Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a suite of SEO tools focusing on backlink (inbound link) and on-page SEO analysis in addition to brand mentions tracking, competitor analysis and more. They claim to have the largest index of live backlinks available online. They use a proprietary bot and index which they mention uses over a trillion connections to websites. Their index is constantly updates twice per hour and fresh index data available users thirty minutes after the index refresh. Ahrefs also ranks their database of over forty five million keywords in nine various countries including: United States, Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia and Brazil. That's powerful data crunching and valuable to businesses who take action to increase their search engine ranking online. The Site Explorer allows you to choose a targeted URL; with or without sub-domains, and provides data regarding it such as: backlink total, list of IP's and subnets referring, types of inbound links on a site; redirects, images, text and more. You can view a history of data crawled over the past month and half. That's all good. There are other reports such as anchor text, pages crawled total, SERP positioning, new links, lost links with the ability to export this data. In the New Link area you can search the past month, view the current month data or discover new links added per day. This enables you to reverse engineer competitor link building campaigns and help focus your own link campaigns. Solid features. The Lost Links area contains the exact data as the New Links area. This area is used to identify links the competition have lost in order to take advantage of these links no longer utilized, as well as to identify drops in quality of your own link building efforts. Exporting this data is available which is key when wanting to compare it to external data. The Anchor Text tab list external links and the number of times they occur with a drop-down menu which shows pages link to and from whichever site being researched. This report is available for export using various filters. The Crawled Pages tab show all pages crawled with the following data: external links, internal links, crawl date, page size, page URL & title. This report would be useful when performing competitor research to check SERP's, which pages are linked to internally and which structure their website is using. Ahrefs offers estimated data for keyword ranking using Google & Bing / Yahoo for multiple countries listed above. Data is created based on each keyword researched in the following categories: position, cpc, estimated costs, search volume globally, ad competition, last checked, estimated visitor rating and changes in ranking. I also like the daily data available such as new keywords, lost keywords, total keywords moving up & down, total keyword position up & down, ratings changes and cost changes. With graph based data for search engine traffic, traffic costs, keyword trending, new & lost keywords, estimates & history of changes. Ahrefs integrates Google & Bing / Yahoo data pay per click advertising data. You can view ad rankings, advertising text, search volume & cost per click data and competition levels. And it's possible to create reports using filters for your own domain, client or competitor domains with the following options: URL's from, backlink type, specific pages, subdomains, anchor text URL's, IP's, countries, date, TLD and subnets. That's a lot of valuable data to work with. Gaining access to complete data regarding inbound links with the ability to identify broken links, learn the status of various links, when links were discovered and generate reports for different websites. By all accounts Ahrefs comes out with updates continuously. The dashboard is very intuitive with the ability to view multiple campaigns at a glance. The index is updated quite every 30 minutes which is outstanding. The exporting is easy and helpful for cross comparison with external data. It's reasonably priced considering the work load it automates.

The pricing starts with a free trial with no credit card required and paid plans: $79 per month, $179 per month & $399 per month. It's easy to understand how this data could provide a serious ROI for your business. But it's an investment and freelancers or small businesses would have a bit of a tough time justifying these costs, unless they had an expert who could leverage it accordingly. Duplicate URL's are generated in reports it would be nice to filter these URL's. Perhaps more options in the keyword ranking tool would be good. A more visual interface overall would enable users who learn best this way to enjoy such powerful data easily. There are reports that their indexing system does not identify live links very quickly.

Ahrefs Site Explorer is very useful in the complete data it provides regarding backlinks on our sites and competition websites. The incredible detail provided is well worth the price they are asking. There is a significant learning curve involved to learn how to get the most out of the software. But if you know how to put this data to good use it would easily have a tremendous return.