysis to keyword research, and site audits to health scores, improve your website’s success with just a few clicks.

Overall

3.9

• User Friendliness
• Advanced Features
• Customer Service
• Pricing

Pros

• All-in-one SEO software
• User-friendly interface
• Enormous backlink database and competitor analysis
• Reliable clickstream data powers the keyword generator, which updates monthly
• The database has 7+ billion keyword suggestions
• Identifies parent topics, giving you more keyword ideas
• The keyword difficulty score is one of the best
• Good SERP overview and ranking history features
• Access to educational resources and private community

Cons

• No free trial
• Pricier than competitors
• Only advanced and enterprise plans provide daily updates
• Keyword suggestions don’t come with a relevancy score
• PCC competitor research isn’t as strong as competitors

Consumer Reviews

This is the aggregate score of reader reviews we’ve received. Have you had a good or bad experience with Ahrefs? Feel free to leave your review in the comments. Please note that only reviews with valid review content are published and counted.

Visit The Ahrefs Website

10 Key Features

1. User-Friendly Dashboard. The Ahrefs dashboard offers a high-level view of all your projects for tracking their SEO performance and success.
2. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer. Ahrefs keyword research tool provides high-volume keywords and identifies new keyword opportunities for your website.
3. Content Analysis. This feature allows you to analyze the content on your website to ensure it is optimized for search engines. This enables you to check for issues such as missing meta tags, broken links, and duplicate content so you can make improvements to your site’s visibility.
4. Ahrefs Backlinks Checker. Ahrefs has an extensive backlink database compared to many other SEO tools. This allows you to monitor your backlinks and your competitors’ link profiles. Not only does this improve your website’s authority, but it can also help you identify link-building opportunities.
5. Competitor Analysis. Compare your website’s performance against your competitors and how your organic traffic, backlinks profile, and keyword ranking compare. This allows you to identify link-building opportunities and improve your ranking.
6. Ahrefs Health Score. Ahrefs provides a health score for your website. This provides an overall health assessment based on specific criteria, such as device compatibility and crawlability.
7. Ahrefs Site Audit Tool. This tool helps users identify technical issues affecting their site’s search engine performance. Quickly identifying problems means you can get your site running as it should.
8. Ahrefs Search Engine Database. Ahrefs has its own search engine called Yep, which provides users with ranking, competitor performance, backlink profile, keyword analysis, advertising analysis, and more. This backend structure is impressive.
9. Ahrefs Academy & Insider. Ahrefs Academy has many free educational resources to help you get the most out of this digital marketing tool. Take courses to improve your knowledge and obtain certificates for your resume. Plus, enjoy access to Ahrefs Insider, a private community where like-minded people and SEO specialists are happy to help answer your questions and offer advice.
10. Ahrefs Enterprise. Ahrefs also offers help to businesses looking to take their sites to the next level. For a fee, you can use pre-built templates or custom dashboards to leverage and integrate Ahrefs data. With better access management and on-to-one customer support, get assistance to run your business.

About Ahrefs

So, what does Ahrefs do? Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool that offers a wide range of features to help businesses improve their online presence. They have been crawling the web since 2010 and collecting, processing, and storing petabytes of data and information. Ahrefs is one of the largest web crawlers in SEO. They give their users insight into their data and discoveries for a fee.

To give you an idea of how large, they crawl five million pages every minute and would have had to spend $900m on the cloud in three years without their own infrastructure.

Anyone looking to build a successful online business must consider whether SEO is beneficial for them, and if so, use an SEO tool to maximize their potential. Ahrefs claims to give its users everything they need to rank higher and get more traffic. Although your website can thrive without help, you need to know the ins and outs of SEO and continuously keep on top of it, which can be time-consuming. However, SEO software like Ahrefs can make the process more efficient and achieve better success. Let’s find out more.

Ahrefs Prices

Ahrefs used to offer a one-week trial for $7, but they don’t appear to offer a trial at the time of writing. Instead, they provide website owners limited access to Ahrefs site explorer and site audit webmaster tools. Also, unlike some of its competitors, its website claims never to run discounts.

*Each plan covers one prepaid power user who can use Ahrefs tools on a credit system, covering 500 credits a month for free. Additional users can be added for $20-$50 per month, depending on their user status.

It’s great that Ahrefs has no hidden fees, and they are upfront about their costs on their website. Plus, there are no setup or contract fees, which can be offputting for prospective customers. Another bonus that Ahrefs offers that not all of its competitor’s offer is that unused credits are carried over to the next month. They last for three billing months. This means you don’t lose out on pay-as-you-go purchases during quieter months and can go for gold the following month.

