How to Use Ahrefs for Backlink Analysis and SEO Research

Ahrefs is one of the most widely used SEO tools in the industry, and its backlink database is regarded as among the most comprehensive available. Agencies, in-house SEO teams, and independent consultants rely on it daily for link building campaigns, keyword research, content planning, and competitive analysis.

This guide covers the tools within Ahrefs you’ll use most: Site Explorer for backlink and organic search analysis, Keywords Explorer for keyword research, and Content Gap for finding opportunities your competitors are capturing that you aren’t.

Backlink Analysis With Site Explorer

Site Explorer is the heart of Ahrefs. Enter your domain (or a competitor’s) and you’ll see a dashboard showing Domain Rating (DR), the number of referring domains, estimated organic traffic, and the top organic keywords. DR is Ahrefs’ proprietary metric for the strength of a site’s backlink profile — it runs from 0 to 100 and is a useful rough guide to authority.

Click through to the Backlinks report to see every inbound link Ahrefs has found pointing to the site. You can filter by link type (dofollow vs nofollow), by domain rating of the linking site, or by the anchor text used. For your own site, this is your link audit — look for spammy or irrelevant links that might be doing more harm than good.

The Referring Domains report is often more useful than the raw backlinks view because it groups links by source domain. A site with 1,000 links from 10 domains is far less authoritative than one with 1,000 links from 500 different domains. Building breadth of referring domains is generally a more reliable strategy than accumulating links from the same few sources.

Keyword Research and Organic Search Analysis

Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer works similarly to SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool. Enter a seed keyword, choose your target country, and explore the related terms, questions, and phrase-match variations. Ahrefs provides Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores alongside estimated monthly search volumes and click-through rate data.

One feature that sets Ahrefs apart is the traffic potential metric. Rather than just showing the search volume of the exact keyword, it estimates the total traffic you’d gain by ranking number one for that keyword — accounting for the fact that ranking pages typically also pick up traffic from many related queries.

In Site Explorer’s Organic Keywords report, you can see every keyword a domain or URL ranks for. Sort by position to find keywords where you rank on page two — these are often the quickest wins, as small improvements to those pages can push them onto page one and significantly increase traffic.

Finding Content Gaps and Link Opportunities

The Content Gap tool lets you compare your domain against up to ten competitors and find keywords they rank for that you don’t. This is one of the fastest ways to build a content calendar with topics that have proven search demand. Filter the results by difficulty and volume to prioritise the most accessible opportunities.

For link building, the Link Intersect tool shows you which sites link to two or more of your competitors but not to you. These are warm prospects: they already link to similar sites in your space, which suggests they’re interested in your topic area and may be receptive to a well-crafted outreach message.