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Ahrefs, and five SEO tools worth knowing first

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2024.12.25Updated 2026.10.07
  • SEO and digital marketing

Summary

What Ahrefs can do, and how to use it. A first look at the product, and which numbers are worth watching if you want SEO to move.

Anyone who has studied SEO to some degree has probably heard of Ahrefs, but few have had the chance to actually use its features.

So what features does Ahrefs actually have, and how do you use them? This article walks through them all at once. Besides giving you a basic understanding, it will also show you which data is actually worth looking at if you want better SEO results.

But before that, let me first introduce what Ahrefs is.

What is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is a website that brings together a full SEO toolkit. Whatever data you want to research, whether it's website rankings, keyword research, competitor analysis, or website issue diagnosis, you can find it among the tools on this site.

What are the advantages of Ahrefs?

Ahrefs's biggest advantage is how well it brings everything together. In the past, researching SEO meant looking at lots of scattered information and data separately.

Ahrefs not only brings these analytics tools together, but the Ahrefs blog also has many articles about SEO, so while you use the tools you can also learn SEO systematically.

On top of that, there are its YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter channels to help you learn more of the finer points of SEO.

If you now have a basic understanding of Ahrefs, let's get straight into the basics of using Ahrefs's tools!

Ahrefs basics tutorial

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On this page

  • What is Ahrefs?
  • What are the advantages of Ahrefs?
  • Ahrefs basics tutorial
  • Site Explorer
  • Checking backlinks
  • Researching organic traffic
  • Researching paid traffic
  • Keywords Explorer
  • Get lots of keyword ideas
  • Search for keywords with different filters
  • Check keyword difficulty
  • See more data about a keyword
  • Save your keyword ideas
  • Site Audit
  • Rank Tracker
  • See data changes at a glance
  • Understand how your competitors are doing
  • Regular monitoring reports
  • Content Explorer
  • Find great content using filters
  • See how content trends change
  • Conclusion

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Ahrefs has five main tools, and I'll introduce them in five sections, one per tool. They are:

  1. Site Explorer: research on a specific website
  2. Keywords Explorer: research on large numbers of keywords
  3. Site Audit: research on SEO issues
  4. Rank Tracker: research on website rankings
  5. Content Explorer: research on website content

Site Explorer

Ahrefs's Site Explorer uses organic traffic, backlink, and paid traffic data to help you analyze your competitors' websites and understand them in more depth.

So you can enter a competitor's website in the search bar and carry out the following three main types of research:

  1. Backlinks
  2. Organic search
  3. Paid search (pay per click)

Then use Overview at the very top of the left sidebar to see the statistics for all three.

Checking backlinks

In the backlinks section of the sidebar, you can see more data about backlinks.

Using the data below, you can analyze which links point to your website and your competitors' websites, research those sites, and plan and build your backlink strategy.

  • New backlinks
  • Lost backlinks
  • Broken backlinks
  • New referring domains
  • Lost referring domains
  • Anchors
  • Backlinks and URLs listed by IP (referring IPs)
  • Internal backlinks

Researching organic traffic

In the organic search section of the sidebar, you can see more traffic data for web pages.

With the data below, you can find out your competitors' keywords and pages, analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your pages versus theirs in depth, and work out the best content strategy.

  • Newest keywords (new)
  • Keyword traffic and rankings over time (movements)
  • Top pages
  • Top subfolders/pages (top subfolders)
  • Top subdomains
  • Which websites compete with you (competing domains)
  • Which pages compete with yours (competing pages)
  • Keywords your competitors rank for but you don't (content gap)

Researching paid traffic

In the paid search section of the sidebar, you can see the keywords and ads behind paid traffic.

With the data below, you can see which keywords your competitors advertise on and what their ad landing pages contain, and find ways to get more traffic.

  • Paid traffic keywords (PPC keywords)
  • Paid traffic ads (Ads)
  • Top landing pages

That wraps up Site Explorer. In short, you enter a specific website's URL to carry out more targeted research that helps you beat your competitors.

