What is Ahrefs? Comprehensive tutorial on how to use the Ahrefs tool

What is the Ahrefs tool? And how does it work? To learn about this tool, read this article.

We have seen many changes in SEO techniques in recent years. Therefore, many tools are provided to help SEO masters. One such tool is Ahrefs. Ahrefs is a powerful website that helps you optimize your site. Ahrefs has different sections that you can use to review your website. It is also very easy to use ahrefs techniques. This article explains Ahrefs and how to use it completely. This article is a comprehensive and step-by-step guide for you. First, let’s define Ahrefs.

Note that this article is written by Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko.

What is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is an SEO software suite that includes tools for link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, ranking checks, and site audits. Many of the features within Ahrefs are designed for marketing professionals. In short, Ahrefs is one of the popular SEO tools that people use to get higher Google rankings.

What is Ahrefs used for?

Mostly used for website link profile analysis, keyword ranking, and SEO health.

You can also use Ahrefs to research Google, YouTube, and Amazon keywords.

Many people use Ahrefs to find content that is performing well (in terms of links and social shares) on their topic.

When Ahrefs first launched in 2011, it was primarily a tool for analyzing site links. Of course, the set of features of this tool has increased a lot over the years. During this time, Ahrefs has evolved from a link analysis tool into a growing, fully-fledged SEO suite and now competes with Moz Pro and SEMrush.

Today, Ahrefs is mostly used for:

Small business owners doing SEO for their websites.
Advertising and SEO agencies that work with different clients.
Remote marketers who do marketing for their employer’s site.
Affiliate marketers who intend to launch or manage several different sites.
SEO consultants who plan SEO strategies for their clients.

How much does the Ahrefs tool cost?

The price and tariff for using Ahrefs depends on the plan you choose and whether you choose monthly or annual billing. Here are Ahref’s pricing plans. Samples are categorized by year or month.

While Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free trial, you can get a one-week trial for $7.

Ahrefs terms and criteria

If you’ve been using Ahrefs for more than 30 seconds, you’ll notice that the tool contains tons of different terms and metrics. (such as “UR”, “Ahrefs Rank” and “CTLDs Distribution”) and to be honest, Ahrefs doesn’t do a great job of explaining what these things are in plain English.

For example, they describe domain ranking as: “the target URL’s backlink profile on a 100-point logarithmic scale (higher = stronger)”. So before we dive into all the main features of Ahrefs, it’s important to learn how to “talk to Ahrefs”. I will also translate technical material into easily translatable terms.

Ahrefs common terms

Here are the terms you use when using Ahrefs.

URL Rating (UR): A link that a web page has. It is calculated as a combination of the quality and quantity of backlinks that refer to that page.

Domain Rank (DR): URL rank applied to the entire site (this is the equivalent of Moz’s Domain Institute).

Anchors: A breakdown of the most common anchor text in a site’s link profile.

Referring Domains: The number of different unique websites that link to the page or site in question. A large number of referring domains correlates with higher rankings in Google.

CTLD distribution: distribution of links to a site by the top-level domain (.com, .edu, .de, etc.)

Ahrefs Rank: The global ranking of a site’s link profile. As with Alexa ranking, the lower the number, the better the link profile.

Parent topic: The broad topic that a keyword falls under (for example, “link building” is under “SEO” in the parent section).

Traffic Potential: If you rank in the #1 spot for that keyword, you’ll get traffic.

Keyword difficulty: How hard (easy) it is to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword.

Also, rank regularly: a list of keywords that the top 10 results are also categorized for (for example, pages that rank for “content marketing” can also rank for “what’s in content marketing”).

Backlink Analysis

Backlink analysis is Ahrefs’ bread and butter feature. There are many interesting things you can do here, from analyzing your competitors’ backlinks to finding toxic links pointing to your website.

Backlink profile

To see a site’s links (or page links), just put a home page or page URL into Site Explorer:

You will get a dashboard with information on the background, metrics, and organic traffic of that site.

Tap “Backlinks” in the sidebar to go to that site’s link profile.

And you will get a complete list.

If a site has a backlink, I recommend going to “Link type” – “do follow”.

That way, you don’t have to link to loads of semi-worthless nofollow links. For example, the site backlinks have 196,849 backlinks. But if you just look at do follow links, that number jumps to 163,629.

