If you are a marketer, you are probably well aware of the huge importance and attention content marketing has been garnering lately. And with that comes backlinking and SEO analysis which are two of the most popular SEO tactics used to improve website search ranking. In this post, we're sharing 6 Ahrefs alternative that you can use for exactly this.
Every brand, every website has online content that is competing to be the best, and a favorite amongst their target audience.
The catch, however, is that EVERY BRAND also knows the situation and does their best to be the lead in the game. So, how do YOU help your brand climb the ladder at a faster speed? With so much competition and clutter around, it is next to impossible to become leaders in your niche overnight. Success, in this field, demands strategy and logic, and skill and timing. Now that seems like a daunting task, but fortunately, we have a list of helpful tools that actually break it down for us.
Ahrefs is a hugely bundled tool, which confuses a lot of people and leaves them wondering where to start from. But also, there's so much one can do on the platform, it's almost self-sufficient. From enabling marketers to grow their audience to reaching out to the growing, yet relevant market, in an effective manner, almost everything is taken care of. Let's find out how:
Ahrefs, you get your hands on position tracking, keyword research, backlink analysis, competition analysis, technical SEO and lots more.
Backlink Analysis: One of the most important features on Ahrefs is the extensive crawling set up that the platform offers and it comes with a plethora of benefits. With crawling, you can come across all the backlinks and mentions over the web that you may have missed in your manual efforts.
Content Explorer: Content marketers often struggle with searching for popular content topics. Ahref resolves that problem by helping marketers search for most sought-after topics and "linked-to" popular articles. For an article or topic that you enter a search query for, you will get a list of most popular articles shortlisted on the basis of a range of 'performance metrics'.
Competitor Analysis: Ahrefs not only helps you work on your own content and make it stronger but also digs deep into your competition's search traffic with the help of its Positions Explorer tool. By knowing what your competition is up to, you can strategize much better and make your execution much stronger for improved results.
So, on the whole, Ahrefs is doing a fabulous job of helping marketers achieve the extra edge over their competition. But most professionals are also on the lookout for its alternatives. While Ahrefs is a popular choice among leading marketers, the tool has also been facing some criticism lately. Let's take a look at the reasons:
- Pricing: It is highly priced, which makes it less popular amongst those who are just starting out or who are not sure if they want to be in the game for the long run. IN fact, Afrefs comes as one of the higher prices platforms amongst its peers!
- Graphs: The graphs, which are one of the most helpful features cannot be exported out of the tool and that's a huge drawback! Exporting these graphs is not even an option offered by Ahrefs, which seriously needs to be looked into.
- Blanket Reporting: There is no option for "blanket" reporting. Although Ahrefs has been doing extremely well when it comes to gathering data and making reports out of so many numbers, there are no SEO blanket reports. And that's a complicated situation for most marketers.
- Complicated: Ahrefs has a range of features and offerings that can become a little daunting for most marketers. Although the platform shared a bunch of tutorials and training material, they still need to do more. For example, they could start by highlighting what the user is missing in their strategy and what features can guide them through the complicated marketing landscape.
Coming back to the alternatives for Ahrefs, here's a list of the top ones that are floating in the market at the moment.
SEMrush
Another highly recommended SEO tool, SEMrush has been gaining popularity in the marketing spectrum lately. The tool is being widely recommended and is even being called a game changer. For better understanding, let's check out its features:
Quick Summary: With SEMRush, you will probably not feel the absence of any functionality. It covers everything from competition analysis to keyword search irrespective of your niche and full site audits to domain comparisons and link building opportunities.
What makes SEMrush so popular?
Competition Research: With SEMrush you get a complete overview of your competition analysis which is extremely critical to plan your scalability and growt h in terms of traffic, sales as well as branding. You receive a detailed report on the kind of keywords you should be targeting and what SEO strategies you should be opting for the growth of your online business. The competition analysis delivers a range of metrics that include backlink analysis, top keywords on a site, approximate traffic on the website, even the ad copies of your competition.
