Understanding the power of SEO is crucial to achieving a prominent online presence. This is where Ahrefs comes in. Ahrefs has established itself as a leading SEO toolset that empowers businesses to elevate their search engine rankings and enhance their online visibility.
So, it is an all-encompassing SEO software suite with a range of different tools that can help you bolster your organic ranking and visibility. This is key to achieving your data-driven marketing goals. This comprehensive guide will introduce you to the fundamentals of how to use Ahrefs and provide actionable insights for conductive effective website SEO analysis.
Getting Started with Ahrefs
It’s important to note that Ahrefs primarily offers paid plans, though it does provide some free tools and features with limitations. In this section, you’ll be introduced to the different plans available, including the free tool, and learn how to use Ahrefs to set up your first Ahrefs project.
Plans and Pricing
Ahrefs offers different subscription plans tailored to a range of users, from those seeking basic insights to large enterprises in need of advanced features and data. More so, for individuals just beginning their SEO journey, there is the free option called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which grants limited access to a couple of core tools.
For those seeking more features and data, Ahrefs offers four main paid plans, each coming with 5,000 crawl credits per month for verified projects:
- Starter plan ($29/month) provides access to all the core tools with 100 credits per month. Best for SEO beginners.
- Lite plan ($129/month) increases credits to 500 per month, but crawl credits are still capped at 5,000. Five unverified projects are allowed. Best for small businesses.
- Standard plan ($249/month) is limited to one user but there are unlimited credits. Twenty unverified projects are allowed
- Advanced plan ($449/month) also offers unlimited credits and extends the number of unverified projects allowed to fifty.
There is an additional enterprise plan that starts at $14,990 per year, suitable for large agencies that need customized plans with highly advanced features.
Also, you can purchase additional add-ons for a monthly fee, such as extra credits, export rows, crawl credits, etc.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT)
For newcomers to SEO analysis and how to use Ahrefs specifically, most professional-grade SEO tools can feel overwhelming. This is where the Ahrefs Webmaster Tools comes in. More so, Ahrefs offers no free trials for paid plans. However, AWT allows you to understand what using the main Ahrefs suite feels like before you commit fully.
The Ahrefs Webmaster Tools grants access to two of Ahrefs’ core tools: Site Explorer and Site Audit. They allow you to perform essential SEO tasks like analyzing your website’s backlink profile, researching keywords, and identifying technical SEO issues that might be hindering your website’s performance in search results.
Of course, there are some limitations. For instance, with AWT, you can only view up to 1,000 backlinks and 1,000 keywords per project. However, it’s still a starting point to taste Ahrefs’ powerful capabilities. And as your SEO needs expand, you can always upgrade to access a wider array of features.
Setting Up Your Ahrefs Account
Here are the steps to understand how to use Ahrefs and set up your first project:
- Sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT)
- Add your website: You can add your website by entering its URL or by connecting your Google Search Console account.
- Verify ownership of your website. You can verify ownership of your website using DNS records, an HTML file, or your Google Analytics account.
- Schedule your site audits. You can adjust the frequency of your crawls, specify your URL sources, and adjust your crawl speed settings and limits. You can also leave the default settings and adjust them later.
- Hit “Finish.” Once you’ve scheduled your site audits, you’re done setting up your first project! You can start using Ahrefs to analyze your website’s SEO performance and find ways to improve your rankings.
A Guide to Ahrefs’ Key Tools
- Ahrefs Dashboard
The Ahrefs Dashboard tool is the Swiss Army knife of marketing tools. It’s like a mission control for all your SEO efforts, where you get to see the big picture of what’s going on with all your projects at a glance. And it’s pretty handy for staying on top of things without drowning in details.
- Site Explorer
The Site Explorer tool is like having x-ray vision for websites. And this doesn’t just apply to your own site, but you can snoop around your competitors’ websites too. Basically, its functionality is to let you see how much organic traffic a site is pulling in and check out who is linking to that site.
More interestingly, you can figure out what keywords your rivals are using to get ahead, as well as which of their pages are bringing in the most visitors. By spotting these gaps, you arm yourself with insights to outsmart your competitors, and this has proven a game-changing tool for many in the SEO industry.
- Keywords Explorer
Keywords Explorer is your go-to tool for uncovering the right words to fuel your marketing efforts. It can generate thousands of keyword ideas at once and help you identify golden opportunities and help you identify golden opportunities that you might otherwise miss. Additionally, the keywords are organized logically and systematically.
What sets Keywords Explorer apart is its broad reach. It doesn’t just stick to regular web searches – it digs into image, video, and news-related keywords too. This wide-angle view helps you spot opportunities across different types of content, giving you a leg up in your overall strategy.
- Site Audit
No website is perfect, and even minor technical SEO issues can hold your website back from achieving its full potential. The Site Audit tool by Ahrefs acts as a website health checker, crawling your website to identify several potential SEO problems.
It scans for issues related to slow page speed, broken links, missing meta descriptions, and much more. Providing actionable recommendations on how to fix them. Site Audit also categorizes these issues by severity, helping you to prioritize your SEO efforts.
- Rank Tracker
Understanding your website’s ranking for target keywords is essential for measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Rank Tracker allows you to track your website’s ranking positions for thousands of keywords in different locations over time.
You can monitor your progress and see if your efforts are paying off. Of course, you can also identify areas that need improvement. Rank Tracker also provides data on your competitors’ rankings, allowing you to benchmark your performance and adapt your strategy.
- Content Explorer
Ahrefs’ Content Explorer functions like a search engine specifically for content, allowing you to find top-performing content in your niche. You can use it to uncover content ideas, analyze what’s already popular, and find link-building opportunities by identifying websites that have linked to similar content.
Ahrefs has access to a massive database of over 15 billion web pages, which provides a vast pool of content to explore with the tool.
- AI Content Grader
One of the latest additions to the Ahrefs suite of tools is the AI Content Grader, which the team introduced alongside a slew of other AI features back in July 2024. True to its name, it leverages artificial intelligence to help you improve your existing content and create new content that’s strategically aligned with search intent.
The downside here is that the AI Content Grader is still in beta and only available for Enterprise plan users. However, non-paying users can access a number of free AI writing tools that they can use to improve their content and even generate content.
Play the SEO Game Better
It may seem daunting at first, but once you know how to use Ahrefs, you’ll find that it’s a user-friendly tool with a wealth of resources available. For more resources on how to play the SEO game better and promote your business online, follow Startup Growth Guide to gain actionable insights.
Featured Image by Ahrefs
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