When you compare Ahrefs price to other competitors, they are more expensive. Even Semrush, one of the best-known SEO software, is cheaper. Another negative about their pricing is that customers are automatically charged on a pay-as-you-go basis if you do not prepay for additional users. This can become costly, so keeping on top of your business needs and the credits used is important.

One of the biggest complaints of Ahrefs is its new pricing structure. Previous legacy users have been switched from their original tariff to a new credit-based system. However, Ahrefs states that this was the first price increase in 10 years and had to be done to provide a sustainable product. The new structure is visible on their pricing page, so check this out to ensure it fits your budget.

Things Only Ahrefs Do

What makes Ahrefs stand out from the SEO crowd? According to their website, here are just some things that Ahrefs does that no other SEO marketing tool currently does. These are some reasons many customers feel Ahrefs is worth the higher costs than other tools. There are many more unique features and data points, and Ahrefs has many how-to videos, webinars, and more in Ahrefs academy section, so you can get the most out of it.

1. Compare Current And Historical Data.
2. See Competitor’s Top Performing Pages.
3. See Backlink Performance Over Time.
4. Inspect Backlinks In The Source Code.
5. Discover Low-Hanging Keyword Opportunities.
6. Analyze Pages And Fix All Issues Immediately.
7. Configure Advanced SEO Audits.
8. Use Content Explorer To Find Top Content And Links.

My Experience With Ahrefs

Ahrefs was founded in 2010 and has been crawling the web ever since. Although they added many helpful features over the years, their simple interface has remained the same. I tested out Ahrefs free version, so let’s look at how I found their software.

Simple Set Up And Dashboard

I found setting up the free version of Ahrefs simple. Once I imported our projects from the Google Search Console (GSC), it ran a comprehensive crawl of our websites. The dashboard displays an overview of each project with an Ahrefs health score, domain rating, organic traffic, and more. I found Ahrefs site explorer smooth and easy to follow.

Monitor GSC Directly In Ahrefs

I connected our GSC with our Ahrefs account, and all of the GSC data was there immediately. GSC only shows 16 months of data by default, but with Ahrefs, you can see much more. This historical data, combined with the percentage of clicks from anonymized queries, means you can get a more precise picture of your clicks.

Discover Opportunities To Improve

If you think you’ve done everything right but are unsure why you aren’t getting the desired results, Ahrefs has a great tool that allows you to view everything you need to improve in one easy list. I scrolled through all the suggestions and discovered ways to improve our content, links, and technical issues. Some of these suggestions are free, whereas others require a paid plan. I think this is such a great feature as all the tips are in one place, saving me time trawling through countless pages.

I then moved over to the Ahrefs site audit tab and selected “issue setting” on the right-hand corner of my screen. This took me to the list of errors, warnings, and notices for all our projects. On the right side of the screen, there is a “how to fix it” button, where you can see ways to fix everything that has been flagged. I think this is another great time-saving component.

Another tool I found helpful is the internal link opportunities report. This report finds internal linking suggestions on autopilot without having to trawl through your pages. The report looks at the top keywords for your site’s ranking pages and finds mention of them on your other pages. This allows you to share link equity from high-authority pages to lower-authority ones.

Look At Your Organic Competitors

The free version also allows you to look at your organic competitors. Explore your website competition that ranks in the top 10 organic search results for the keywords they get the most traffic from. The competitive map shows how they stack up against you in terms of traffic, value, and pages. You can also discover their best-performing pages to see if they are worth creating. I found it really interesting to see how I could boost our performance without too much effort or digging.

These are just some features that I explored on Ahrefs free plan. I found the dashboard simple to use after spending a little time with it. I think having all the suggestions to improve and errors to fix in one list is really helpful and saves so much time! Plus, there are many more features with the paid plans.

Ahrefs Customer Reviews

I scoured the web to find out how real users rate Ahrefs. I’ve found some reviews to give you an overall picture from customers’ perspectives.

Praise

I love Ahrefs because it offers a complete SEO toolkit with data for backlink analysis, keyword research, competitor analysis, and site audits. It has a great UX/UI and it makes it easy to use for both beginners and professionals, helping more than just improve website visibility and organic traffic. I have been using ahrefs for more than 8 years and it’s one of my go-to tools for research.

Sanjit, Trustpilot – 01/12/2023

Been a paying ($2000+ yearly) customer for 4+ years. They have good data in comparison with SEMRush/Moz/Other and help make quick decisions. Not a huge fan of the credit system (hence the doc in 1 star) but overall the product has been really useful in helping us know where we are ranking and what we need to work on.

