Ahrefs is a website that helps you increase your search engine traffic.

The site boasts 4 billion keywords in its database! As a result, when you sign up, you officially have access to the largest keyword database in the industry.

Why You Should Use Ahrefs

• If you want to improve your SEO, use Ahrefs. It is considered the best site for its purpose.
• You will have access to a private Facebook community where you can get help with your blogging, beta test new tools, and get your SEO questions answered.
• Ahrefs has its own blog. Their blog posts contain valuable blogging tips.
• You are able to build on past successes knowing what keywords you rank for. You can see the keywords and posts that are bringing you the most traffic by clicking “Top Content.”
• Ahrefs has podcasts where you have the option of listening to the information instead of reading it.
• Ahrefs offers tips for marketers. Marketers definitely need visibility in search engines.
  
• The site has over 4 billion keywords in their database. Clearly, they have a valuable keyword checker.
• Ahrefs will email you reports about your progress in ranking for keywords. You get notified by Ahrefs if your post’s position in the search engine pages changes. I was excited to read my Kingged post made it into the top 3 on Google!
• Ahrefs is good for checking your number of backlinks. In fact, I discovered I had 37,830 links.
• Do you want to know who is linking to you? Check Ahrefs. I saw almost 1,000 domains linking to me.
• Ahrefs can show you the return rate of your keyword. How often will they check for it again and again? Ahrefs can tell you.
• You can check the metrics of your best keywords that get you your most traffic at Ahrefs. You can save the metrics to a list and export it. Do you store your keyword results in an Excel Spreadsheet? There’s no need to anymore. There’s a place to store your results right in Ahrefs. On the other hand, you can always opt to export your list to an Excel Spreadsheet.
• The site emails you when new people link to you. Ahrefs will even show you recent links to your site put there within hours. 

This screenshot shows a notification I received from Ahrefs. Can you tell I got a dofollow link from Flipboard? Dofollow links help you more in search engines than links that are not Dofollow. DR shows you the Domain Rank of the site giving you the link. The higher the number, the better the site and the more valuable search engines consider your work.

• Ahrefs knows what Google likes. According to Ian Cleary of RazorSocial, Google analyzes your links. You should let Ahrefs analyze your links so your SEO doesn’t suffer if Google isn’t impressed.
• Ahrefs is so accurate, it can predict your chances of ranking in the top ten on Google’s first page.
• Ahrefs will alert you of broken links by sending you an email. Google will penalize you if you have broken links.
• You can also set Ahrefs to alert you to keywords getting published on the internet that you’re interested in.
• Ahrefs is a great tool for checking on your competition. The site helps you monitor how your competition is doing when it comes to link building. Instead of typing in your URL, type in your competitor’s URL to check on the links people have to their sites.
• Ahrefs has a site explorer where you can get statistics for your blog or website.
• You can see search volume so you know if there is interest in your keywords.
• Ahrefs has a content explorer that will enable you to find the most shared content for the topics in your niche.
• Ahrefs has a Position Tracker. With Ahrefs, you can see just how much success you are having. Through the Position Tracker tool, you can track keyword research and rankings and even see how your pages are ranking on mobile devices.
• There is always someone available to help you if you run into trouble thanks to the Live Chat feature.
• You can even set up alerts that notify you when you’re mentioned on the internet.
• Ahrefs will tell you how many links you need to your post before it can appear on Page 1 of Google.
• Their data is always current since the site is updated every 15 minutes.
• With over 14,000 Twitter followers, Ahrefs must be doing something right.
• Ahrefs will show you long-tail keywords so you don’t need a separate tool to find those.
• Ahrefs is free to try for 2 weeks.

Ahrefs Tutorial

How to get started using Ahrefs:

Go to Ahrefs.com.

This screenshot shows your Ahrefs home screen.

Dashboard:

Step 1: Put in your site URL. Click “Add a website.”

Step 2: Click your site name that has the highest number of backlinks. For me, it had https in front of it, not http. Mine defaulted to a site without the highest number, and there was a message telling me to pick another URL. All of them were for Mostly Blogging, my site, but they had a different number of backlinks listed. Click “next.”

These are the metrics you will see for your site:

Look at the screenshot:

By looking at the screenshot, you can see I get valuable information about my blog’s ability to get found in search engines.

Keyword:

This column contains the keywords used in search queries. These were not the keywords I tagged my post with. Instead, these are the keywords people typed into search engines that helped them find my blog articles.

Pos.:

This is the position my article is in at Google’s search engine results pages (SERPS). It seems accurate. I typed in “Sticky Blogging,” (look at the 7th entry) and my article really appeared 6th.

Since there are approximately 8 entries on each page of Google, every time the position is 8 and below, my article can be found on Page 1 of Google.

Volume:

This column shows the number of searches for the keyword. The higher the volume, the more likely your article will be found in the search engine results pages and clicked.

Note: You have to consider both. For example, there are 4000 searches a month for “BizSugar,” which I consider a decent number of searches. However, with my article at Position #20, it is far away from the top of Page 1.

May I digress and tell a joke? I can’t take credit since I didn’t make it up:

Question: What is the greatest hiding place in the entire world?

Answer: Page 2 of Google.

Do you see my point? I want to be on Page 1 of Google in order to enhance my article’s visibility, not Page 2 or even farther away from Page 1.

URL:

The URL of my article that people can find when they type in the search word.

What is the value of knowing this information?

1. Knowing the keywords that have high volume searches is crucial to your increasing your search engine traffic. If you use these keywords again, you should continue to get traffic since interest in these keywords is high.
2. If you see your article’s rank is falling, boost interest in it so page views rise. How to do that? Simple. Retweet. Twitter is designed for this. The hashtags #ArchiveDay is for you to post old articles on Saturday. Also, the hashtag #TBT or #Throwback Thursday is designed so you can tweet your links to older articles on Thursdays. You could also post or repost your articles at linky parties. I have seen people post articles many years old at linky parties.

