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The 7 Best Ahrefs Alternatives You'll Ever Need

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To call Ahrefs' business practices confusing is an understatement.

From changing its pricing structure to a credit-based system to booting out Legacy users, it appears that the once mighty SEO tool is more interested in turning in a profit nowadays than providing its users with excellent service as it did before.

At the end of the day, Ahrefs will do what it wants. But instead of sticking around and allowing yourself to be subjected to these costly changes (and whatever else the company thinks of), consider jumping ship to other SEO tools.

Below are Ahrefs alternatives, also the most popular SEO tools in the market, that can help you develop effective SEO strategies and campaigns for your website and client sites without the headache and added costs. Let's begin!

  1. Legiit Dashboard - Best SEO management tool and client dashboard
  2. Semrush - Best online marketing tool that is the most identical to Ahrefs
  3. SE Ranking - Best keyword ranking tool and is a more lightweight version of Semrush
  4. Serpstat - SEO tool that provides the most value and bang for the buck
  5. Mangools - Easiest-to-use keyword research tool
  6. Ubersuggest - Another affordable SEO focused on providing data to rank your site
  7. SEO Powersuite - Desktop-based SEO software that's cost-efficient, flexible, and powerful

Legiit Dashboard

Legiit Dashboard is a relatively new feature at Legiit, an online marketplace where people can buy and sell services to grow their businesses.

Founder Chris M. Walker felt the need to provide users with a way to seamlessly monitor the performance of the websites they are managing from Legiit. This way, users can improve the ability of their sites to rank on search results by buying SEO services offered by Legiit freelancers.

Benefits

Upon connecting your website, the Dashboard will compute its Legiit Score based on various ranking factors. The higher the score (on a scale of 0-100, 100 being the highest), the better your site is performing.

To help you increase its score, follow the To Do List provided on the right side of the Dashboard by default. There are also Legiit AI Recommendations that you can add to your list to boost your score further. This provides users who aren't too familiar with SEO with actionable items to improve their websites' keyword rankings.

Speaking of keywords, Legiit Dashboard lets users track which search queries the pages of your sites are showing up on Google search. Choose from a drop-down list of keywords you want to monitor and the location. Aside from the keyword rankings, the Dashboard shows you the search volume of each term, the evolution graph of your ranking, and the weekly and monthly ranking changes.

These help you determine how your pages are faring for the terms and what you must do to improve their search positions.

One way to do this is by optimizing your pages for their target keywords. Legiit Dashboard helps you here with its Audiit feature. It lets you analyze the top 20 results for a keyword based on various factors like word count, keyword density, and keyword mentions in the title, URL, headings, and others.

This is helpful when editing the page content for your keyword and making it similar to the top-ranking pages. Or you can use the information provided here to create new content for your site from scratch.

The backlink history widget lets you monitor a site's best links in its backlink profile. It shows the pages and website where you got the link from, whether it's dofollow or not, and what anchor text it's using. It also tells you the link's status, whether live or not. If the latter, contact the site to recover your link.

To help make monitoring your website performance much simpler, you can connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console with Legiit Dashboard. Doing so shows you the most relevant data from both platforms, so you don't have to jump back and forth between tools to view insights.

And with the data provided by Legiit Dashboard, you can have a much better understanding as to why your site is performing the way it does.

As mentioned, you can hire Legiit freelancers as the platform recommends to help boost your Legiit score. While you must pay separately for these services, you can filter the offers based on their star ratings and customer testimonials. They help you find freelancers that can increase your score and positively impact your site's performance.

Pricing

Legiit Dashboard has a 7-day trial for $7. You can then upgrade your account for $27/month. This includes all the features above but with more limits (more sites to add, keywords to tracks, backlinks to monitor, and Audiit credits).

For more limits, plus the ability to create white-label reports, sign up for its Agency plan at $99/month.

Semrush

When it comes to Ahrefs alternatives, Semrush is the closest you'll get. This SEO software also works as an online marketing platform to help increase your site's visibility and generate highly qualified leads for your business.

Benefits

For starters, Semrush's Domain Overview is the equivalent of Ahrefs' Site Explorer. Enter the domain URL of the site to view its Authority Score, organic traffic in two years, the keyword it's generating the most traffic from, the number of backlinks, and more. This data and more give you a glance at the site's SEO performance.

Its keyword research tool, Keyword Overview, lets you analyze the search query for its volume, keyword difficulty (KD), and search intent. It also generates ideas and suggestions from the keyword you typed in. There's also a SERP analysis widget that breaks down the pages that are ranking for the term for their Authority Scores, backlinks, traffic, and other factors. This is very similar to the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer.

