When carrying out any SEO work, whether it is for your own website or for a client, it is important to have tools that make our lives easier.
Undoubtedly, Ahrefs is one of the best tools available on the market, but its price means that many people end up looking for free alternatives.
If you are a small company or a freelance that is starting, paying for this tool can be a very high cost for your business.
For this reason, in this article, we bring you the 10 best alternatives to ahrefs for free.
The Importance of Having Free Alternatives to Ahrefs
There are more than 200 factors that Google uses to rank web pages, and two of them have the most influence.
The first is the content and the second is the backlinks.
You can create super relevant content that provides high value to users, but how to analyze or find the backlinks of the competition?
Ahrefs is one of the best tools for analyzing competitor backlink profiles, and it can be used to monitor backlinks from any website.
But it is a bit expensive, which is why most webmasters look for cheaper alternatives to Ahrefs.
Here are some reasons to look for alternatives to Ahrefs :
- It is an expensive tool.
- The way it calculates keyword difficulty scores are not as accurate as it should be.
- Missing Google Chrome extension.
Whatever your reason, you should know that you have other alternative keyword research options.
Here is a list of tools that can help you perform the same tasks as Ahrefs, more cheaply, but no less efficiently.
The Best Alternatives to Ahrefs Free
Most of the tools that we detail below are completely free and others offer you to create a free user account, with some limitations.
Google KeywordPlanner
Despite the fact that this is not one of the best alternatives, we cannot fail to mention it.
The data is not useful for organic keyword research, however, we list it because it is absolutely free.
In addition, it is a good alternative for those who want or need to start specializing in the search for keywords to attract organic traffic.
Keyword Shitter
Keyword Shitter is the best tool to analyze Google auto-suggest keywords.
All you have to do is enter the keyword term you are interested in in the main toolbar and Shitter will produce a long list of all relevant keywords based on auto-suggestions.
You will also have the opportunity to connect negative and positive filters to adjust your content, which represents a better opportunity.
It practically does not have customer service, if you have any doubts, but when it comes to searching for keywords, you will be able to do it perfectly.
This tool is ideal when you are starting out with new research just to get an idea of a wide range of keywords and get topics for your blog content creation.
Also, this software is particularly powerful when used with the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension, because you can also get the search volume for each keyword generated.
Soovle
Soovle is a free platform like Keyword Shitter, where you enter a seed keyword and auto-suggest options are generated from all major search engines, including Google, Amazon, Bing, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and YouTube.
Google Trends
If you need to include graphics in the content you generate, this tool is ideal.
Of course, it’s also great for locating keywords and knowing if a niche or topic is trending up or down.
That is definitely its main strength as a keyword research tool.
SEOBook
SEOBook’s keyword research tool is great for being free.
We have compared many search volume results to Ahrefs and it is quite accurate.
It doesn’t offer many of the other advantages that Ahrefs does, but if you just need to search for keyword volume, SEOBook is fantastic.
Answer the Public
ATP is great for expanding topics and keywords for a generic keyword.
You just have to enter a starting keyword and it will immediately suggest many additional long-tail options in graphs or lists.
In this way, you can ensure many ideas to develop relevant content for your niche market.
Ubersuggest
Digital marketing great Neil Patel bought Ubersuggest in 2018 and managed to make this already good keyword research tool even better.
It offers a search volume and its own keyword difficulty score.
We’re not sure how many features Neil plans to add, but if he does it all and keeps it free, he could become a serious threat to Ahrefs, SEMrush, and other paid keyword research tools.
SEMrush
At first, it may seem difficult to use, due to the features that are all over the board.
But actually, the program is simple to use.
This is not just an SEO tool, but it packs a bunch of useful stuff including:
- Backlink analysis.
- Rankings.
- Advertising planning.
- Traffic analysis.
It’s an all-in-one solution for digital marketing and finding competitive data, making it a great alternative.
Also, it is very easy to get detailed information about your competitor’s website.
You only have to enter the domain name of your competitor and then statistics such as:
- Organic keywords and their positions in Google.
- Backlink profile with anchor text.
- Top-ranked keywords.
After adding the competitor site, just head over to “organic search positions” from the sidebar.
There you will see the keywords along with the search volume and search engine ranking.
This way, you can make the best use of SEMrush and capture valuable keywords.
It also describes the latest movements of your competitor’s keywords in search engines.
And by putting up a single competitor domain name, SEMrush lists the other potential competitors and thus helps you design more competent SEO strategies.