Step 3:

Add keywords to track how well your website ranks in organic search results separated by commas.

At this point, you will see the keywords you rank for and how you rank for those words in Google. This is important information.

For example, I mentioned in previous articles that a post I wrote five months ago about Niume picks up so many page views it is one of my highest all-time performing posts.

Look at my Ahrefs data, and you can see why.

Alerts:

I added an alert for my website. If other people link to me or mention my site, I want to know about it. I do get emails when my site gets mentioned.

Site Explorer:

There is a lot to look at here.

According to Neil Patel, Ahrefs has promoted their Site Explorer as “the best backlink checker tool in the industry.”

Ahref’s Site Explorer is a backlink checker. Here you can check the backlinks for your site or competitors’ sites. This is a live index so it will always be up to date.

You can also use Site Explorer to boost your search traffic. You can see what keywords your competitors are ranking for and which pages bring the most traffic from search

According to Razor Social‘s Ian Cleary, the Site Explorer is the most valuable feature of Ahrefs since it lets you analyze the links to your site from other websites. The more valuable other website creators found your content, the more your blogging efforts paid off!

Ahrefs explained the value of their Site Explorer: “Ahrefs has the fastest backlink crawler in the industry and boasts the world’s biggest index of live backlinks (over 15 trillion links), which makes Site Explorer the best tool for backlink research.”

Look: Can you tell over the past 10 months, I have received far more links to my site?  Exciting to see. If other people think my content is worth linking to, search engines will show my content to their users.

Click “Backlinks” and you will see who linked to your content. I was pleased and surprised to discover that my friend Mitch McConnell linked to my long-form content article.

I found “New Referring Domains.” I wanted to see who recently linked to me, so I clicked it. To my delight, I found that three days ago, someone linked to my article 1 Thing the Most Successful Authors Know That Others Don’t. I also found out the blogger’s domain rank. The better the rank, the better the effect on my SEO. Google will think if someone with a strong ranking links to my content, it must be worthwhile!

I clicked “Organic Search Movements” since I wanted to see changes. I found three articles have moved up in the search engine results pages while my BizSugar article has fallen.

Look: 

While I was in “Site Explorer,” I clicked “Organic Keywords.”

Can you see the arrows? The green arrows pointing up show me the good news: The keywords I rank for moved up in Google’s search engine pages.

However, the red down arrow showed me the disappointing news: My Nniume article dropped one position at Google.

I realize Ahrefs sends me emails notifying me of these changes, but I don’t need to wait. The information is available to me at the click of a button.

Top Pages:

I wanted to see my progress in Google’s search engine which this metric will show. This screenshot shows my Niume article is my top ranking post in Google’s search engines. Can you tell by looking at the first screenshot in this post that my Niume article has fallen from Position 4 to Position 6?

Best By Link’s Growth:

I discovered some of my content is performing nicely in search results.

Organic Search

Scrolling down, you will see the top 5 keywords that led people to your site and your top 5 pages or posts

Content Explorer

Put in your keyword to see the most popular content on the web in your niche. I entered “blogging” and “blogging tips” since that’s what I write about.”

Keyword Explorer

This is my favorite part of Ahrefs.

According to Entrepreneur, your SEO strategy should include starting with keywords that match your content and searching for “low-hanging fruit.” Ahrefs Keywords Explorer provides both.

Features of Keyword Explorer: There are three activities at your fingertips with the keyword function of the site.

• You can generate thousands of keywords. 

I wanted to see what kind of keyword possibilities I could generate for this post about Ahrefs, so I plugged “Ahrefs” into the search bar. 462 possibilities came up. “Ahrefs” had a search volume of 17,000. Did you notice the keywords I chose for this post? The other two keywords I chose, “website checker” and “SEO tools” each had a search volume of 13,000.

My post about how many tags you should use in your article explained I don’t want to use too many, so I stopped there. However, as you see from the screenshot, there are many possibilities for you to use to find keywords.

More good news: the keyword difficulty was low, so it appears it will be easy to get search engine traffic to my Ahrefs article. SEO Strategist Ashley Faulkes also advises creating content about keywords with high search volume but with a low difficulty level.

Let’s look at another example: 

Even if you can’t understand the metrics, just seeing the score surrounded by green shows you that it is considered an easy keyword. There are 150 searches for the term each month.

Can you see the words, “You’ll need backlinks from 47 websites to rank in the Top 10 for this keyword?” This means 47 people would have to link to my article for it to rank in Google’s Top 10 in their search results.

According to SEO Quality Backlinks, “With backlinks remaining one of the top ranking factors in all of the search engines, this is a major plus for the SEO of your website, and something you should be striving for with every piece of content that you write.”

• Do an in-depth analysis of specific keywords.
• Get the metrics for a specific keyword. If Ahrefs shows you a low search volume or a high keyword difficulty, look at the suggestions. Clicking on them may unearth easier keywords to rank for. 

Ahrefs has a search volume of 15,000. However, I may not like the difficulty level of the keyword. Look at all these possible options!

Testimonials

According to Nikola Roza of nikolaroza.com:

“I love Ahrefs because it gives me the biggest bang for my buck. What I mean is, not only does Ahefs has the biggest backlink index in the industry (very important as more links you know about; more links you can potentially replicate); but they also developed a nifty Content Explorer and awesome keyword research tool to boot.

Really, Ahefs has matured from the best backlink checker into the best, or at least most affordable all-in-all SEO tool.

In case you haven’t noticed- I love Ahrefs”!