Ahrefs is an SEO tool providers. Ahrefs Site Explorer provides a suite of tools including a component for backlink & on-page SEO analysis, online brand mentions tracking, and domain comparison tool for competitor analysis, etc. They refer to themselves as “the largest index of live backlinks.”
$99
per month
UpCity
Score 1.0 out of 10
N/A
UpCity is a search engine optimization software solution offered by UpCity.
All the competing tools I have used seem to focus on one or two key strengths and then include other features kind of half-baked. Ahrefs is the only tool that feels like they have considered and encompassed all features fully thought out.
I actually like Ahrefs reporting much better for SEO. It doesn't have checklist system, though. Asana has a checklist system that is much easier to manage and integrates well with our other tools like Slack so we have moved to that for task tracking. The biggest strength UpCity …
It gives the best report to us which helps us to find the opportunity to build backlinks. Another main feature that makes Ahrefs a safe and sound approach to SEO is that it provides information about duplicate content, URLs, redirects along with other errors that can be dangerous to the website.
For our purposes, UpCity is well suited to our small business clients that are looking to improve their SEO. We have had a good partnership with UpCity to provide consulting and copywriting services for local search, social media and reputation management for our clients, and their software and reporting helps us show ROI to our clients.
Backlink data: Ahrefs continues to provide the best backlink data in the industry when compared to other tools. Other players are playing catching up, but as a first mover, Ahrefs is ahead of the game by far.
Keyword data: Ahrefs provides extremely valuable keyword data. Though I rank them second in this category, the data that they provide is comparable to the first ranked player.
Content Explorer: I don't think other industry tools (SEO specific) has a content explorer as useful as Ahrefs. Their content explorer works great for identifying top content and trends for multiple industries.
Rank Tracker: This rank tracker is better than the average tracker and Ahrefs provides a large limit for tracked keywords. Though they have moved away from daily updates, the rank tracker is great for bench marking progress.
The way UpCity verifies items in your marketing checklist (like whether you have social accounts, you're on Google, etc,) helps my business, and others, save precious time having to manually verify them yourself.
I love the impact scores and estimated time shown on each task to give us a feel of how much we are doing each month and what value that time spent is.
The "about" and "how to" section on tasks makes it very clear how to accomplish each task.
Anchor text alert notifications for a specific domain would be nice to have.
Would also be nice to set a specific client domain and then be able to pick 5 competitor sites to compare it to instead of entering in the client site and then 4 competitors to compare.
Adding emails to forward the exports to from running a report would be good too.
Their index is too vast to ignore when looking at a complete backlink profile. We find links in Ahrefs that do not appear in any other link detection tool. For this reason, it's a must for our agency to use for the foreseeable future. Plus, it's very affordable considering the data you get
Ahrefs is very easy to use - you can jump right in and understand most of the assets. Overall, the dashboard snapshots give a very good picture of inbound link activity. For deeper analysis of historical trends, the system can become cumbersome, making it hard to do full work without exporting and reformatting the data.
Usability is mediocre: They have a dashboard to track things but they have some antiquated system of ranking companies and don’t tell you what the logic is behind it. You also have no way to combat negative ratings or respond and try to correct them.
Ahrefs has always been responsive when there's been a technical issue with the site. There are usually very little problems, but if there are, they announce it on their social media accounts which keeps its customers informed. Email support is prompt and the customer service people are very helpful, knowledgable and friendly.
I received little help from customer service rep, Sarah. She told me I should speak to a manager to “reset my expectations”. Apparently, all the sales promises of more traffic and increase SEO were an issue with my expectations, and not the company failing to deliver.
I think when it comes to keyword tracking, Ahrefs is not as good BrightEdge, but Ahrefs Site Explorer trumps BrightEdge when it comes to anything backlink related. I would use Ahrefs Site Explorer for backlink analysis, identifying 404 error pages, examining anchor texts, and exploring top content. However, I would utilze BrightEdge for keyword and ranking information
We selected UpCity primarily because of the ongoing services they provide. The UpCity software is a simple platform that enables us to easily show progress and ROI to our clients.
