How To Use Ahrefs: A Step-by-Step Guideline in 2025?

Your website isn’t getting enough visitors.

It feels like you’re putting in a lot of work, but your content just isn’t showing up when people search online.

This can be super frustrating.

The truth is, getting noticed on Google can be tough if you don’t know the right moves. 

This guide will show you how to use Ahrefs, a powerful tool that can help your website get the attention it deserves.

Getting Started: Your First Steps

First things first, you need to sign up.

Ahrefs has different plans, so you can pick one that fits what you need and your budget.

For most people just starting with SEO, the “Lite” plan usually has everything you need to get going.

• Go to the Ahrefs Website: Open your web browser and type in ahrefs.com. That’s where you’ll find it.
• Pick Your Plan: Look at the different choices for membership. Choose the one that feels right for you.
• Sign Up: Follow the simple steps to create your account. You’ll put in your email and create a password, just like signing up for other websites.

1. Adding Your First Project

Once you’re signed in, it’s time to tell Ahrefs about your website.

This is like giving Ahrefs permission to look at your site and gather important info. We call this your “project.”

• Log In: Go to the Ahrefs website and log in with your new account details.
• Click “Add Project”: You’ll see a clear button on your main screen that says something like “Add Project” or “+ New Project.” Click that.
• Put in Your Website’s Address: Type in your website’s address (like yourwebsite.com). Ahrefs will often suggest connecting it to your Google Search Console. This is a good idea because it helps Ahrefs get info from Google faster and more accurately, giving you better insights into your domain.
• Set Up Details (Optional): You can also tell Ahrefs if you want to track how your site does in a specific country or on different search engines. Don’t stress too much about this part right now; you can always change it later.

2. Getting Around the Ahrefs Dashboard

The “dashboard” is your main control center in Ahrefs. It gives you a quick look at how your website is doing and lets you jump to different tools.

• Your Project Overview: Right away, you’ll see a summary of your website’s performance. This includes things like its “Domain Rating” (which tells you how strong your website’s backlinks are) and how much estimated organic traffic your site gets. This gives you a quick snapshot of how well your domain is doing.
• Finding the Tools: At the top or side of the screen, you’ll see a menu with names like “Site Explorer,” “Keywords Explorer,” “Site Audit,” and “Rank Tracker.” These are the main tools you’ll use. Think of them as different sections, each helping you with a different part of SEO. You, the user, can even arrange this menu to put your favorite tools at the top.

Now that your site is set up, you’re ready to start digging into the data!

Mastering Site Explorer: Analyzing Your Website 

Think of Site Explorer as a super-powered magnifying glass for any website.

You can use it to peek at your own site’s health or to spy on what your competitors are doing well.

It’s a fantastic tool for keyword research and figuring out good link-building ideas.

1. Understanding Your Site’s SEO Health

Before you can make your garden grow, you need to know what’s in the soil.

Site Explorer helps you understand how your website is performing right now.

• Type in Your Website: In the search bar at the top of Ahrefs, make sure you’re in “Site Explorer” and type in your website’s address.
• Overview Report: This is your starting point, like a summary page. What cool things will you see here?
  • Domain Rating (DR): This is a score from 0 to 100 that shows how strong your website’s backlinks are. A higher number means a stronger site.
  • URL Rating (UR): Similar to DR, but this score is just for one specific page on your website.
  • Referring Domains: This tells you how many different websites are linking to your site. More unique websites linking to you is usually a good sign!
  • Organic Keywords: How many different search terms (keywords) does your website show up for in Google’s top 100 results?
  • Organic Traffic: This is Ahrefs’ guess at how many visitors your website gets each month from Google searches.
  • Traffic Value: A guess at how much it would cost you to get that same amount of traffic if you paid for ads. This metric helps you see the value of your SEO work.

2. Diving into Organic Search Performance

Want to know which words people type into Google to find you? And how well you’re doing for those words?

