Ahrefs

Overall, I have had a great experience with Ahrefs. You can tell that the company really cares about its product and its customers through the consistent updates that are made to meet the needs of customers.

Pros: Ahrefs consistently adds features and is quickly becoming a tool that you can use to tackle all of your SEO needs including keyword research, competitive analysis, content ideas, backlink research, anchor text optimization, site audits, SEO ranking reports, and domain strength analysis. Ahrefs has one of the best backlink indexes, second only to the major search engines like Google. This is important when tracking links to your site and also links to competitors sites. They create content that not only helps you use their software, but it also helps you do your job better. I have picked up a number of tips and tricks for improving my SEO skills by reading their blog. You can see how many domains are linking to the referring pages that link to your site and you can all see how many domains the referring page is linking out to besides your domain which is very helpful in determining how much power the pages that are linking to your site are passing on to you. You can see how many keywords a referring page is ranking for. They listen to customers and truly care about feedback. Most recently, there was an issue with backlink data not being updated for 5 days with no communication to users of the product. After the issue occurred, Ahrefs released a statement taking responsibility for the mishap and communicating the fact that they are working on a way to improve internal processes so that the communication gap never happens again.

Cons: The keyword difficulty score only takes backlinks into account. Backlinks are very important, but for many search engine results pages (SERPs), it is becoming clear that backlinks are not the only factor and that other variables should be taken into account when determining how difficult it will be to rank for a specific keyword. Their keyword research tool is based on their own database, instead of pulling from Google so some of the keyword results are not updated when using the tool Many smaller keywords are not available since the keyword tool does not pull from Google Keyword research is not great for smaller countries. The client of my company Charles Brian International, in South East Asia and found it difficult to get reliable keyword research information for some of the Asian countries.

Pro’s

On the Internet, you can find a lot of SEO tools, but Ahrefs is one of the few where you can find almost anything an SEO expert needs. Moreover, the Ahrefs marketing team does a very nice job covering how to use their tool. They use very simple language to explain step-by-step any terms that might not be familiar, which helps SEO’s get the most out of the software. SEO experts can use Ahrefs for a quick analysis when the time is of the essence to make a decision. That said, SEO’s get the most value by thoroughly utilizing all sections. To this end, Ahrefs is suitable for freelancers and SEO agencies alike… and its price is suitable for all. SEO experts like myself currently use it for off-site optimization analysis-- checking backlinks, monitoring their quantity and quality, keyword phrase analysis, SERP positions, and a quick overview of why they could be on top. The tool also is useful for on-site optimization, especially site audits.   

Con’s

Any SEO expert knows that you shouldn’t rely only on one tool, therefore as an SEO Expert of CIENCE, I cannot find any cons in using Ahrefs-- since it should never be used in isolation. This may be an interesting quirk inherent to the SEO space, as redundancy is positive. You always need other tools for checking the above-mentioned metrics to have a more full picture of a site’s health and data analysis. 

Pros: Insights are good.

Cons: Can't think of any right now.

I have been using Ahrefs as my primary SEO tool now for about seven months. My company Riotly Social Media currently subscribes to the "Lite" plan. There are several limitations to the Lite plan that have frustrated me as a user, but my main complaint is the inability to view our site's organic keywords beyond position 20. 

From a content marketing/SEO perspective, this makes tracking any forward or backward motion for lower ranking keywords next to impossible.

Pros:

• It's incredibly easy and quick to get a snapshot of any site's overall SEO ranking, including DR, backlinks, referring domains, keywords, traffic and more. 
• The online platform is very straightforward and does not take much time to learn. 
• I use Ahrefs constantly for keyword research. I find the keywords explorer to be quite comprehensive and useful, making it a useful tool for optimizing content for SEO. 

Cons:

• Inaccuracy. Ahrefs is always going to be behind Google in terms of data. For that reason, it's not always safe to assume you have the most updated information. In my line of work, the most frustrating inaccuracies center around keyword/SERP ranking. For example, I almost always have to manually check where my articles rank in terms of the SERPs, due to a lack of real-time accuracy on Ahref's part. 

In my overall experience, I find Ahrefs to be a very useful tool when it comes to tracking SEO and keywords. That being said, my biggest concern about using the platform is accuracy. If you're looking to get a general, close-enough idea of your site from a data perspective, Ahrefs is a great tool. That being said, I wouldn't rely on it for exact, real-time metrics. 

As a Co-Founder and CEO of Mettl company, I share my true opinions regarding Ahrefs Software.

