Ahrefs

I have used my fair share of paid SEO tools in my career at TopSailDigital and I have had a paid account for Ahrefs.

My Score for Paid (Competitor Research Tool) is:

Ahrefs – 4/5 – Ahrefs does an OK job at competitor Research, but I have to stick with Ahrefs since they offer CompetitorResearch and a slew of other SEO tools in one package.

Ahref Tool is a great tool to unearth your competitor’s backlink profile and build high-quality backlinks for your site. It is a perfect tool in terms of index size, freshness, building quality backlinks and also to track your position on search engines, perform technical audits, and do keyword research.

Ahrefs boasts the world’s largest index of live backlinks. They update it with fresh data every 15-30 minutes. Here is the overall experience of the Ahref tool after using it for my agency - Grazitti Interactive:-

Key Features of Ahrefs -

1. Site Explorer - In-depth analysis of the organic search traffic and backlink profiles of any website.
2. Keywords Explorer - Discover the popular keywords for any website.
3. Content Explorer - Discover the most popular content for any topic.
4. Rank Tracker - Tracks the rankings for the keywords. You can download daily/weekly/monthly reports.
5. Site Audit - Audit the complete website with metrics such as index pages, backlinks profiles, authority, citation flow, etc.
6. Alerts - Get new and lost backlinks, keyword rankings and mentions related to the brand keywords.
7. Backlink Checker - Give the detailed backlinks analysis of any website or URL.
8. Website Authority Checker - Discover the authority of the website/URL..
9. Domain Comparison - Compare the backlinks profiles of up to 5 domains.
10. Content Gap - Provides an in-depth analysis of the keywords for your competitor ranks for.

Pros -

1. Powerful backlink analysis tool.
2. Rank Tracker is accurate and reliable.
3. Keywords Explorer 2.0 sets higher standards of keyword research. They have a 9.9 billion keywords index database of search queries across 10 different search engines in 171 countries.
4. Excellent outreach tool which works better in keeping track and generating the new backlinks..
5. 100% ROI in terms of backlinks analysis at the enterprise/agencies level.

Cons-

It is expensive as compared with Spyfu.

Pricing

• Lite (Minimum Package) - $99/month
• Advanced Package - $399 (Ideal for SEO agencies)
• Agency (Maximum Package) - $999/month (Ideal for marketing agencies with a big range of clients)

Prior to launching my own venture - Illuminate Labs, I worked at one of the top SEO firms in the U.S. for four years. Here is my response:

Ahrefs is more valuable for organic search. Since Google already provides extensive paid search data and analytics, Ahrefs is more valuable overall in my opinion. The UX is superior on Ahrefs and they have better customer support as well.

I've used Ahrefs for SEO projects at Leadhub and found it by far the better software than others. Ahrefs has more tools, more current data and more capacity for SEO research. The biggest con to Ahrefs is that it is not at all intuitive to new users. The interface is more overwhelming for new users to pick-up than other software. However, it's not difficult to learn once you spend a little time with it. It can also be difficult to use on mobile, I only recommend using it on a desktop.

At TimePayment Corp., we prefer using Ahrefs over any other software it tracks your site's keyword positions over time, so you don't have to take the time to manually go in and track them. A con of using Ahrefs is that it is one of the higher monthly cost SEO tools and the price can add up over time.

I am Sean Clancy, Director of an SEO Agency - Edge Marketing and here is my point of view regarding Ahrefs software. Without a doubt, Ahrefs has been the market leader for some time and has only gone from strength to strength over the last couple of years.

Pros:

A. Has unique features that no other competitor has, such as - Keyword research for 10 searches and discover content gaps between your site and your competitors

B. Has the biggest database of links out of all the major backlink checkers

C. The dashboards are very clear and intuitive to use. Keeping it simple

D. Has great integration features with other applications to power up your analysis.

Cons:

A. Bit pricey for freelancers or small businesses

B. Is slowing up a lot lately with massive database and volume of new users

C. The free features are very limited compared to other providers.

Overall Experience:

Ahrefs features cover a variety of other SAAS services, meaning you can get most of what you need under one package. Usually, a jack of all trades suffer in quality, not Ahrefs, each of their features could stand up to individual SAAS competitors.

Their blog and how-to videos/articles are top-notch and really allow you to maximize your use of Ahrefs, using almost all the features to good effect.

My firm - Octiv Digital handles SEO campaigns for businesses large and small, so a solid set of tools is vital. Ahrefs is a go-to tool I use almost daily for backlink analysis. Unlike some of its competing platforms, Ahrefs offers extensive analysis into competitors’ links that allow us to set up a competitive link acquisition strategy for them. The tool also shows different types of links that can be acquired ranging from different domain name extensions (.net, .com., .edu) to link types (Nofollow vs. followed links). It carries a lot of pros and the only con is the price. However, for the amount of information available, it’s well worth it.

My name is Jesse Silkoff, founder of MyRoofingPal, an online marketplace that connects people with the best local roofers in 4,000 cities across the U.S.

I use AHREFS for competitor analysis and keyword research for all of my sites. A very powerful way to do this using AHREFS is to search the URL of your biggest competitors in the AHREFS search bar. From there click "top pages" on the left-hand side. The "top pages" functionality allows you to sort all pages on your competitors' site by total traffic, number of keywords that competitors page ranks for, and the estimated value of that pages' traffic if that traffic was acquired via PPC. The "top pages" view also displays the number of referring domains that a particular page has as well. The "top pages" view of a competitors website is a great way to come up with ideas for pages on your own site that could potentially drive a lot of traffic. I have come up with countless ideas for valuable new pages on my own sites by using the "top pages" view on AHREFS. The key is to look for pages on a competitor's site that drive a lot of traffic, with high value, and a low amount of referring domains.

I've been using different SEO software on a daily basis at my organization - The Kidd Group for my competitor analysis, keyword research, competitor insights, negative backlinks built, etc. I will be sharing the experience of using Ahrefs.

Pros:

- gather all backlinks possible and has lots of features compare to other software

- fresh index backlinks / lost backlinks

- favorite feature: rank #0 / featured snippet

- chain redirects that can be seen only by using this tool

Cons: It cost way too much when compared to other software. Plus only top 20 ranking keywords can be shown on elite subscription($99/month)

If you're running a very high competition business/website that might get hit by negative SEO(bombarded with thousands of links) Ahrefs is your go-to backlink analysis tool.