Keywords Explorer

In Keywords Explorer, you can see lots of keyword data for different countries and different search engines, including search volume, clicks, and keyword difficulty. It also has a huge keyword database that can give you many more keyword ideas.

Here are some of the more common keyword research methods and features you may need:

  1. Get lots of keyword ideas
  2. Search for keywords with different filters
  3. Check keyword difficulty
  4. See more data about a keyword
  5. Save your keyword ideas

Enter the keyword you want in the search bar, then use Overview at the top left to see all of that keyword's data, including basics like difficulty, search volume, and clicks.

Get lots of keyword ideas

After entering a keyword in the search bar, click keyword ideas on the left to reach the keyword suggestions page.

Ahrefs has a huge number of keyword suggestions that can give you an endless supply of ideas. The Chinese-language market doesn't have as many as the English one, but there are still enough for basic keyword research.

Search for keywords with different filters

If the keyword suggestions still aren't enough for you to come up with the best keyword, you can click phrase match and try filtering with different criteria.

Difficulty and search volume can both be used as filters. Adjust the filters to suit your needs until you find the keywords you think fit best.

Check keyword difficulty

Once I've chosen a keyword, I go back to Overview to check its difficulty.

Difficulty is the most essential reference metric in keyword research. It represents how hard it is for that keyword to reach Google's first page. And for a new website, choosing keywords of the right difficulty is a very important strategy.

See more data about a keyword

If a keyword's basic data isn't enough for you, you can use more data to judge its other characteristics, including clicks, click-through rate, and return rate. These can all serve as extra reference metrics.

Save your keyword ideas

Finally, once you've finished your basic keyword research, you can use Ahrefs's keyword lists to save the keywords you think have potential as a list for future use.

Site Audit

Site Audit helps you check your website's health and find ranking issues, so you can better address the factors behind declining SEO performance and optimize how your website performs.

In Overview at the top left, you can see a detailed website analysis covering every possible SEO issue, along with suggested fixes to help you deal with the problems the right way.

In addition, Site Audit groups issues into categories so you can work through them systematically. These issues include:

  • Performance: slow pages, CSS or HTML files that are too large.
  • HTML tags: missing article titles or descriptions, or ones that are duplicated or too long.
  • Social tags: incomplete social tags
  • Content quality: scattered duplicate pages
  • Localization
  • Incoming links: nofollow link issues detected
  • Outgoing links: links to broken pages detected
  • Resources: problems with images, JavaScript, or CSS.
  • External pages

If you want an engineer to fix these issues, they can use Ahrefs's issue categories to quickly give you professional advice.

Rank Tracker

In Rank Tracker, you can enter a set of keywords along with your competitors' URLs and immediately start tracking how rankings change over time. Reports are sent to your inbox so you can check them anytime.

Click Overview at the top left to see the following tracking data:

  • Visibility: click-through rate from organic traffic
  • Average position & traffic
  • Position distribution: the number of pages ranking 1-3, 4-10, 11-50, 51-100, and 101 and beyond

See data changes at a glance

Ahrefs uses clear markers to highlight changes in important data, making your research more intuitive and convenient.

Understand how your competitors are doing

Beyond your own rankings, you can also use this tool on many competitors at once to monitor their rankings, traffic, and other data.

Regular monitoring reports

Rank Tracker also thoughtfully emails you analysis reports detailing changes in keyword rankings and how other metrics are performing.

Content Explorer

In Content Explorer, you can enter a topic you're interested in, find "popular articles" on that topic, and dig into how these top websites write great, high-quality content.

Find great content using filters

You can sort these popular articles by the following criteria.

  • Publication status
  • Publication date
  • Language
  • Backlinks
  • Organic traffic
  • Number of backlinks
  • Domain rating
  • Organic traffic value
  • Social shares
  • Author

In the sorted list of popular articles, you can see all of each article's data and use it to judge the value of its content.

See how content trends change

You can also use the chart of pages over time to see in which years and months a topic you're interested in was most popular. This feature also shows how often your brand is mentioned and how much content your competitors publish.

Conclusion

After reading this article, you should now have a basic understanding of Ahrefs and be ready to start using these tools to boost your website's SEO.

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