Using this information lets you identify the best keywords to target for your website.

If you want to expand your keyword research, the Keyword Magic Tool lets you filter the ideas using the abovementioned factors. You can also narrow the keyword results to show only exact, broad, and phrase matches, as well as questions, so you can zero in on the keywords you're looking for.

Semrush's site audit tool lets you analyze your site's technical SEO and determine issues that make crawling your pages harder for search spiders. After completing the audit, the tool offers an overall score indicating how well your website is set up. It then reveals the errors, warnings, and notices you must address to increase the score and improve your site's crawlability.

A Semrush feature that Ahrefs doesn't have is the SEO Content Template and SEO Writing Assistant. Enter the keyword you want to optimize on your site. The tool will then create an SEO content brief that shows basic and key recommendations. This includes page title and metadata to use, number of words, semantically relevant terms to include in the content, and more.

Since link building and monitoring is Ahrefs' specialty, Semrush has backlink analysis tools as well. Its Backlink Analytics lets you delve deep into a site's referring domains and backlinks. It also shows new and lost backlinks, link types the site has acquired over the years, anchor text distribution, pages with the best links, sites with similar link profiles, and more.

This feature lets you assess a site's backlink profile and identify link opportunities for your website. You can also compare your domain with competitors to see which referring domains they have that you don't have yet. From here, you can launch a link building campaign for your site from the tool.

Other Semrush features that can help you build an effective SEO strategy for your site and clients include:

  • Traffic Analytics - Research your competitor's traffic statistics and growth strategies to help build your own.
  • Position Tracking Tool - Monitor website rankings for your target keywords and uncover trends, patterns, and opportunities to help increase their positions.
  • Link Building Tool - Automatically identify link prospects and send outreach emails to each.
  • On-Page SEO Checker - Enter your website URL for the tool to generate ideas based on competitor analysis to help improve your site's SEO performance.

Pricing

The lowest plan of $129/month ($108.33/month paid annually) gives you access to all aforementioned features except its SEO Content Template and SEO Writing Assistant. You'll have to pay for its higher plans to unlock more projects and better Keyword Analytics and Reporting features.

Some of its advanced features (Semrest Local, .Trends, Social, etc.) are add-ons that go on top of your chosen subscription plan above if you want to beef up your digital marketing efforts.

SE Ranking

If you're looking for more affordable alternatives to Ahrefs, SE Ranking is a good place to start. The software was primarily a keyword rank tracker designed for SEO professionals before branching out to other features to help users develop comprehensive SEO campaigns for their sites and clients.

Benefits

Before using the tool, you must create a website project. This includes choosing which search engines you want the site to rank on, the keywords to track, and your competitors.

This enables the tool to provide a bird's eye view of your website and help you generate insights on improving its performance on search results.

If you want to conduct your research, use SE Ranking's Competitive Research, similar to how you use Ahrefs' Site Explorer. Once searching for your website URL, the platform gives you an overview of the site's organic traffic, ranking keywords, paid ads, traffic distribution, keyword intent, and more.

Its keyword research feature can help you identify each term to optimize for your site based on its search volume, KD, intent, and other variables. It also provides users with keyword suggestions containing the seed keyword's related and long tail keywords to help them narrow their search.

What if the data for the keyword you want to optimize isn't available? SE Ranking allows you to submit search queries for analysis and to be included in their database. This shows that the platform's keyword data depends on what users are interested in optimizing for, which is good. However, this feature is only available to the tools's higher plans.

Users can generate a backlink report for a domain. It provides them with comprehensive information about the site's link profile, which includes the Domain Trust (similar to Ahrefs' Domain Rating), the domain's total traffic, Page Trust (authority of the page linking to your site), the target URL, anchor text used, and more.

The report also shows you the domain's broken links and the toxicity score of each link. Being mindful of these backlink data enables you to recover the links that aren't working and identify which links to disavow from your site.

Finally, SE Ranking's reporting feature lets you send white-label reports to clients regarding their site's SEO progress. Choose which template to create your report and add the vital information you want to feature. You can also add your insights to help flesh out the data and highlight the positive impact of your SEO campaign.

Other SE Ranking features that can help you carry over the things you're doing with the help of Ahrefs include:

  • Content Marketing - Generate topic ideas and create optimized content for each by mentioning related terms in the text, modelling the content structure with top-ranking pages, and more.
  • Website Audit - Identify issues preventing your site from being crawled and indexed by Google and fixing said issues.
  • On-Page SEO Checker - Improve your page's ability to rank for its target keywords by providing you with actionable tasks to complete.

