The PRmoment Tool Review: Ahrefs Content Explorer gets full marks

Tool name and maker
Content Explorer from Ahrefs

What this tool does
Ahrefs is a comprehensive platform and a staple for any PR expert which will help you to understand the content your competitors are writing as well as helping to construct your own content more effectively. 

Ahrefs is also a very efficient SEO planning tool and helps you to create content that your audience is actively searching for. This tool will help you to find content that is garnering search traffic and shares which will help you to find ideas and themes for your own campaigns and story planning.

Price as reviewed
Pricing for the tool depends on whether you choose the Lite, Standard, Advanced or Agency package, pricing is as follows:

Lite: £765 + VAT per annum (12-month subscription + 1 user account)

Standard: £1,383 + VAT per annum (12-month subscription + 1 user account)

Advanced: £3,084 + VAT per annum (12-month subscription + 3 user accounts)

Agency: £7,722 + VAT per annum (12-month subscription + 5 user accounts)

The monitoring and reporting functions differ across each of the four packages, these include trend graphs, broken pages, history graphs and their time periods and the number of reports you receive day to day.

The test
For the test we used Ahrefs to explore content themes around financial wellbeing in the UK.

How it performed
We used the search to find the articles with the highest organic traffic which we were able to find out by using the ‘Sort By’ function at the top of the results section. We wanted the results to be displayed in this way so that we could establish a common trend across each of the top performing posts.

It handily shows how many page results you can explore (in this case 12,326 pages) which you can then filter down by when the article was published, if it was ever republished, the language and whether the links are live or broken.

Once we have filtered our results, we can then export the findings into a csv file in Excel. This function makes it easier to have all of the data in one place, making the filtering process more efficient.

Likes

• The platform is straight forward and simple to use so it does not require any extensive training.
• The results are very visual so you can see a graph of the performance of the pages over time as well as how the results would appear in Google.
• You can click on the referring domains of each piece of content to see the publications and websites who have linked back which will give you an indicator of the types of publications you can pitch/sell-in to if you are to explore a similar topic.
• You can add filters such as social shares to see how successful the content performed across social media.
• The Words feature allows you to search for published content within a set word count so you can gauge the length of the top performing pieces of content.
  
  

Dislikes

Overall, I think this platform has many credible and insightful functions to offer, however it could benefit from:

• Keywords used throughout the article so that you can use these in your own version.
• A breakdown of the type of websites your search term has appeared on, such as National, Lifestyle, Regional, Consumer, Blog, etc.

Star rating (out of 5)

Written by Sarah Evans, senior digital strategist at PR agency Bottle