• Organic Keywords Report: This report lists every single keyword your website ranks for.
  • Using Filters: This is where you can really dig in! Use the filter options to sort the keywords. You can look for:
    • Position: See only the keywords where you rank in the top 3, top 10, or even lower down the list.
    • Volume: Find keyword ideas that a lot of people search for.
    • Keyword Difficulty (KD): This score tells you how hard it might be to rank for a keyword. A lower number means it’s usually easier. Ahrefs even suggests how many backlinks you might need to rank for a specific keyword.
    • SERP Features: See if your pages are showing up in special boxes on Google, like “featured snippets” or image results.
  • New Keywords: This shows you any new keywords your site has recently started ranking for. It’s a great way to spot what new content is working.
  • Keyword Movement: Are your keywords going up or down in Google’s results? This helps you see if your SEO changes are helping or hurting.
• Top Pages Report: Find out which of your website’s pages are getting the most visitors from Google.
  • Traffic Potential: This shows you which pages are bringing in the most estimated traffic.
  • Keyword Distribution: See exactly which keywords each of your popular pages ranks for. This helps you understand what content is already doing well.

3. Analyzing Your Backlink Profile

Backlinks are links from other websites to yours.

Think of them as votes of trust. Site Explorer helps you understand these votes.

• Backlinks Report: This shows you every single backlink pointing to your site.
  • Referring Domains: How many unique websites are linking to you? It’s better to have links from many different websites than many links from just one.
  • New/Lost Backlinks: Keep an eye on new links you get and any links you lose. Losing good links can hurt your rankings.
  • Broken Backlinks: Find links that used to work but are now broken. Fixing these can help your SEO.
  • Anchor Text: This is the clickable text people use to link to your site. Is it varied and natural-looking?
• Internal Backlinks: These are links within your website, from one page to another. Good internal linking helps Google understand your site better.
• Link Intersect: This is a super smart way to find link-building chances. You can see which websites link to your competitors but not to you. These are great places to reach out for a link!

4. Competitive Analysis with Site Explorer

Site Explorer isn’t just for you; it’s also perfect for checking out your rivals.

• Find Your Rivals: If you’re not sure who your top competitors are in Google, the “Organic Competitors” report within Site Explorer can help you find them based on the keywords you both rank for.
• Competitors’ Organic Keywords: See exactly what keywords your competitors are showing up for. This can give you new keyword ideas to target.
  • Content Gap Analysis: This is a gem! You put in your website and a few of your competitors’ websites. Ahrefs will then show you keywords that they rank for, but you don’t. This is perfect for finding new content topics that you know already get traffic.
• Competitors’ Backlinks: Look at where your competitors are getting their backlinks.
  • Referring Domains: See which websites are linking to them. Can you get links from those same sites? This is a pure link-building strategy!
  • Best by Links: Find your competitors’ most popular content – the stuff that has attracted the most backlinks. This can give you ideas for creating even better content that naturally gets links.

Deep Dive into Keywords Explorer: Finding Profitable Keywords

Keywords Explorer is like a treasure map for finding the exact words and phrases people type into search engines.

This is a crucial part of SEO, and Ahrefs is a top-notch keyword research tool. 

If you’re looking for an SEO tool like Ahrefs to supercharge your digital marketing, this section is for you.

1. Generating Keyword Ideas

Every great piece of content starts with a good idea, and for SEO, that means good keyword ideas.

• Start with a Seed Keyword: This is your starting point – a main word or phrase related to what you do. For example, if you sell pet food, a seed keyword could be “dog food” or “cat treats.” Type this into the Keywords Explorer search bar.
• Matching Terms: Ahrefs will then show you a huge list of keyword ideas that contain your seed keyword. This is like seeing all the different ways people search for “dog food,” such as “best dog food for puppies” or “organic dog food brands.”
• Related Terms: This report gives you keywords that are related in meaning to your seed keyword, even if they don’t have the exact words. For example, for “dog food,” you might see “canine nutrition” or “pet diet.”
• Search Suggestions: Ahrefs also pulls ideas from what Google suggests when you start typing. This includes phrases from Google Autocomplete and the “People Also Ask” boxes, which often reveal common questions.
• Questions: There’s a special section just for keywords that are questions (like “how to choose dog food?”). These are great for writing helpful articles that answer common user questions.

2. Analyzing Keyword Metrics

Once you have a bunch of keyword ideas, you need to figure out which ones are worth going after.

Ahrefs provides helpful SEO metrics for this.

