Ahrefs is a link-building, keyword research, competition analysis, rank tracking, and site auditing software suite. The majority of Ahrefs’ features are geared toward marketing professionals.

In a nutshell, Ahrefs is a well-known SEO tool that individuals use to improve their Google rankings.

What is the purpose of Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is primarily used to assess the link profile, keyword rankings, and SEO health of a website.

Keyword research for Google, YouTube, and Amazon can also be done with Ahrefs.

When Ahrefs initially launched in 2011, it was primarily a backlink analysis tool.

And its feature set has expanded significantly over time. In reality, I’ve been a customer of Ahrefs since 2013.

Over that time, Ahrefs has evolved from a link analysis tool to a full-featured SEO suite that now competes directly with Moz Pro and SEMrush.

Ahrefs is mostly used by:

• Owners of small businesses who perform SEO on their own websites
• SEO firms that work with a variety of clientele
• Marketers who work “in house” for their employer’s website
• Affiliate marketers who maintain many websites
• SEO experts who provide SEO strategy advice to clients

How Much Does Ahrefs Cost?

The cost of Ahrefs is determined by the plan you select. And if you want to pay monthly or annually.

The pricing of Ahrefs is broken down below.

While Ahrefs presently does not provide a free trial, they do offer a $7 7-day trial.

Is Ahrefs a Better Alternative to SEMrush?

So, if you’re interested in learning more about how these products compare, I recommend going there.

However, in a nutshell, I prefer Ahrefs to SEMrush. Both tools are fantastic (in fact, I subscribe to both). However, I prefer Ahrefs’ user interface. The tools are otherwise fairly comparable.

Following that, here’s a brief comparison of Ahrefs and SEMrush:

This isn’t an Ahrefs review, to be clear. However, many people wonder if I prefer Ahrefs or SEMrush. So I’d like to briefly respond to that here.

Frequently Used Ahrefs Terms

Here’s a rundown of the terms you’ll come across when using Ahrefs.

The link authority of a webpage is measured by its URL rating (UR). The quality and amount of backlinks pointing to that page are combined to determine the score.

URL Rating applied across an entire site (domain rating) (this is basically the equivalent of Moz Domain Authority).

The most widely used anchor text in a site’s link profile is broken down into anchors.

The amount of different unique websites that link to the page or site you’re viewing. Higher Google ranks are associated with a large number of referring websites.

The distribution of top-level domains (CTLDs) on a website (.com, .edu. .de etc.)

Ahrefs Rank: A ranking of a site’s link profile on a global scale. The lower the number, similar to Alexa rating, the better the link profile.

Parent Topic: The broad topic under which a term falls (for example, “link building” falls under “SEO”).

The quantity of traffic you’d get if you were to rank #1 for that term.

Keyword Difficulty: How difficult (or easy) it will be to rank on Google’s first page for a specific keyword.

Also Rank For: A list of keywords that appear in the top 10 results (for example, pages that rank for “content marketing” may also rank for “what is content marketing”).