Navigating Ahrefs

In this lesson, we’ll walk you through Ahrefs’ core tools, so you know where each of them is located and when to use them.

We’ll also touch upon a few standalone tools that can help you with your daily SEO tasks.

Ahrefs’ core tools

Ahrefs has 7 core tools, each of them fulfilling a different purpose.

First up is the Dashboard – which is not a core tool in itself, but the starting point of your Ahrefs journey.

The Dashboard shows key SEO metrics for your projects: domains, subdomains, subfolders, or URLs that you track automatically over time.

Next up are our 7 core tools.

1. Site Explorer is our competitive research tool that helps you reverse engineer your competitors’ content strategy, link building strategy, you name it.

2. Keywords Explorer is our keyword research tool. Through it, you can generate thousands of keyword ideas from our 20.4 billion keywords database and gain valuable insights.

3. Site Audit is our website auditing tool. Use it to run complete website audits on your or your clients’ websites for over 140 technical and on-page issues – then fix them to make sure your site is visible to both users and website crawlers.

4. Rank Tracker helps you track keyword rankings for your target for over 190 countries and regions—both on desktop and mobile. It also supports local tracking.

5. Content Explorer is our search engine made for marketers that contains close to 14 billion pages. Use it to discover top-performing content in your niche and qualified link prospects.

6. Web Explorer allows you to search through our search engine, Yep.com’s, database of 500 billion pages for your topic, including pages, backlinks, and outlinks—all in one place.

7. Competitive Analysis is the home for various competitive tools that help you find gaps between you and your competitors’ content and backlinks.

Ahrefs’ standalone tools

We also have a bunch of standalone tools which you can access from the More dropdown.

Among them, these four in particular can help you streamline your day-to-day SEO tasks:

1. Alerts is our alerts system.

With it, you can set up:

• Backlinks alerts - Track new and/or lost backlinks to a target—whether that’d be a domain, subdomain, subfolder, or URL.
• New keywords alerts - Track new keyword rankings and significant position movements for your target.
• Mentions - Discover pages that mention specific phrases, keywords, or queries. This is great for following your SEO metrics.

2. Batch Analysis pulls SEO metrics for up to 200 domains at once. Just paste them and you’ll get a bulk backlink analysis with all the metrics you need: AR, DR, number of referring domains, backlinks, and more.

3. SEO Toolbar is our FREE browser extension available for both Chrome and Firefox that provides valuable SEO data about the pages and websites you visit.

Over 200K+ SEO professionals across the world use it daily to get Ahrefs SEO metrics for the pages they visit, run concise on-page SEO reports, and check search results in different countries.

4. WordPress Plugin helps you automate content audits and grow organic traffic to your WordPress website by offering suggestions for improvement based on your content and their rankings.

As you complete the course material, you’ll know exactly where to go and when to go there to get actionable data and insights fast.