Pricing

SE Ranking is one of this list's most affordable SEO tools, starting at $39/month ($31.2/month paid annually). To gain access to its Content Marketing features and increased limits to projects, database expansion, and backlinks to monitor, you must sign up for its higher plans.

Serpstat

Serpstat is another excellent Ahrefs alternative. Unlike the previous two alternatives in this list. Serpstat is focused on providing SEO data and metrics to help users make sense of the site's performance on search engines and generate insights for creating better campaigns.

Benefits

You can learn about the site's SEO information by entering its URL on Domain Analysis. You will see the site's organic traffic and keywords, its Visibility in top-20 Google, and keyword position distribution.

Scrolling down the page, you'll see the visibility, traffic, and keyword trends in graph format. This shows the valleys and peaks of the trends for these SEO metrics, giving you a more visual approach to understanding the site's SEO data.

Under the tool's SEO research, you can pit your domain against competitors to learn about gaps and opportunities for your website. In particular, it tells you which keywords your competitors are ranking for but you don't. It also tells keywords you and your competitor is ranking for and which of you has a higher position.

Using this information, you can create content optimized for terms you're not ranking for, and re-optimize content not ranking as high as competitors.

Serpstat also has a backlink analysis feature that gathers and organizes the inbound links you have from different domains. And just like Ahrefs, it lets you delve deeper into the backlinks by identifying top pages, anchor texts, TLDs, and more.

You can run your competitors using this feature to uncover their link building strategy based on the factors covered in the report.

Another approach you can use to building your backlinking strategy is to use the tool's Links intersection. Like Ahrefs' Link Intersect, enter your competitors and let Serpstat cross-reference your backlinks. It will show you links that your competitors have, and you don't. Then, compile the authoritative links you don't have and acquire links from these domains just like your competitors did!

Below are other things Serpstat can do that are similar to Ahrefs to monitor and improve your site's SEO performance:

  • Site audit - Conduct site-wide or page-specific audits to identify issues keeping them from ranking on search engines.
  • Keyword research - Find low-hanging fruit keyword ideas from seed keywords to rank for and optimize on your website.
  • Rank tracking - Monitor keyword rankings to see if your SEO campaigns worked.

Pricing

Given its wealth of features not mentioned above (AI content tools, local SEO, keyword clustering) that even Ahrefs doesn't have, Serpstat is another affordable choice for your SEO needs. Prices start at $59/month ($50/month paid annually). Almost all features except API access, reporting, and AI tools are available, which you can unlock if you subscribe to higher plans.

Mangools

Mangools is another popular SEO tool for its price and features. It started as a keyword tool and then expanded to offer other features to provide users with ways to develop and implement an SEO strategy that delivers results.

Benefits

Mangools has one of the best keyword research tools, if not the best, in KWFinder. Enter the keyword you want to analyze to see its KD, search volume, and SERP analysis. You can also show related keywords, autocomplete, and question keywords to help you target keywords with different intent.

Finally, enter the domain URL to extract keywords the site is ranking for. Use this to spy on competitor's organic keywords to rank for your site.

Mangool's SERPChecker let you analyze the top-ranking pages for your keyword. Type in your keyword here to see the web pages ranking for it and third-party metrics, like Moz's Domain Authority (DA), Majestic's Flow Metrics (Trust Flow and Citation Flow), and others.

Using the information here, determine whether to target the keyword as part of your campaign. For example, if most of the pages ranking for the keyword have high DA and Flow Metrics, consider choosing another keyword to optimize. This is a great way to validate your keyword choices instead of relying on keyword difficulty.

The tool's LinkMiner is its version of backlink checker to monitor your link profile or find link opportunities for your site using your competitor websites. Enter the URL to see the links pointing to it. You can organize them using the same metrics found in SERPChecker. Click on the link to view the page on the same window to see how the link appears.

There are two other tools Mangools offers:

  • SERPWatcher - Monitor keyword rankings over time to see if the SEO campaign positively changed your search positions.
  • SiteProfiler - Get a basic overview of the website by looking at its top content, backlinks, and others before conducting a deeper analysis on it using other tools.

Pricing

Mangools' plans include all features starting at $29/month ($19/month paid annually). The higher plans give you more limits to its features and additional seats if you're working with a team.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest was once a free keyword research tool before Neil Patel purchased it. Since then, it has added many new features that have made it a robust SEO toolkit and a formidable yet cost-effective alternative to Ahrefs.

Benefits

From the dashboard, you can enter a keyword you want to research or a domain to analyze. You can perform either even with a free plan, although the data the tool will provide will be limited.

