How Can Ahrefs Help with Link Building?

Table of Contents:

• Ahrefs. What Is It?
  • How Does Ahrefs Help With Link Building?
• Which Agrefs’ Elements Are Worthy of Your Attention?
• Ahrefs. To Choose Or Not To Choose – That Is The Question

Ahrefs – what is it?

Ahrefs, a solution that can be accessed at ahrefs.com, is considered to be one of the most advanced SEO tools available on the market.

Although you may associate it mainly with the analysis of a domain’s link profile, it has much more to offer. With its use, you can monitor your website visibility in Google, conduct page audits, scrutinize market rivals, and more. However, in today’s entry, we’ll focus on answering the question of how Ahrefs can support your link building.

The premium version of the tool isn’t available for free, nevertheless, it’s possible to check basic pieces of website information with a free Backlink Checker from Ahrefs. This way, you can determine the DR parameter of the site and the number of backlinks or linking pages. Moreover, it’s possible to verify the top 5 most frequently applied anchors and some of the websites with links to a specific domain. To obtain all this information, you don’t even need to set up an account.

How much does the premium version cost? The most affordable option is $99, and the most expensive one costs $999 per month. If you pay $7, you can test one of the two cheapest options for 7 days. Differences between individual plans can be checked in the screenshot below. They concern elements such as the number of users, unverified projects, and more.

Check out the pricing offered by Ahrefs to access detailed information about functionalities provided by individual plans.

Now when you know what Ahrefs is, let’s discuss how it can support the link building process.

How does Ahrefs help with link building?

Website visibility is affected by both on-site and off-site actions. The first group comprises activities such as speeding up website loading, implementing appropriate meta tags, optimizing content, and many more. On the other hand, off-site denotes links obtained from other pages.

It’s important to note that the abovementioned links should come from high-quality domains because otherwise, they won’t have a positive impact on your page visibility. But what does it actually mean and how to determine whether a given backlink is valuable? This is when Ahrefs comes in handy in terms of link building process.

Depending on the site where the link is placed, it can have a positive, negative, or neutral influence on your page visibility. Keep in mind that one quality backlink can be enough to improve your position in the search results from 54 to 36, however, if you’re already displayed in the top 3 for a highly competitive phrase, the same link may not make any difference.

Ahrefs is also a rich source of information about your market rivals. You can check which websites link to your competitors. Thanks to it, you’ll determine platforms where it’s worth placing your links and frequently do it for free. Find out which pages enable leaving comments with a link and analyze whether backlinks have the “nofollow” or “UGC” attributes. You can also verify backlinks to individual subpages.

Which Ahrefs’ elements are worthy of your attention?

If you aim at improving website visibility, Ahrefs can provide you with a wide range of helpful tips. You have access to a number of functionalities that will tell you a lot about your site and the platforms of your market rivals. Start the analysis. Select Site Explorer, enter your domain name, and wait for the data.

The most crucial pieces of information about the website can be found at the top:

Below you can see the meaning of individual elements:

• Ahrefs Rank – indicates the strength of a given site in terms of the link profile, it takes into account all websites that are in Ahrefs database. 1 is the strongest position.
• UR – stands for URL Rating. It shows the power of the link profile of a selected subpage on a scale from 0 to 100. If you’ve provided a landing page address in the search box, then you receive the UR of this page.
• DR – meaning Domain Rating. In this case, the tool evaluates the link profile of the whole domain in relation to other pages found in Ahrefs database. Therefore, it’s the rating of the entire website. Take a look below. After entering one of the subpages of the analyzed site, the DR parameter remained the same, however, UR has changed. Regardless of the scrutinized subpage, DR remains identical and only UR varies.

• Backlinks – the total number of links redirecting to your site.
• Referrals – the number of unique domains that link to your site. If there are 50 links redirecting to your domain, they’ll be counted as one referral.
• Organic keywords – the number of phrases the analyzed website is displayed for in the top 100 search results in all countries belonging to the database of the tool.
• Organic traffic – the estimated monthly website traffic from the search engine.

Apart from this data, you can also access other valuable information concerning acquired and lost links or changes in the number of domains linking to your website over time. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see which anchors are applied the most frequently in the case of backlinks to a given site.

Although Ahrefs offers numerous functionalities, we’ll focus on discussing how this tool can support your link building. In this respect, it definitely stands out from the crowd and remains an indispensable element of every SEO specialist’s work.

This is how Ahrefs can improve link building and support the entire process:

• The choice of sites for publishing sponsored articles and other referrals – not every backlink has a positive impact on your website visibility in Google. It’s crucial to link from valuable domains. But how to evaluate their value? Use Ahrefs. Start with checking the DR of the selected page. It should be higher than the parameter of your site, however, be careful as many websites manipulate this element to generate interest in buying links. Thus, you should also analyze Google visibility. If it’s low or close to zero, such backlinks won’t bring you any benefits. When buying a link from a particular subpage that already exists, check its UR. The higher this indicator, the better. To check the DR and UR of the website, you can use the free Ahrefs version which can be found here. For a detailed competitive analysis, you will need the premium plan.

• Analysis of links of your market rivals – are you impressed by the page positions of your main business rival? Be sure to check the link profile. Thanks to Ahrefs, you can determine which pages include backlinks to the site and what are their parameters. This way you’ll easily find sites where you can publish a comment with a link or a forum post. You’ll also analyze which platforms accept sponsored articles. If they published entries prepared by your market rivals, they’ll probably agree to cooperate with you as well. When it comes to the free version of Ahrefs, you only receive a sample of data, however, a thorough analysis requires the premium plan. The list of backlinks should include DR, UR, the number of links leading to the site, but also the number of external links from selected subpages. If you plan to place a backlink on the existing subpage, analyze external links. Remember that the link juice is going to be divided between individual pages linked by the platform. The more links there are, the less link juice is passed to your site.

• Lost backlinks – one of the most appealing functionalities offered by Ahrefs. It means that the tool detects errors or links that have been removed. This valuable feature enables you to control whether, for example, a link you paid for has disappeared. It’s impossible to check hundreds of links manually – meanwhile, you just need to open Ahrefs once in a while and see which links disappeared. The “link removed” message usually indicates that the backlink has been deleted. With other errors, it’s likely that the link still exists and will be detected during the next analysis.

• Broken backlinks – this functionality allows you to check which links lead to subpages that don’t exist and generate e.g. 404 errors. What should you do with such information? Everything depends on the source of the problem. A backlink may refer to a website that doesn’t exist anymore. In this case, use the 301 redirects and change the address to the landing page or a subpage with similar content. Or maybe you’ve ordered a sponsored article but you’ve provided an incorrect link. If so, ask the website owner to change the backlink to the correct one.

• Anchors – thanks to Ahrefs you can also check what are the most popular anchors of backlinks leading to your site. It’s crucial to control this element – the vast majority of backlinks should be in the most natural form of URLs. If “exact match” anchors (meaning anchors with specific keywords you do SEO for) dominate, you may lose the trust in Google algorithms which will translate into decreased page visibility.

Ahrefs: to choose or not to choose, that is the question

Without a shadow of a doubt, Ahrefs is one of the tools worthy of your attention.

Does Ahrefs help with link building? Yes! With this tool, you can analyze backlinks to a selected website and monitor its visibility in Google. Discover which key phrases generate the most traffic and find out what’s the average number of searches. Don’t hesitate! Set up an account and learn about other benefits offered by this tool!