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What is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is a robust SEO tool that you can use to get better SEO results. Using this tool will help you make the most out of your content and link building efforts. It can help you research for keywords and check your backlinks. It can even explore competitors through competitor analysis, website audit, and more.

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What Are The Main Things You Can Do With Ahrefs?

Search For Brand New Content Ideas

It can be hard to think of content that is relevant to your niche. It's even harder to check which kinds of content gets shared the most. What types of content can drive traffic into your money-making website? Ahrefs can help you create new content ideas that you can turn into high-quality and engaging content.

Keep A Close Watch On Your Competitions

Ahrefs can help you check the keywords your competitors use. You can also use this to check on the content they make that rank high and gains lots of traffic. This way, you can finally outrun them by getting a headstart before they even make a move.

Ahrefs helps you build better backlinks and increase social media shares.  It can tell you which pages are linking to your competitors. It can also show which of their content gets quality backlinks. This data can help you in creating content worth sharing in social networking sites.

Multiply Your Network Manifold

Knowing who use your content will help you build your followers. For one, you get to engage with your sharers and influencers. Each influencer already has their followers. Knowing who these audiences are will give you an idea of what content they need. In turn, you get to better cater to their needs through quality content creation.

backlink checker

Ahrefs Review: Top features you should be using

Alright, it’s the time when you learn about a few notable features of Ahrefs. Do remember, Ahrefs is not just a tool but a suite of SEO tools, and I’m covering just a few of them here and others you need to discover yourself by playing with Ahrefs.

What is Ahrefs Keyword Explorer?

Keyword explorer let you perform keyword research on the following platforms:
•    Google
•    YouTube
•    Amazon
•    Bing
•    Yahoo
•    Yandex
•    Baidu
The keyword explorer is complemented by Keyword list feature which let you save the keywords while you performing the research.
You can use the pre-built filter on the left side to populate more keywords. Using Include feature, you can filter keyword based on “Awareness”, “Consideration” or “transaction stage”.

Do pay attention to KD (Keyword difficulty) store to find keywords that you can rank easily.
The parent topic feature is something you should pay close attention to as by targeting one parent topic, you could rank for hundreds of keywords. I will discuss the complete methodology in the coming days.

What is Content gap by Ahrefs ( Quickly find keyword opportunities )

This feature let you find profitable keyword opportunities that you are not encashing on.
You can quickly compare your domain with your competitors to find out what keywords they are ranking for, which you are not. This is another great way to find profitable keywords by performing Competitor Analysis.

Backlink audit feature

Head over to Site Explorer and enter the domain name for which you want to find the backlink profile.

You can use the backlink profile to do a lot of things:
•    Broken link building
•    Internal backlinks (This is a new feature)
•    Link intersect

How to use Link Intersect tool by Ahrefs?

This is perhaps one of the most talked features of Ahrefs.

Using link intersect feature, you can find sites that link to your competitors (or their pages) but don’t link to you (yet). What interesting here is, you can compare your domain with up to 10 domains to find those link building opportunities.
Usually, this lets you find those link building opportunities which are easy to build.

Ahrefs Content Explorer

Ahrefs content explorer is quite different than any other content explorer you have ever used.
This one is designed for finding easy to win link opportunities and competitor analysis. Content Explorer by Ahrefs also let you find the most popular content around any topic or from any website. You can sort content based on social share or backlinks.
In the search box, you can type any topic, and it will show you the most shared content on the web. You can filter the results by date and language or pick from available filters. You can also include or exclude certain domains from the results to refine your search.
Using Ahrefs content explorer, you will be able to do the following:
•    Find republished content of any website
•    Find broken links around any topic (Link building opportunity)
•    Check the publishing frequency of you vs. competitors
•    See the trend of any topic
•    Find a hot topic on your competitor website

Fix keyword cannibalization

This is another less known feature of Ahrefs Suite. You can use the ranking explorer feature to find if any two or more pages on your domain are fighting for the same keyword.
This is a common SEO issue with a large and old website.

The SERP position history will help you quickly see which all pages are competing for the same keyword. You can then decide if you want to prune, consolidate or even delete the page.
If you are suffering from the Keyword cannibalization issue and need help fixing it, let me know in the comment section below. Based on the number of requests, we will publish a guide on fixing the issue of Keyword Cannibalization.

Ahrefs toolbar: (Chrome and Firefox)

Ahrefs also offers a Chrome and Firefox toolbar that let you see vital SEO metrics within SERPs. To download the Ahrefs toolbar, head over to this page and depending upon the browser you are using, download the correct extension.