In the screenshot below, performing a keyword analysis shows you the usual metrics (KD, search volume, keyword ideas, content ideas report).

If you're not happy with the data for the keyword, browse through various keyword ideas to find other suggestions you can use to optimize your content.

There's also a Keyword Visualization feature that lets you see ideas from your seed keyword grouped into different categories like questions, keywords that contain prepositions and comparative words, and others.

This feature was once exclusive to Answer the Publish, but since Neil Patel also bought that one, it has been integrated into Ubersuggest as well.

If you enter a domain on the search bar, you can access Ubersuggest's Traffic Estimation feature. Like Ahrefs' Site Explore, it tells you the site's organic traffic and keywords, top SEO pages, backlinks, and more.

For link building, its Backlinks Overview lets you analyze a domain's link profile for its various SEO metrics. On the other hand, the Backlink Opportunities allows you to find high-quality links similar sites have, but yours doesn't. Both features can help you improve your link building efforts and grow your site's rankings.

Other features that can help you optimize your website the way that Ahrefs does include:

  • Site Audit - Analyze your site's technical SEO set-up and identify issues you must solve to help search spiders find your site much easier.
  • Rank Tracking - Monitor keyword rankings over time to ensure your money keywords rank on top of Google search results.
  • SEO Opportunities - Create a website project so the tool can analyze it properly and provide you with an actionable to-do list to improve its SEO performance.

Pricing

Ubersuggest has the most affordable monthly plans among the SEO tools in the list. The Individual plan ($20/month) is perfect for people managing a single website. SEO freelancers and agencies should subscribe to its higher plans, giving them more projects to manage and higher limits across all its features.

SEO Powersuite

SEO Powersuite is the only desktop-based SEO software in this list. That means you have to download the software to your computer to use it, And it's also the most cost-efficient tool relative to the things you can achieve with its various features.

Benefits

Its Website Auditor is similar to Screaming Frog because it deeply analyzes a website based on various technical and on-page SEO factors. After running the audit, the tool will provide you with a list of issues and warnings it has spotted about your site.

There's also an option to visualize your website structure to see your topic cluster, interlinking strategy, and orphan pages.

You can deep-dive specific pages on your site to determine how optimized it is for its target keyword. The Content Audit lets you analyze pages for their keywords and find ideas for optimizing them first. The Content Editor, on the other hand, lets you find related terms to include in the content, similar to Surfer SEO. This lets you increase its optimization score even further.

The Rank Tracker combines keyword monitoring and keyword research features in a single tool. It draws keywords from Google Suggest, Google ads, and other products from the search engine. Aside from the usual keyword metrics, you can see the expected SEO traffic from each keyword, assuming you rank for it on top of SERPs. This helps you identify which keywords to target for your SEO campaign.

Its keyword ranking feature shows your position on search results for the terms you monitor. You can also compare your rankings against your competitors to see how you're performing against them over time with your SEO strategy.

There are other features SEO Powersuite to help you supercharge your site's SEO:

  • SEO Spyglass - Conduct link analytics on your site and competitors to determine ways to improve your link acquisition strategy and keyword rankings.
  • Link Assistant - Launch a link building outreach campaign by identifying link prospects and creating email campaigns sent to each to maximize response and success rate.

Pricing

SEO Powersuite is arguably the best SEO tool on the budget. There are no limits regarding its features. For instance, you can search for as many keywords as you want and need time for all plans. The difference is you can't export the keywords, or any data for that matter, for free users.

In this case, you must subscribe to its paid plans, starting with its Professional plan at $299/year. What makes it different from the Enterprise plan ($499/year) is you can't generate one-click, white-label reports on the Professional plan.

Also, each feature counts as a separate tool. So, buying the Rank Tracker tool without the others is possible to save on costs. This gives you flexibility if you're just interested in a feature of SEO Powersuite, as you use the other SEO software in the list.

What's the Best Ahrefs Alternative for You?

Just because Ahrefs continues to make drastic changes with how you experience its tool doesn't mean you have to grin and bear them.

The alternatives featured above are more than capable enough to help you conduct your SEO research and campaigns without skipping a beat.

While some of the tools don't have the data that Ahrefs has, which is one of its major selling points, the alternatives are much more affordable. You can subscribe to multiple tools and get the same level of data that Ahrefs delivers to its users, if not more!

About the Author

christopherjanb

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I provide COMPREHENSIVE CONTENT EXPERIENCES designed to improve my clients' online visibility by observing the best on-page SEO practices and engaging their audience with well-written and informative content.

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