Brand's Site Analysis: You get a dashboard from SEMrush which summarizes the overall performance of your own website. On the dashboard, you get a quick peep into the performance of your organic keywords, organic traffic, Ads, position tracking visibility, site audit, SEO ideas, social media tools tracker, brand monitoring by tracking brand mentions, backlink audit which also lets you identify and get rid of bad links. With all the above-mentioned features, you can easily track and see where all your website is linked and associated to which online properties. You can also keep an eye on the kind of conversations your audience has around the brand. To put it simply, you get the true picture of the overall performance of your website.
Traffic Analysis: If you want to know how many visitors your competition sites are garnering on a regular basis, you can definitely rely on SEMrush for accurate numbers. The Traffic Analytics feature is in its Beta version and gives you the website traffic generated by visitors browsing on their desktops. The feature is limited to desktop users for now and will soon be extended to mobile device users too. You will not only get the total visitor count but a detailed report, covering:
- Unique visitor count
- Pages visited
- Average visit duration
- Bounce Rate
- SEMrush traffic ranking
- Traffic sources
These details and numbers are more than enough for your brand to outrun your competition, provided, you craft a clever strategy.
SEO Content Analysis: Search traffic is probably one of the most critical factors for any brand trying to get somewhere on the big bad web. As per the new feature on SEMRush, one can analyze their competition's website, in terms of their content and optimization required on your own website. To put things simply, you can quickly analyze what your competition is doing right and craft your own SEO content strategy accordingly, to make it more impactful, and drive better results.
From getting keyword recommendations for better SEO to the number of words required for better ranking, you get all the details to make it big in the game.
Serpstat:
Another SEO software product, Serpstat actually lies amongst the top 3 of its kind. The platform surely carried every feature that any other leading SEO product would have, but we are still going to list down why Serpstat is a great alternative to Ahrefs!
So here goes:
Do you want to take your business to another level of success? Maybe you should start with your website and its performance online. Serpstat is an all-rounder SEO platform, which includes SEO, PPC, and Content Marketing specific functionalities. There are primarily 5 tools within the Serspstat platform namely:
Now each of the above-mentioned tools has further been broken down into a number of functionalities, each serving one sole purpose- improving the performance of your website.
Serpstat provides data for 18 google regions which include the United Kingdom, USA, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Bulgaria, South Africa, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and the Netherlands. Now that when clubbed together become a huge geography to cover- imagine the number of keywords getting analyzed with so much data from so many regions.
Keyword Research: On Serpstat, you can look for long tail keywords and expand the entire keyword list which is great as it helps you to avoid making your content look keyword stuffed. The tool also indicated keyword intent metric which helps you understand the intent of your keyword and classify it as- transactional, navigational or informational.
Another feature called the keyword difficulty metric allows you to know how hard it is going to be for you to rank in the top-10 search results for a particular keyword. This way you can easily decide if you should be spending any time on that keyword at all or not.
Competitive Keyword research is another helpful functionality which lets you compare your site to your competitor's site. This way you can quickly point out keywords that you have skipped by mistake, while your competition is making most out of them to win huge traffic.
Rank Tracking: With the rank tracking tool, you can easily monitor and track your own and your competitor's website positions in SERP for selected keywords. But, before you start monitoring, you will be needed to create a project, mention the region and add keywords that you'd like to track. Other than this, you can completely rely on the tools for a list of most suitable keywords that the platform generates after its analysis.
Backlink Analysis and Site Audit: The analysis covers a number of index pages, referring pages, linked domains and paged, internal links, referring subnets, Trust Rank and Page Rank. Not only this, but you can also look through pages that lie amongst the topmost ranks. You can also take a look at your site's anchors and their density, along with the number of domains per anchor.
Under the site audit functionality, you can point out meta tags and headlines issues, accessibility and indexations, redirects and links, server parameters, content issues as well as loading speed. The tool will not only point out the errors but will also indicate its location and recommendations to fix those errors.