There are still many links. But the management is much easier. I usually hit the “One link per domain” or “Group similar links” button here.

This is because most of the time, you don’t want or need to see every link a site has. It’s more about getting a general idea of who’s linking to that site and why they’re linking to it, and when you add the “One link per domain” or “Group similar links” filters, you’ll get this information. … without the need for a lot of noise. So: Now that you have a complete list of of backlinks on your site, what can you do with this information?

What you can do with this report:

There are two main things you can do with the Ahrefs backlinks report.

You can find pages that link to your competitor… they may link to you.

And when I look at the page, I see that it links to many different websites:

(especially websites that write about technical SEO)

So if I had an article on my site about technical SEO, I would send my post to the person who guides the page. Repeat this process until you have gone through all of your competitor’s link profiles.

You can use their link profile to get an idea of how people relate to that site.

Search for keywords in Keywords Explorer.

Keyword Explorer is Ahrefs’ keyword tool and it gives you an undeniable amount of data about any keyword. It’s like putting a magnifying glass (or microscope) on a given keyword, and in this episode, I’ll show you how to use Ahrefs for keyword research.

Keyword research for other search engines

Ahrefs Keyword Tool now supports a variety of different search engines. Like most keyword research tools, you can search keyword data for a bunch of different countries (like Germany and the UK).

But you can use Keyword Checker for various search engines, including:

YouTube
Amazon
Bing
Yahoo
Yandex
Baidu

So if you do SEO for any of these non-Google search engines, you’re covered.

Organic keywords and organic search traffic

This awesome Ahrefs feature scrapes millions of Google results to see who is ranking for what keywords, and when you enter almost any domain or URL into Ahrefs, you can get a detailed list of the terms they rank for. See (and where they rank for). This allows you to quickly measure your site’s speed against the competition.

You can also use it to keep tabs on how your site is doing (the data is updated often, which is basically what I use instead of traditional rank tracking). Let’s break down this useful feature in detail.

Keywords and organic traffic

Ahrefs’ “Organic Keywords” and “Organic Search Traffic” features show the keywords a domain is ranking for and how much search engine traffic that site is currently getting.

Traffic value

This underrated feature shows you the approximate amount of traffic a website gets from searches. The higher the number, the more valuable the traffic.

Why is this important to note?

Well, it’s one thing to get 1 million visitors a month from Google. But if most of that traffic comes from keywords with little business intent at all, then it’s not incredibly valuable. On the other hand, if a site only gets 10K visitors per month, but that traffic is driven by people with high buyer intent, the traffic value report will show. I tend to pay more attention to my Traffic Value number than anything else. As long as this goes up, I know the quality of my search traffic is increasing.

Content Explorer

Ahrefs Content Explorer is designed to show content that gets a lot of social shares…not necessarily backlinks, and in this section you’ll learn how this feature works.

Find completely shared content.

This is the main reason people use Content Explorer. All you have to do is pop a keyword or topic into the Content Explorer… and you’ll get a list of articles that are contributing heavily to social media.

Sort by traffic amount

As I mentioned in the previous section, I’m a big fan of using Traffic Value as a measure of a site’s SEO performance, and the cool thing about Content Explorer is that you can sort the results by Traffic Value. That way, you’re not just seeing content that’s getting a lot of shares…but content that’s driving valuable traffic today.

Useful features of Ahrefs

Now it’s time to cover a few random Ahrefs features that don’t fit into any of the categories we’ve talked about so far.

SEO site analysis
Find competitors
Features of PPC
Compare domains directly
And more

Advanced Ahrefs Tips

Here are some cool things you can do with Ahrefs that I’ve picked up over the years. So if you want to squeeze even more out of your Ahrefs subscription, this is the section for you.

Easily find broken links.

Ahrefs takes a lot of the blasphemy from Broken Link Building. This is because Ahrefs will show you all the broken links on a site. (so you don’t need to run my links a million times)

Anchor text analysis

Keyword-rich anchor text can improve your Google ranking… If your anchor text is over-optimized, you could find yourself with a Google penalty. So check out the “Anchors” report to make sure that more of Your anchor texts are made up of generic and branded anchors.

Batch analysis

If you’re doing SEO at any scale, then batch analysis is for you. Instead of analyzing URLs one by one, you can analyze up to 200 URLs at once.