• Search Volume: This is a very important metric. It tells you how many times people search for that specific keyword each month. High search volume means more people are looking for that topic.
• Keyword Difficulty (KD): This is Ahrefs’ score (from 0 to 100) that tells you how hard it might be to rank in the top 10 results for a keyword. A lower number means it’s generally easier to rank. Ahrefs even suggests how many backlinks you might need to rank for a particular target keyword.
• Clicks: This metric estimates how many actual clicks the search results for that keyword get. Sometimes a keyword has high search volume, but fewer clicks because people find their answer right in Google (like in a featured snippet) and don’t need to click a website.
• Clicks Per Search (CPS): This tells you how many clicks, on average, happen for each search query.
• Traffic Potential: This metric is super useful. Instead of just showing the search volume for one target keyword, Ahrefs estimates the total organic traffic you could get if you ranked #1 for all the keywords that the top-ranking page for your target keyword also ranks for. It gives you a more realistic idea of potential search traffic.
• Cost Per Click (CPC): If you ever plan to run ads, this shows you the average cost you’d pay each time someone clicks an ad for that keyword.

3. Understanding Search Intent

If you understand the user’s goal, you can create content that truly helps them.

These are important use cases for effective digital marketing.

• Informational: The user wants to learn something (e.g., “how to bake cookies,” “what is technical SEO?”).
• Navigational: The user wants to go to a specific website (e.g., “Facebook login,” “Amazon homepage”).
• Commercial Investigation: The user is researching products or services before buying (e.g., “best laptops 2025,” “Ahrefs review”).
• Transactional: The user is ready to buy something (e.g., “buy running shoes online,” “Ahrefs subscription discount”).

Ahrefs often gives clues about search intent within Keywords Explorer. 

This is where your keyword research tool truly shines.

This type of deep understanding is why Ahrefs is a preferred seo tool like ahrefs for many professionals.

Optimizing Your Site with Site Audit

Think of Ahrefs’ Site Audit as a doctor for your website.

It checks everything to make sure your site is healthy and ready for Google to understand.

Regularly using this tool helps you find problems with your on-page SEO and fix them before they hurt your ranking. 

1. Running a Site Audit

Setting up a regular check-up for your website is a smart move.

• Start a New Audit: Inside the Site Audit part of Ahrefs, you’ll start a new project for your website.
• Tell Ahrefs How to Crawl: You can adjust a few settings, like how fast Ahrefs should look at your pages or if it should check subdomains (like https://www.google.com/search?q=blog.yourwebsite.com).
• Schedule Regular Checks: This is important! Set up the audit to run every week or every month. This way, Ahrefs will automatically keep an eye on your site and tell you if new problems pop up.

2. Understanding Audit Reports

Ahrefs gives you easy-to-understand reports about all the things it found.

• Health Score: You’ll get a score that shows how generally healthy your website’s SEO is. A higher score means fewer problems.
• Big Problems to Fix First (Critical Errors): These are the most important issues to tackle because they can really mess with your rankings. For example:
  • Broken Pages (4XX errors): These are pages on your site that don’t load. Imagine a visitor clicking a link only to find nothing there!
  • Redirect Issues: Problems with how your website sends visitors from an old page to a new one. Bad redirects can confuse search engines.
  • Noindexed Pages: These are pages that you’ve accidentally told Google not to show in search results. Sometimes this is on purpose, but often it’s a mistake.
• Warnings and Notices: These are less urgent than critical errors but still important to fix. They include things like:
  • Duplicate Content: When you have the same content on more than one page. Google doesn’t like this.
  • Missing Titles or Descriptions: These are the little snippets of text that show up in Google search results. They’re part of good on-page SEO.
  • Low Word Count: Pages with very little text might not give Google much to understand.
  • Slow Pages: If your pages load slowly, people might leave, and Google notices that!
• Link Ideas: Site Audit can even point out chances to improve your internal link building, showing you where to add links between your pages.
• Batch AI (New in 2025): This is a cool new feature! Ahrefs can use AI to help you quickly write titles and meta descriptions for many pages at once. This saves you a lot of time on your on-page SEO.

By running these audits regularly, you’re making sure your website is in tip-top shape.

Ready to rank for those keywords you found with Keywords Explorer and to attract more monthly search traffic. 

Tracking Your Progress with Rank Tracker

So, you’ve done your keyword research process, fixed your website with Site Audit, and maybe even started some link building.

But how do you know if all that hard work is actually paying off? 

Unlike some free SEO tools that only give you basic ranking checks, Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker provides deep insights.