SE Ranking
SE ranking is another tool you can use to optimize the SEO performance of your website. It further helps in achieving improved rankings as well in various search engines. What's more? businesses can also easily track their keyword ranking and run the website and on-page SEO audits, backlinks and even suggest keywords with high website traffic. Here, in the next few paragraphs, we'll be doing a quick review of SE Ranking, capturing all its features, so you can decide if it's the right tool for your business.
The Rank Tracker: This one is a simple functionality, all you have to do is put in the keywords that you would like to rank to your site pages. Not only this but just in case if you don't have any ideas for new keywords, you can also make use of the Keyword Suggestion Tool. Also, if at this point, you can't really think of any keywords, you can also choose to leave the space blank and move to the next step.
Online Marketing Plan: After completing the Ranking bit, you can get on with the online marketing plan section, which is a comprehensive checklist of all things marketing. If you're someone who doesn't know where to begin with in respect to the SEO strategy, this is going to be your go-to feature.
In this list, you will find a whole list of optimization techniques that should be taken into account for your website. If you follow these steps, you will eventually see the hard work pay off when your site will be easily found on Google in the long run. In some ways, this si the feature that actually plays as SE Ranking's USP as it makes the entire process much simpler for the newbies!
Tracking and Scheduling Social Media: With this feature, you can actually go ahead and integrate your social media channels (only Twitter and Facebook for now) with SE Ranking. You can easily import and merge social media data into your SE Ranking reports and even schedule content that you plan to post out in the future.
Keyword And Competitor Research: To use this feature, you will have to fill in the keywords in the search bar, as well as mention the niche of your site. And to look through a database, you will need to select a country and location, to target a specific volume. The location you choose will depend on where you would want to rank- locally or globally and choose the database accordingly.
But, to understand your site's SEO performance, you should also look at your competition's website. You can start with looking at where your competition is ranking for the keywords you generally target in your strategy.
Mangools
Mangools as a platform offers 4 different SEO tools in the package. These tools are called KWFinder, SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, and LinkMiner. Each of these tools has its own USPs, and excel in different functionalities.
Let's begin understanding each of these tools:
KWFinder: Again, giving importance to keyword research, KWFinder enables you to do just that. Keyword Research is an important aspect for any SEO strategy as it can actually help you build your business online. Owing to the functionality and its importance, KWFinder becomes one of the most important tools that you would be using most often.
Moreover, the tool earns full points for not being complicated at all and serves as one of the best tools for SEO beginners.
SERPChecker: On SERPChecker, you can not only analyze the keywords and their performance, but the platform offers much more. Just like on KWFinder, you will have to fill in the keyword, post which you will receive huge amounts of data, everything- from domain rating to even the number of Facebook shares. Other than the keyword related websites and articles, you also get access to featured snippets and related queries to expand your search. Further, you also get an option to publish your results to include in the reports.
SERPWatcher: SERPWatcher is a tool that you can rely on to track search engine ranking of your targeted keywords. Tracking their ranks is always a great idea as the ranking keeps fluctuating almost on a daily basis. With this tool, you can focus on making SERP tracking effective and simple. Moreover, the platform offers a simple UI that even a beginner could understand in the first go. You also get an option to turn on email notifications to understand SERP data and its changes as they happen.
On the platform, you get a dashboard where you can view all the relevant data in one look. The dashboard carries figures for everything- the keywords you are currently tracking, the changes in those positions, search volumes for each of those keywords and lots more. The tool also offers a reporting functionality which lets you track the progress and efficacy of selected keywords. Further, you can also export these reports and share them with your team for effective collaboration.
LinkMiner: Another one of the Mangools tools, LinkMiner is a go-to product in the marketing world for backlink analysis. To use the tool, you will have to sign up on Mangools for the entire SEO Suite. If you use Linkminer, you will be using it to check the backlinks of your website as well as your competition's- you can check all the links that your site might have generated since its inception as well as leverage all the metric that the tools offer. Other than this, there are a bunch of interesting and helpful features that make LinkMiner a resourceful link building tool.
LinkMiner offers a website preview feature, which ensures that you won't have to open a new window to view a website, instead you simply get its preview on your current window. In fact, you can also save URLs for later by organizing these links and categorizing them as per the way you would want to take your link building strategy ahead.
