Ahrefs

Ahrefs monitors the ranking positions of your site at both a page level, and a keyword level, broken down by position, keyword difficulty (how difficult it is to rank highly for said keyword), estimated traffic, search volume, and traffic value (essentially estimating what that page is worth based on your ranking and how much people are paying Google per click for the same keywords).

They even show you historically how that page has ranked for that keyword as compared to competitors, and yourself, showing you when a page is improving, declining, and how much your page has changed content-wise since the last major ranking change.

It will also track SERP features (like if a page is showing in the Question/Answer section) or a featured snippet, image, and more, although this changes a lot and isn't the most accurate.

What I particularly love about this is the gamification that you get from seeing how a page is historically improving in a search result. When you see how you've improved over time, it is a great validation point that what you're doing is actually working (and the same goes for the reverse). It gets me to write more and update content on the site more often, which is huge.

This is one of my favorite features for a couple reasons. SEO is such a strange thing, all of your competitor's information is essentially right there in public:

• What pages and keywords are bringing your competitors the most traffic?
• What keywords are they ranking for that you have a shot at overthrowing them?
• What are the top ranking pages writing about in order to rank and what inspiration could you take from that?

It's wild in a sense... The first thing I do now when I go to a site that is interesting, hear about a friend's startup, or go to a talk/networking event and start talking to someone is I look up their site in Ahrefs and may or may not judge then for it 😆

For example, see a huge spike and then crash of traffic around the "Helpful Content Update"? Ah yes, you were probably trying to cut corners by using AI to write content for you on your site, not totally sure we're going to get along well. Some people look at someone's LinkedIn, I look at their site on Ahrefs 😂

Looking for inspiration of what you should write about? Check out your competitors, they probably did a lot of research about what keywords/pages are resulting in traffic that converts for them. It's great inspiration and a pretty big shortcut. Try doing what they did, but in your own way with more thought and care, because they probably just hired some half-assed SEO firm, you got this!

Everything you do is public, people can right-click a page and inspect it to see everything you've done, down to your header tags, page schema, metadata, site structure, and more. This area will either be the bane of your existence, or the thing that keeps you going. Either way, it's great!

Ahrefs has a native Google Search Engine Console integration which enriches the data you're shown, using the actual search engine reporting data that Google sees, directly to you as a site owner. If you haven't yet checked out your Google Search Engine Console, then you're missing a treasure trove of information, like impressions and clickthrough rates for keywords and pages on your site. It's incredibly powerful and insightful even just on its own.

Google Search Console Stats

While at times in the past I have felt like Ahrefs has needed a visual overhaul, in using Ahrefs alongside SEMRush for years, I've continually found myself going to Ahrefs as their UI is actually more utilitarian, like that of Google Sheets or Airtable. With Ahrefs, I find that I'm getting a more direct answer to what has changed, what to keep an eye on, and a better pulse of how things are going in a single pane of glass.

With an untrained eye, you're probably to think the exact opposite, when looking at SEMRush for instance, but I'm here to tell you that while SEMRush may "look" more modern, it's throwing a lot of additional information at you at all points, whereas Ahrefs is just showing you what you need to see to take action on most screens.

Now when I first started using Ahrefs, I begged them for a cheaper paid tier, but they were quite adamant about wanting to stay a premium product and not offer any discounts ever.

I used to beg Ahrefs: "I want to pay you, but I just can't justify the $129 for your paid tier, is there any way to get a discount while I'm just starting to take SEO more seriously?", and to which they would consistently reply that they take pride in that they never discount, and that they want to be a premium product. (While audibly frustrated, I was low-key impressed by them, and appreciated them all the more for this response—sorry Ahrefs) 😆

Because we didn't have much SEO or traffic value going on during the early days, it was such a tough pill to swallow. So for that reason, it always felt like Ahrefs was more built for the SEO agencies or larger businesses that already had some serious SEO traffic.

It was this way for 6+ years, until they just recently completely shocked the world by releasing a $29/mo tier 🤯

My hunch is that this was probably due to the competition of cheaper SEO tools jumping on the market (with the help of SEMRush's API data that they license out), resulting in some lower cost competitors to hit the scenes.

With this intro pricing tier, it has become a total no-brainer to kick things off in Ahrefs over all the others, for which most are just white-labeled versions of SEMRush at the end of the day. So now if you're even just slightly interested in dipping your toes into SEO for your company, Ahrefs has a pricing tier for everything you might want.

We're happily on the Lite tier, but funny enough, that's because the Starter tier didn't exist at the time. Actually curious if we could get away with it, but now that Ahrefs is so core to our business, we've been considering even higher tiers.