Item: Ahrefs
Rating: 8
Author: Andrew Clark

Overall Satisfaction with Ahrefs Site Explorer

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

When we decided to focus our efforts around SEO, we explored several options for our SEO toolkit. Ahrefs continually came up as the best solution in a crowded market. We use it to track our SEO progress, plan content and keyword targeting, and to monitor backlinks to our site. It's our bag of tricks for making sure we're making good progress with our SEO efforts.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Great web-crawling and site-crawling features.
Link building seems to be their specialty, and tracking and monitoring backlinks is excellent with Ahrefs.
It's an all-in-one solution, with plenty of tools for SEO work, eliminating the need for additional tools.

Cons

Complexity. Ahrefs is great & powerful, but not always the easiest to understand. You have to know what you're doing to get real value.
There's variable tool quality. As with any all-in-one solution, the quality of each individual tool varies. I'd highly recommend the trial to figure out if Ahrefs will fit your specific needs.
Price. It's just a little on the high side, as the "Lite" plan is fairly limited, and the next plan up is almost double the cost. There are certainly more affordable options out there, but you often get what you pay for with these things.

Return on Investment

We've seen consistent improvement in our site traffic and SEO performance since using the Ahrefs tools.
We save time and money because we're spending less time doing research and more time applying the research to our efforts.

Alternatives Considered

Moz and SEMRush

I've used Moz in the past, and while it's simpler and easier to use for an unseasoned SEO person, it's also not as powerful as Ahrefs. If you already had a good idea of what you're doing, you're going to find that Ahrefs is much more useful than Moz. Moz is somewhat more affordable.
SEMRush is more comparable to Ahrefs, depending on what you need. SEMRush falls short on backlinks and indexing, so Ahrefs is where it's at if that's what you need most. SEMRush also had some data accuracy issues in the past, and I wouldn't trust their info as much as I do Ahrefs'.

Other Software Used

Zapier, Intercom, Shape Software

Likelihood to Recommend

Ahrefs is well-suited for anyone looking for a powerful all-in-one solution for their SEO needs, particularly if you come to them with some existing knowledge or expertise. They have great content to help teach users how to use their product, but it isn't as simple or easy to use as some other SEO tools.
Ahrefs wouldn't be great for the overly conscious, or for people who are just getting started with SEO. There are other well-known players in the space that could better fill that role.

Ahrefs Feature Ratings

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A Solid All-in-One SEO Tool—If You Know What You're Doing