SiteProfiler: If you want to check the SEO strength and popularity of a website, be it yours or your competitor's SiteProfiler should be your go-to tool. It works to save a lot of your time by delivering a bunch of metrics for your website, including keywords, ranking, backlinks, domain quality, traffic, competitors, etc.
To generate traffic, SiteProfiler also helps you look for popular content on the analyzed website and directs you to guest blogging and link building opportunities accordingly.
SEOProfiler
Another cloud-based internet marketing tool, SEOprofiler is great at helping websites achieve high ranks across various search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. By taking up this marketing solution, your brand and website have higher chances of appearing higher in the search results, thus attracting more traffic as well as relevant leads to your business.
Daily Ranking Monitor: SEO Profiler comes with a Daily Ranking Monitor that covers data from across 120 countries in the world to enable your team for an effective SEO strategy. Website ranking plays a key role in the success of a website's performance and by knowing exactly where you stand can really help marketers put an effective plan in place. Strategies that actually work would help improve the overall ranking and gather more traction as well as lead generation.
Website Auditor: Other than this, the tool also runs automatic website audits so that you can focus on your marketing objectives and strategies. Auditing a webpage regularly and accurately is important ask by any marketer today, especially with so many online businesses and websites popping up every other day. Addressing the requirement, SEOProfiler has ensured a weekly automated site audit to avoid the presence of any SEO errors across the page. This particular feature is especially helpful because you as a marketer would have one thing less to worry about!
BackLink Builder: It has a backlink builder that helps companies identify relevant websites to link back to their own website. Further, the feature allows marketers to manage links, check their status every now and then to ensure that they work perfectly and bring new traffic to the website consistently. As you would know, if you have backlinks that work, they would ideally bring new traffic to your site and raise the chances of higher lead generation.
Social Media Monitor: Further, it also has a social media monitor, to keep a track of your social media channels and the mention of your business across these platforms.
If you're making the most of your social media channels to reach out to a wider audience and establish your name as a people's brand, you would definitely need a social media monitor. SEOProfiler understands the need for marketers to constantly track and measure their presence on social media channels, hence, this feature. On using the social media monitor, you would know exactly where your brand has been mention, by whom and when. You can choose to respond as and when the mention takes place and builds a strong relationship with your target audience.
SEOProfiler also offers a couple of other features like Analytics, Reporting and Project Management which are again pretty helpful for today's marketer.
Spyfu
Keeping a track of your competitor, in other words, spying can be a helpful mechanism to improve your own business performance. And Spyfu does exactly that. The tool can spy on your competitor's strategies specific to their keyword sets, ranking and even PPC campaigns.
It is almost like researching and analyzing your competition from head to toe before you set out to craft your own SEO Strategy. By doing this, you can find gaps in your strategies and objectives, such as missing keywords. Moreover, you can also get information on things you should not do, going by your competitor's mistakes. Such insights can help you steer clear from trouble, lower rankings, and bad visibility.
PPC Competitor Research: Analysing your competition is always a great idea as you get to know about the things that work for them and things that don't. Going by the same industry and sector, you can choose to imply similar strategies for your own business or understand from their mistakes and avoid the same in your strategies. On Spyfu, you get insights into every keyword that your competition buys on Google and ever ad test that they run through Spyfu.
SEO Competitor Research: Knowing the exact ranking of every keyword that your competition chooses to use can be very helpful for your own strategy. Know the exact content and even the backlinks that work for them and their improved rankings.
Keyword Research Tool: Keywords are an important aspect of any SEO strategy. Over here, Spyfy lets you in on every keyword that has been bought by your competitor and even the test ads that they have run on Spyfu. Such insights can do wonders for your own SEO strategy!
Conclusion
So this was a rather detailed round-up of alternative tools for Ahrefs if you don't want to spend that much. Although the list of tools mentioned here cost about the same, each of them definitely has its own USP. So go ahead and explore them before you zero down on one.
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