This is one of our top picks in the category so we recommend it over others (you're on the right page), read below to learn why we love and recommend it! ⤵
This is one of the better tools in its category, see below if this tool is right for you! ⤵
Ahrefs has by-far the best and most accurate data as compared to all the tools in the space with the most utilitarian experience, and yes, I'm including SEMRush when I say this. In-fact, just take 2 minutes looking at their YouTube channel and Blog, you can see how much they care about teaching you SEO.
In using both Ahrefs and SEMRush side-by-side for years (amongst countless others), we've found ourselves continually coming back to Ahrefs as it most accurately reflected our site analytics, long-tail keywords, Google Search Console stats, and more, all while supplying us with the most important data and history needed for actually making content creation decisions (without overwhelm or fluff).
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what they do well, and what they could do better. ⤵
Your digital marketing strategy backed by real, actionable data.
Ahrefs is an SEO tool (Search Engine Optimization) that businesses, agencies, and individuals (who have a website/blog) use to help them understand where they are ranking organically on search engines (primarily on Google).
They essentially scan search engines to see where they are ranking your site as a whole, along with all the pages on your site, at the deepest keyword level.
It even estimates the traffic value of the various pages on your site, by looking at what people are paying Google for in ads on the keywords that your various pages you're ranking for.
This is incredibly useful when you're trying to figure out what a page might be worth to sponsors and advertisers when you eventually look to monetize your site, or are evaluating the value and impact of SEO as compared to other paid marketing channels (critical for businesses and startups especially).
Based on your research, who loves this software? Categorize that group of people.
If you are a business that is serious about your SEO, you're not going to find a better tool than Ahrefs. Whether you're just starting out to build out your content strategy online, or evaluating "if SEO should be part of your marketing strategy", then Ahrefs gives you all the SEO and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) tools needed for this.
Whether you're looking to evaluate competitors in your space to see what pages they are ranking on Google with and focusing on (spoiler alert: those might be the keywords that are leading to conversion—so learn from what they've already put the work in to learning).
If you're in growth/marketing for a company and have a website, you've almost certainly heard of Ahrefs, and probably also SEMRush, and if this is the case, then Ahrefs is for you, keep reading because you're in the right place!
Ahrefs has SO many features, like a ton. So many in-fact, that I have been using Ahrefs for nearly a decade now, and I'm only just scratching the surface.
Sounds overwhelming, right? Well actually no... That's the point, I don't even worry about most of Ahrefs features, I just focus of the few that I use almost daily, and I'll search for more when I'm specifically looking to solve a pain-point, or just bored on a Saturday afternoon and looking to explore (and yes, I'm currently writing this entire Ahrefs review on a Saturday afternoon—if it wasn't obvious, we love this stuff...)
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:
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.
Ahrefs has a bit of a hidden free tier that you can sign up to here, which is referred to as the "Ahrefs Webmaster Tools" tier, which is actually what I got away with for the first 2 or so years using Ahrefs.
With their free tier, you're going to be restricted to just looking at your own site (you can't look up competitors or dive too deep into the data), but you'll be able to view the top-level performance metrics, which is all you really need when you're starting out with an SEO tool in your business.
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.
Is Ahrefs worth it? Well… let's just say that if we could only purchase a single SEO tool to use for our business, it would be Ahrefs hands-down. While we've been constantly evaluating other tools in the space, it has continually come down to Ahrefs has the best data available and a more actionable user-experience. We're literally an SEO-driven software review and comparison site—we've used a LOT of SEO tools over the past decade (I was also formerly a web developer and SEO/SEM expert for the first 6 years of my career before pivoting the business to software consulting FWIW).
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.
What we've continually seen with the alluring more "modern" SEO tools on the market coming out is that they are often just paying for SEMRush data (which is pulled via their API), so at the end of the day is that it's really Ahrefs vs SEMRush, and for us, we've just found that SEMRush has missed the mark in accurately reflecting our actual traffic, competitors, and traffic value as well as Ahrefs has. But what's even more important than this is
We actually had a friend over that worked for SEMRush, so with access to the highest tier and all the knowledge, we asked him to sell us on why we should switch from Ahrefs.
3 hours later and countless features shown, specifically for our website, and we were left feeling even more confused by SEMRush and actually uninspired. It just seemed to overcomplicate things, throwing too much data and terminology (that they came up with) at you. Needless to say, we stayed with Ahrefs, and I think that should say a lot.
There's a reason you see many SEO consultants and experts on X, LinkedIn, and other platforms sharing screenshots of Ahrefs, not so much SEMRush.
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