John Rampton, Trustpilot – 22/03/2023

Complaints

Have just unsubscribed. I could not see when signing up anything about credit based searches. 500, would last me days not weeks or even a month. Its so sad because the tools are good but just not financially viable for a small business trying to get a grip on their SEO. After reading the reviews below it is guaranteed Ahres will definitely lose business, sorry guys it’s the truth. Whoever thought of this policy needs to think hard of users not just a bank balance, trust me it won’t work in the long run.
If I could find out how to get a refund I would ask for one.
Such a shame 🙁

Paul Higgins, Trustpilot – 08/02/2024

Really disappointing how they have treated loyal customers. Prices have more than doubled from our legacy plan. I get how things change and price increases are inevitable, but to double this from one month to the next is unacceptable and a great way to lose clients.

Sean, Trustpilot – 19/12/2023

Ahrefs Alternatives

Are you not impressed with what you’ve seen so far? Or maybe you’re still not sure if an Ahrefs subscription is for you. Let’s take a quick look at Ahrefs competitors and why these might be your better option.

Semrush

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Semrush is another leading SEO tool with a similar user-friendly interface and many features, offering all-encompassing software. Unlike Ahrefs, Semrush still offers a seven-day free trial for all of its plans, which is great for beginners or businesses looking to explore their options. Prices range from $129 to $499, although enterprise packages are more and require a quote. Semrush has the largest keyword database on the market and also offers social media management and advertising insights. Plus, they constantly add new features, keeping up with industry needs and trends.

MOZ

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Moz offers a 30-day free trial, which is great for smaller businesses starting their SEO journey. They have several plans that range from $99 to $599. The most popular plan is Moz Pro, another all-in-one SEO software package. Their tracking of keyword rankings is intelligent, and they offer insights into page optimization recommendations and domain authority. And they also have a marketing blog, one of the best-known resources for online marketers.

Raven

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Raven prices range between $39 and $399, which is much more attainable for smaller businesses. They also offer a free seven-day trial. Raven offers a comprehensive SEO platform but isn’t as user-friendly as Ahrefs. Raven is praised for its customer service and willingness to add features based on customer feedback. This could be a good choice if you’re a niche company or looking for something that other SEO tools don’t offer.

If you’re still unsure which SEO tool is the best option for you, look at our comprehensive guide to the best SEO tools, which explores 15 of them.

Frequently Asked Questions

We know our readers still have many questions about Ahrefs and how it can improve their online business. If you don’t see yours below, ask about it in the comments, and we’ll find the answer.

How Does Ahrefs Help With SEO?

Ahrefs provides comprehensive data on keywords, allowing users to identify high-value keywords to target in their content. It also analyzes the health of your website and the quality of your backlinks and recommends ways to improve. It also allows you to spy on your competitors, see how they rank, and discover ways to build on their success.

Is Ahrefs Worth It?

Ahrefs has an extensive suite of tools and accurate data provided by one of the largest databases in the industry. Ahrefs is highly regarded among SEO professionals and beginners alike. Take the time to explore its features to ensure that it meets your business needs and is worth it before committing to a long-term subscription.

What’s The Difference Between Ahrefs Lite Vs. Standard Plans?

With the lite plan, you can access Ahrefs keyword explorer, backlink analysis, content and competitor analysis, site audits, and more. The lite plan is ideal for individuals or small businesses who want to improve their SEO performance without breaking the bank. Ahrefs standard plan takes your SEO capabilities up a notch with additional features. These include more frequent updates, tracking rankings over time, and gaining a deeper insight into your competitor’s strategy. It also provides more in-depth historical data and allows users to create custom reports. Choosing between the two plans depends on your SEO needs and budget constraints.

Which Is Better – Ahrefs vs Semrush?

The best SEO tool depends on your specific goals and preferences. Both Ahrefs and Semrush provide comprehensive keyword research and competitor analysis tools. Each has unique features, so it’s best to explore all the alternatives before deciding which SEO tool suits your needs the most. Budget is also a significant factor, and Ahrefs is generally the most expensive of the two tools.

Learn More About Improving Your Online Presence

Now that you’ve explored Ahrefs and perhaps other SEO tool options, it’s time to focus on keyword research and trend analysis to ensure your website is seen. Get ahead of your competition and ensure your website hits all the targets needed to succeed. When it comes to online success, you need to work smarter, not harder, so be sure to explore our marketing guides and more.

Do you think you might give Ahrefs a go, or are you considering switching to another SEO provider? Maybe you have used their services and want to share your experience. Let us know in the comments below.

Why Trust We Rock Your Web

Emma is a freelance writer and strives to create content that is helpful for her and her readers to improve their business. She constantly researches and reviews the latest online SEO tools and tech to help small businesses thrive in an ever-changing and challenging environment. Emma works with a professional and experienced team to give her readers the best, most accurate, and most up-to-date information.