Ahrefs: The Definitive Guide

6 Steps to Get AI to Recommend Your Brand

1. Intro to Ahrefs

What is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is an SEO software suite that contains tools for link building, keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking and site audits. Most of the features inside Ahrefs are designed for marketing professionals.

In short: Ahrefs is an SEO tool designed to help people get higher Google rankings.

What is Ahrefs Used For?

Ahrefs is mainly used to analyze a website’s link profile, keyword rankings, and SEO health.

You can also use Ahrefs to conduct keyword research for Google, YouTube, and Amazon.

And many people use Ahrefs to find content that’s performed well (in terms of social shares and/or links) on a given topic.

When Ahrefs first launched in 2011, it was mainly a tool to analyze a site’s [backlinks](/content/hub/seo/backlinks "What are backlinks?"/index.html).

And its feature set has grown over the years.

Today, Ahrefs is mostly used by:

Small business owners that do SEO for their own websites
SEO agencies that work with multiple clients
“In-house” marketers that run marketing for their employer’s site
Affiliate marketers that run several different sites
SEO consultants that advise clients on their [SEO strategy](/content/seo-strategy "Effective SEO Strategy"/index.html)

2. Ahrefs Terms and Metrics

If you use Ahrefs for more than 30 seconds, you’ll notice that the tool contains A LOT of different terms and metrics.

Here’s a breakdown of the terms that you’ll run into as you use Ahrefs.

URL Rating (UR): The link authority that a webpage has. Calculated as a combination of the quality and quantity of backlinks that point to that page.

Domain Rating (DR): URL Rating applied across an entire site.

Anchors: A breakdown of the most commonly-used anchor text in a site’s link profile.

Referring Domains: The number of different unique websites that link to the page or site you’re looking at.

CTLDs Distribution: A breakdown of a site’s links by top-level domain (.com, .edu. .de etc.)

Ahrefs Rank: A worldwide ranking of a site’s link profile.

Parent Topic: The broad topic that a keyword falls under.

Traffic Potential: The amount of traffic you’d get if you ranked in the #1 spot for that keyword.

Keyword Difficulty: How hard (or easy) it will be to rank on the first page of Google for a given keyword.

3. Backlink Analysis

Like Semrush, Ahrefs has a massive link index that’s updated on a regular basis.

And there’s a lot of stuff that you can do here, from analyzing a competitor’s backlinks to finding toxic links that point to your own website.

Backlink Profile

To look at a site (or page’s) links, just pop a homepage or page URL into “Site Explorer”:

And you’ll get a dashboard with info on that site’s backlinks, metrics, and organic traffic.

To deep dive into that site’s link profile hit “Backlinks” in the sidebar.

If a site has a ton of backlinks, I recommend going to “Link type” → “Dofollow”.

Here are the two main things you can do with the Ahrefs backlinks report.

You can find pages that link to your competitor… and that might also link to you.
You can use their link profile to get an idea of WHY people link to that site.

4. Keywords Explorer

Keywords Explorer is Ahrefs’ [keyword research tool](/content/keyword-research-tools "15 Keyword Research Tools"/index.html).

When you enter a keyword into Keywords Explorer, you’ll notice a bunch of cards above the fold:

This is the “Overview” section that gives you a high-level overview of the term that you just searched for.

But what makes Keywords Explorer helpful is that you get to also see a keyword’s number of clicks, cost per click, and “Clicks per search”.

5. Organic Keywords and Organic Search Traffic

Ahrefs’ “Organic Keywords” and “Organic Search Traffic” features reveal all of the keywords that a domain ranks for… and how much search engine traffic that site is getting right now.

You can also see how these metrics have changed over time with this chart.

The real value comes from the complete list of keywords that a competitor ranks for.

6. Content Explorer

Ahrefs Content Explorer is designed to show you content that gets lots of social shares.

All you need to do is pop a keyword or topic into Content Explorer, and you’ll get a list of articles that got tons of shares on social media.

You can also sort the results by Traffic Value to see content that’s still bringing in valuable traffic today.