1. Setting Up a Rank Tracking Project

It’s super easy to start watching your keywords climb (hopefully!) the Google ladder.

• Add Your Website: Just like with Site Explorer, you’ll add your website’s address to the Rank Tracker tool.
• Tell It Your Keywords: Now, you need to tell Ahrefs which keywords you want to track. You can type them in one by one, or you can import a big list from your keyword research process in Keywords Explorer. You can even import keywords from Google Search Console. You can track hundreds or even thousands of keywords at once!
• Pick Your Location and Devices: Do you care how you rank in a specific country, like the USA or Canada? Or even a particular city? You can set that up. You can also track if you rank differently on desktop computers compared to mobile phones.
• Add Your Rivals: This is a neat trick. You can also add your competitors’ websites to Rank Tracker. This lets you see how your rankings compare directly to theirs. Are you beating them for important keywords?

2. Analyzing Rank Tracker Reports

Rank Tracker gives you easy-to-read reports that help you see your progress over time.

• Overall View: This report gives you a quick summary. You’ll see your average ranking position, how much estimated traffic your tracked keywords bring, and if your website is becoming more visible in searches.
• Keywords Report: This is where you see the nitty-gritty details for each keyword you’re tracking.
  • Position History: This shows you a graph of how each keyword’s ranking has changed over days, weeks, or months. Are you moving up? Down? Staying steady?
  • SERP Features: Did your content show up in a special Google box, like a “featured snippet” or an image pack? Rank Tracker tells you.
  • Traffic Share by Page: This helps you understand which specific pages on your website are getting the most traffic from the keywords you’re tracking. You might discover a parent topic that is doing surprisingly well.
• Competitors Overview: This report is fantastic for seeing how you stack up. You can compare your visibility, estimated traffic, and keyword rankings directly against your rivals. This helps you find areas where your competitors are doing better than you, giving you ideas for your next steps in link building or content explorer analysis.
• Alerts (New in 2025): This is a great new feature! You can set up Ahrefs to send you an alert if one of your important keywords suddenly jumps up or drops down a lot in rankings. You can also get alerts when new keywords start to rank for your site. This is much faster than doing a manual backlink analysis every day.
• Backlink Analysis Integration (Enhanced): While Rank Tracker mainly focuses on keyword positions, in 2025 Ahrefs has improved how it links with backlink analysis data. This means you can more easily see if a change in your backlinks might be affecting your keyword rankings directly within the Rank Tracker interface.

Conclusion

You’ve just learned how to use Ahrefs, a powerful tool for your website’s SEO.

We covered how to set it up, explore your site and competitors, find great keyword opportunities, and fix SEO issues.

You also saw how to track your progress and learned about some new features for 2025.

Ahrefs isn’t just about putting keywords into a tool.

It gives you clear information to make smart choices.

It helps you find valuable link opportunities and understand your monthly search volume.

Improving your website’s ranking is an ongoing effort. 

Alternatives to Ahrefs

Here are some alternatives to Ahrefs, each offering similar or complementary features for SEO and digital marketing:

• Semrush: A popular all-in-one SEO tool strong in competitor analysis, keyword research, and site auditing.
• Content Raptor: A content brief and optimization tool that helps create detailed, SEO-friendly content outlines.
• Surfer SEO: Focuses on on-page SEO by analyzing top-ranking content and providing data-driven optimization suggestions.
• Moz: Offers SEO tools including Keyword Explorer, Link Explorer for backlink analysis, and the MozBar for quick SEO metrics.
• SE Ranking: A cloud-based SEO tool for keyword research, competitive analysis, backlink monitoring, website audit, and rank tracking.
• Ubersuggest: Provides keyword ideas, content ideas, backlink data, and site audit features, with a free version available.
• SpyFu: Specializes in competitor keyword research, allowing you to see what competitors rank for and bid on in paid search.
• Similarweb: Focuses on website traffic and analytics, providing insights into traffic sources and audience demographics.
• Raven Tools: Offers a suite of SEO tools including site auditing, rank tracking, keyword research, and link building management.
• Mangools: A user-friendly set of five SEO tools covering keyword research, SERP analysis, backlink analysis, site profiling, and rank tracking.
• Ranktracker: Primarily focused on tracking your keyword positions daily across various locations and devices.

Frequently Asked Questions