Now, let’s take a look at the Site audit feature of Ahrefs. I have covered in depth of how Ahrefs Site audit feature works and how you can use it for your domain name.

site explorer

How It’s Used

Ahrefs is intuitively designed. All you have to do is enter the topic, keyword, or domain you want to research. A subscription also comes bundled with learning materials, and access to the Ahrefs community and tech support. Ahrefs is also populated by popup info windows that you can activate by scrolling over an “i” button. Lastly, Ahrefs has an easy to use help chat that will get your questions answered pretty quickly.

AHREF Use Cases

If you’re able to find a piece of content’s broken links you can contact the owner and suggest your own version of that content as the new linked-to piece. It may even be worth it to write that content yourself if a link in the article is important enough.

Discover Which Sites Aren’t Linking to You:

Similarly, you can suggest your content to pages that cover your niche.

Percentage of Clicks:

Knowing where you place on SERPs is helpful, but it’s even more helpful to know your SERP position and how often people actually click your link. You may find that a SERP position doesn’t necessarily translate into more clicks and, as a result, tweak your SEO strategy to target the keywords that lead to more clicks.
Knowing the number of clicks you get is also helpful because Google now answers many questions as a feature, making clicking a link unnecessary in many cases. With this in mind, you can tweak your content to focus on queries that don’t have a featured result. Ahrefs also gives you a snippet of the text around the links on the SERPS you’re looking at, so you get a clearer idea of why people are clicking.

SERP Profile:

See the backlinks, organic traffic, and organic keywords for top SERP pages. This way you can see what about a particular page is impacting its rank. You can use that information to inform your own strategy to improve your rank.
Study Publishing Schedules:
If you know when a popular site is going to be publishing its content you can be prepared in advance to join the conversation. If you also know who on the team engages with comments on social media, you can be among the first to engage and increase the likelihood of being retweeted, talk with the influencer, and have more people see your brand if they’re reading comments.

What They’re Saying

Ahrefs has plenty of users already. Here’s what some of them are saying about it around cyberspace. First, the positive:
•    Highlights competitor info
•    Dashboard gives a great bird’s-eye view of a website
•    Tool has plenty of info, even for smaller sites
•    Site auditor offers actionable insights
•    It does almost everything
•    Helps with content marketing strategy
•    Best all-around SEO tool
Now, the negative:
•    Keyword volume may be inaccurate sometimes
•    Not always a lot of data on niche keywords
•    Can be a bit confusing at times
•    Tool requires a bit of a learning curve
•    Smaller shops will find it expensive
•    Need to upgrade to get the full feature set
•    Site audit tool lags behind competitor tools
•    Reports aren’t as pretty as they are with other tools

ahref coupon code

Ahrefs Pricing and Discount with Coupon code

Ahrefs has four different plans, ranging from $99/month to $999/month.
•    Lite: $99/month
•    Standard: $179/month
•    Advanced: $399/month
•    Agency: $999/month
Every plan has the same major features.
The difference is the amount of data that you get from each feature.
For example, you can track 500 keywords on the Lite plan. But you can track 10k keywords on an Agency plan.
Same feature. But one gives you 50x more data to work with.
And it’s the same story for backlinks, keywords, site audit crawls, and more.
Each plan gives you the same access as any other plan. But the more you pay, the more you can get out of each feature.
Note: there are a few exceptions to this rule. For example, you can’t track mobile rankings at all with a Lite plan. But for the most part, the main difference between each plan is the amount of data that you have access to.

 keyword explorer

Bottom Line on AHREFs

Ahrefs is not as robust as its closest competitor, SEMrush, but that doesn’t mean that you should just ignore Ahrefs. At the end of the day, the choice you make should be informed by what you’re going to be using your suite for. Ahrefs, for example, doesn’t have a tool kit dedicated to PPC, while SEMrush does. Ahrefs, however, can be used more efficiently for backlink research, which makes sense since it was originally solely a backlinking tool.
Many social media marketing agencies, PPC media agencies, and SEO agencies also have a subscription to both SEMrush and Ahrefs because of how well the two complements each other. Because Ahrefs is less robust, it makes use easier in many cases. You can see the most important data right away. But SEMrush’s power is unmatched and allows you to conduct more in-depth research. So, you don’t really have to choose between the two if it’s not cost-prohibitive to subscribe to both.

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