Another important feature that is very useful if you know your target audience is the choice of location.
The tool supports more than 100 locations.
Now, if for example, you are interested in the US audience, it will track and display information only about the US audience.
After obtaining this information, you can use it to improve SEO on your page.
SEMrush can help you plan PPC, that is, Pay Per Click.
In this way, you can conduct advertising research and analyze the advertising strategies of the competition.
Their PPC keyword tool helps you tremendously in programming your AdWords campaign.
Along with display ads, you can keep an eye on competitor video ads and plan your own.
Unfortunately, both Ahrefs and SEMrush are not affordable software for everyone.
But unlike Ahrefs, SEMrush offers a free account that provides up to 10 queries per day.
In addition, you can also get a 7-day trial account.
On the other hand, Ahrefs does not provide a free account and for a trial account, they require payment details.
SEMrush is one of the great tools and if you can afford it then you should use it.
But if you are just a beginner blogger, you may not need this and you can rely on their free account.
Overall, SEMrush is a great tool with tons of features presenting reports in different formats and surely worth every penny you pay for it.
We have also collected free alternatives to SEMrush that you may be interested in learning about.
SERPstat
This is an SEO platform that consists of 5 tools:
- Rankings.
- Keyword research.
- Competitive analysis.
- Website audit.
- Backlink analysis.
As for backlink analysis, Serpstat analyzes your backlink profile, monitors new and lost backlinks, displays their anchor text, and measures link authority.
Also, research the backlinks of competitors.
With this feature, you can find out which sites and pages your competitors are linking to, estimate your link-building strategy, and get some ideas or web pages for your own strategy.
It also has a wide range of features that help you get the most out of Ahrefs-like keyword research.
In addition to a selection of standard keywords, it offers:
- Related Keywords – This feature provides you with a large list of keywords that are semantically related to your main keyword. It also helps you expand your keyword list with synonyms, and different phrase variations to optimize a page for multiple keywords and make your content look more natural.
- Search Suggestions – When you start typing your query into Google search, Google suggests common keywords that people search for on Google. Serpstat gathers all these long-tail keywords for you.
- Search Questions: These are search suggestions in the interrogative form.
- Keyword Difficulty – This metric shows how competitive the keyword is. With this information, you can understand if that keyword is worth spending time and money on.
- Keyword Intent – The tool shows what special elements are shown for your query, eg map, answer box, shopping, etc. It can help you find the right keywords to appear there.
- Keyword Grouping – Grouping of keywords by meaning and relevance. This helps optimize a page for multiple queries and makes sense of a huge list of keywords.
- Competitive keyword research – You can compare your URL and your competitor’s URL and find the keywords you’ve been missing.
Another great tool is ranking tracking. You can set daily, every 3 days, or weekly updates.
In addition, you can monitor your positions in parallel with your competitors’ positions in a project, without having to create additional projects or additional spending limits.
The domain audit tool estimates the level of technical optimization of the page.
Serpstat finds all errors related to metadata, headers, HTTP status code, indexing, links and redirects, loading speed, server parameters, etc.
It sorts the errors by priority and gives you a list of links where the errors are located and recommends a way to fix them.
Also, you can estimate competitors’ PPC ads, find ad examples, find the keywords they are bidding on, and compare ads from multiple domains.
Almost all the features of this tool are suitable for competitive analysis as well as your own website analysis, making it the most suitable alternative to Ahref.
The free version is available but is limited in features, queries per day, and results per report.
The paid versions start at $19/month, but the cheapest plan usually isn’t enough for proper analysis.
Other plans cost between $69 and $299 per month.
Majestic SEO
This software offers multiple tools in one place, such as:
- Backlink analysis.
- Domain Comparison.
- Search browser.
- Powerful API for developers.
- Browser extensions.
In the control panel, you will see the browser bar where you must place the address of the web about which you need information.
There it will show you the backlinks, referring domains, and anchor text details.
Let’s get one thing straight: Majestic does not offer SEO services.
So what is Majestic for?
You can do better backlink analysis with different metrics like citation flow, topic flow, and trust flow.
It has a good backlink index.
- Trust Flow – Defines the number of clicks on the URL listed on the site.
- Citation flow – It mainly determines the number of backlinks and their effect on the domain.
- Topic Flow – Measures the influence of the URL on the specific category.
You can get a free Majestic account, just by providing the necessary information and registering.
Now you know what are the best free Ahrefs alternatives.
Which of these tools will you start using today?
Thanks for Reading.