Pros:



You have a lot of options when you use Ahref as one of your marketing tools which helps you draw various useful insights about the market and industry which can fuel other collateral marketing tools or marketing campaigns that you might use.

• Competitor Analysis:

Ahref helps you accomplish competitor analysis to a very granular level. You can check what your counterparts and competitors are doing around the niche, market dimension, and target audience that you are trying to bring onboard. Based on the insights gained from competitor analysis, you can compare and see where your website is actually performing better than others and where are you lagging behind and can possibly tweak to suit the demands.

• Website Technical Audit:

Just like other industries have procedures for quality analysis, Ahref is your go-to marketing tool for technical audit of the website- you have the option to analyze the website structure, organic keywords, top performing pages of your website, the keywords and backlinks your website has received, level of keyword difficulty, and the keyword ranking which can be leveraged to base your marketing campaign on. All of this valuable and deep knowledge helps you prepare the secret sauce to make effective marketing campaigns and at the same time compare every single metric with your competitors.

• Daily Backlink Activity:

With Ahref, you get to keep track of the daily backlinks activity- it helps you know which all third-party websites have mentioned your brand’s name or the CEO’s, given you backlinks to your website, and also the domain authority and ranking of those third-party websites- giving you massive data about how you are scaling up and improving your search engine rankings (SERP) and domain authority.



Cons:

• Keywords for Countries can’t be Compared in One Search:

When you are conducting keyword research, Ahref doesn’t offer the option of including keyword rankings of two countries together and in one search. Owing to this shortcoming, you have to compare the keywords ranking of different countries individually and separately, making comparisons a tad difficult. 

• An Approximate Value of Some Metrics:

The keyword difficulty and position of organic keywords which Afref correlates and lets you know are based on approximate values. Since the level of keyword difficulty and keyword position are an approximation, you can't trust it solely and you have to take into account other factors or tools to be sure.

Ahrefs site explorer is the first place our company Workshop Digital, LLC choose when we’re doing a backlink analysis for a client. We always pull backlinks from a few different sources since each has a different set indexed, but Ahrefs consistently pulls the largest number and most relevant backlinks which is why it’s our go-to for quick checks and opportunity analyses where we don’t have time to pull from multiple sources.



The tools' Domain Rating metric is a great way to quickly compare the backlink profiles of client sites against competitors, and their reports are all super intuitive and helpful for quick answers about anchor text, broken backlinks, and organic performance over time.

Our experience of using Ahrefs has been truly wonderful thus far. One of the main reasons why Traffic Bees team have found Ahrefs so effective is the extensive amount of resources available on their Blog and YouTube channel. Every week, they release new articles on how to effectively use the features on Ahrefs and what you can do to outrank your competitors. The step-by-step guides are easy to follow and because we used Ahrefs, we were able to see immediate results for our clients.  

The main downside would definitely be the price. To monitor our clients' projects, we are on the Advanced plan and this costs us about $399 a month. It is definitely not cheap, but I would say that it has been worth every cent that we have been paying for the past year.

It's an all in one tool. It's perfect to do keyword research and spy the backlinks of Digital Nova's competitors. And it also gives me very fresh updating about how my website is doing. The only con is that it's very expensive. My overall experience is great especially to check what are the keywords that the site ranks for and it helps me to find a way to track my competitors.

Ahrefs is a great tool and helped The Hoth for reviewing some of your sites analytics as well as estimating your competitors. Please keep in mind Ahrefs is an estimate rather than exact figures from Google analytics. There are so many features to choose from.

Pros:

• keyword research
• organic traffic
• anchors vs. referring domains
• organic keywords

Cons:

• I already pay for the software, but to check the organic traffic for a period earlier than 6 months prior I have to pay more.

I love to use this tool to analyze my competitors' top ranking keywords within a specific niche and gather insight on which keywords to target next.

Pros:

• Their competitor analysis tools are a really great resource. From being able to view their backlinks to their keywords, it's super helpful to Epic Marketing.
• They are continually making updates and adding new features.

Cons:

• You can't segment by date. For instance, if you want to see the "new keywords" you rank for 2 months ago, you can't. It only shows the current time frame.
• The site audit is hit or miss. Sometimes it's extremely accurate, other times it doesn't actually crawl and tells you that you're site is 100% optimized. They also don't keep a record of all site audits. When asked about it, they claim that I'm the one deleting the previous reports.
• They don't have the ability to edit keywords in the rank tracking tool. You either have to delete them, or just stick with them.
• They don't have a white labeling option when it comes to reporting of any kind.