Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO toolset designed to help individuals, teams, and enterprises improve their search engine optimization (SEO) and organic rankings. Here’s a detailed overview of what Ahrefs does and its key features:
What Ahrefs Does
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool that empowers users to enhance their website’s performance through various SEO-related functions. Initially, it was primarily known as a backlink checker and optimization tool, but over time, it has expanded to include a wide range of features.
Key Features and Functionality
Site Explorer
This feature allows users to analyze the backlink profile, site structure, organic traffic, and paid traffic of any website. It provides a detailed dashboard showing metrics such as the number of backlinks, referring domains, domain rank, and more. This is particularly useful for competitive analysis and evaluating the performance of rival websites.
Keywords Explorer
This tool enables users to sift through billions of keywords and their associated SEO metrics to identify the most valuable keywords for their website. It helps in keyword research and finding opportunities to rank higher in search engine results.
Rank Tracker
This feature allows users to monitor the Google rankings of their website and their competitors across 190 locations on both desktop and mobile devices. It provides real-time tracking of keyword rankings, helping users adjust their SEO strategies accordingly.
Site Audit
The Site Audit tool checks a website for over 160 predefined technical and on-page SEO issues. It offers deep insights into HTML, page content, links, and other aspects of the website, helping users uncover and fix SEO problems.
Content Explorer
This feature helps users find content ideas and link prospects within Ahrefs’ vast database of 15.3 billion web pages. It allows users to see which pages of a website have the most backlinks and social shares, and to filter results based on various metrics such as backlinks or social measures.
Additional Features
Top Content
Shows the best pages of a website based on backlinks and social metrics.
Top Pages
Displays a website’s top pages based on the number of organic visitors they receive, along with search terms they rank for.
Best by Links
Highlights the top content of a rival website based on the volume of referring domains.
Advanced Search and Filtering
Ahrefs offers advanced search options similar to Google, allowing users to use operators to make searches more precise. The filtering options are also robust, enabling users to filter results by specific date ranges, which is useful for newsjacking and content curation.
Educational Resources
Ahrefs provides extensive free educational resources on SEO, their tools, and marketing in general. This helps users gain a deeper understanding of SEO practices and how to effectively use the Ahrefs toolset.
Data Infrastructure
Ahrefs updates its index with fresh backlinks every 15 minutes and processes up to 8 billion pages a day, making it one of the most active crawlers in the SEO space. It also supports a keyword index of 12 billion keywords across 216 locations.
In summary, Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool that offers a wide array of features to help users analyze backlinks, conduct keyword research, track rankings, audit websites, and find content ideas. Its robust data infrastructure and continuous updates make it a valuable resource for anyone looking to improve their website’s SEO and organic rankings.
