Ahrefs is a premier, comprehensive SEO software suite designed for competitor analysis, technical auditing, and keyword research, driven by a massive, real time web crawler. The platform facilitates strategic growth through core tools, including Site Explorer for traffic insights, Keywords Explorer for ranking difficulty, and Site Audit for technical health.
Ahrefs is a powerhouse in the SEO industry. It is best known for having one of the world’s largest indexes of live backlinks, powered by its own web crawler (AhrefsBot).
The 5 Core Pillars of Ahrefs
Ahrefs organizes its entire platform around five primary tools, each serving a distinct marketing function:
Site Explorer (Competitor Analysis)
- What it does: Analyzes any website’s organic traffic, paid search campaigns, and backlink profile.
- Why it matters: It lets you see exactly which keywords your competitors rank for and where they get their links.
Keywords Explorer (Keyword Research)
- What it does: Generates thousands of keyword ideas across 10 different search engines (Google, YouTube, Amazon, etc.).
- Why it matters: It provides deep metrics like Keyword Difficulty (KD), search volume, and estimated click-through rates.
Site Audit (Technical SEO)
- What it does: Scans your website to find technical errors that prevent it from ranking.
- Why it matters: It flags broken links, slow pages, duplicate content, and missing HTML tags automatically.
Rank Tracker (Performance Monitoring)
- What it does: Tracks your website’s Google rankings over time for specific keywords across desktop and mobile.
- Why it matters: It visualizes your progress and sends automated reports showing your ranking drops or gains.
Content Explorer (Content Marketing)
- What it does: Searches a database of billions of web pages to find top-performing content in your niche.
- Why it matters: It helps you discover what types of articles get the most social shares, backlinks, and traffic.
You can learn how to use Ahrefs for marketing using step by step guide.
Pros & Cons for Beginners
The Good:
- Data Accuracy: Unmatched backlink and keyword data quality.
- All in One: Replaces the need for multiple separate SEO tools.
- Actionable Insights: Clear visual graphs that explain why data looks the way it does.
The Challenging:
- Learning Curve: The sheer volume of data can be overwhelming at first glance.
- Pricing: It is a premium tool with plans typically starting around $99+/month, making it a serious investment.
How To Use Ahrefs? Beginner’s Guide
When you log into Ahrefs for the first time, it is easy to get lost. Follow these four foundational workflows to start getting immediate value.
Step 1: Audit Your Own Website’s Health
Before trying to beat your competitors, you need to make sure your own site isn’t broken.
- Action: Click on Site Audit in the top navigation bar.
- Action: Click + New Project and import your website (you can link it directly to Google Search Console for free verification).
- Action: Run a full crawl of your site.
- What to look for: Once finished, look at the Health Score. Navigate to the All Issues tab. Prioritize fixing anything marked as a red Error (like 404 pages or broken redirects) before tackling yellow Warnings.
Step 2: Spy on a Competitor’s Traffic
Find out exactly what strategies are working for your top competition so you can replicate them.
- Action: Go to Site Explorer.
- Action: Type a competitor’s domain name into the search bar and hit enter.
- Action: Look at the Overview page to see their total Organic Keywords and Organic Traffic.
- Action: Click on the Top Pages report in the left sidebar.
- What to look for: This report lists your competitor’s pages from most traffic to least. Study their top 5 pages to understand what topics their audience loves.
Step 3: Find Easy Keyword Opportunities
Discover low competition keywords that you can rank for quickly.
- Action: Go to Keywords Explorer.
- Action: Type a broad topic related to your business (e.g., “vegan recipes”) into the search bar.
- Action: Click on Matching terms in the left sidebar.
- Action: Set the KD (Keyword Difficulty) filter to a maximum of 15 (this isolates easy to rank terms).
- Action: Set the Volume filter to a minimum of 200 (ensuring people actually search for it).
- What to look for: Look down the filtered list for highly specific phrases (long tail keywords) that you can write a dedicated blog post or page about.
Step 4: Steal Your Competitors’ Backlinks
Backlinks are like votes of confidence from other websites. If a site links to your competitor, they might link to you too.
- Action: Put your competitor’s domain back into Site Explorer.
- Action: Click on the Backlinks report in the left sidebar.
- Action: Set the filter to One link per domain and the link type to Dofollow (these pass ranking power).
- What to look for: Look at the websites hosting these links. If you see a resource page, a blog directory, or a guest post where your competitor got featured, reach out to that website owner and pitch your own content.
To fix technical errors on your website using Ahrefs, you will primarily use the Site Audit tool. This tool acts like a digital doctor, scanning your website’s code to find issues that hurt your Google rankings.
Here is the exact step by step process to find and fix those technical issues.
Step 1: Set Up and Run Your Audit
Before you can fix anything, Ahrefs needs to crawl your website.
- Click Site Audit in the top menu bar of Ahrefs.
- Click + New Project.
- Connect your Google Search Console to automatically verify ownership and import your website for free.
- Leave the crawl settings on default and click Run Audit.
- Wait for the crawl to finish (this can take from a few minutes to a few hours depending on your site’s size).
Step 2: Read Your Health Dashboard
Once the crawl finishes, click on your project to open the overview dashboard.
- Health Score: This is a percentage score out of 100. Aim for 85% or higher.
- The Main Breakdown: Look at the center of the screen to see your issues categorized into three colors:
Errors (Red): Critical technical issues. Fix these first.
Warnings (Yellow): Medium importance. Fix these second.
Notices (Blue): Minor issues or informational details. Review these last.
Step 3: Locate and Fix the Top 4 Technical Errors
Navigate to the All Issues tab in the left sidebar. This is your master checklist. Here is how to handle the most common critical errors:
Fix Broken Pages (404 Errors)
These occur when a page on your site no longer exists, but a link is still pointing to it, creating a bad user experience.
- Find it: Look for the error “404 page” or “Broken link.”
- The Fix: Click on the number next to the error to see the broken URLs. Click the “Inlinks” column to see which pages contain the broken link. Go into your website CMS (like WordPress) and either delete that broken link or change it to point to a live, working page.
Fix Redirect Loops or Broken Redirects (301/302 Errors)
This happens when Page A points to Page B, but Page B points back to Page A, causing browsers to crash.
- Find it: Look for “Redirect loop” or “Broken redirect.”
- The Fix: View the URL chain provided by Ahrefs. Update your website’s redirection plugin or .htaccess file so that the original URL redirects directly to the final, live destination in a single step.
Fix Missing or Broken Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Search engines use these tags to understand your pages and display them in search results.
- Find it: Look for “Title tag missing or empty” or “Meta description missing.”
- The Fix: Click the list of affected URLs. Log into your website CMS, open those specific pages, and write unique, relevant SEO titles and meta descriptions for each one.
Fix Duplicate Content and Missing Canonical Tags
If Google sees identical content on two different URLs, it gets confused about which one to rank.
- Find it: Look for “Duplicate pages without canonical” or “Canonical points to 404.”
- The Fix: Add a rel=”canonical” tag to the HTML header of the duplicate page, pointing directly to the “master” or original version of the page. This tells Google exactly which URL to index.
Step 4: Verify Your Fixes
After updating your website code or CMS to fix the errors, you need to make sure Ahrefs recognizes the changes.
- Go back to your Site Audit dashboard in Ahrefs.
- Click the New Crawl button in the top right corner.
- Once completed, compare your new Health Score to your old one to verify that your errors have successfully disappeared.
