AHREFS vs Yoast
Recently someone asked me what the difference between AHREFS & Yoast are. If your not familiar with SEO I can see where the confusion comes from, but the two are galaxies apart. One is an SEO research tool. Where you can get lost in data, and overwhelmed with direction. While the other is an SEO guideline. That is simple and straight forward. Both are necessary in today’s online world, but you need to know how to use them. So lets dive in shall we?
What is AHREFS?
AHEFS is the superstar of SEO tools. With its massive database and handy features it can easily replace the use of several tools. Features like Site Explorer allow you to analyze your site’s backlinks as well as your competition. Making it handy to find sites that are already backlinking to content your creating. If you want to explore the most profitable keywords in a specific niche site explorer allows you to do this on your site as well as your competition.
AHREFS’ content explorer allows you to find the most shared content for any given topic. Type in “fund your travels around the world” and you’ll see what & where its been shared.
AHREFS Keywords explorer is where I spend most of my time. As this gives you the difficulty level of a keyword. What it would take to rank on the top page. Average search volume data for a particular keyword and a host of other data necessary to rank in today’s internet world.
Ahrefs rank tracker allows you to create reports for specific sites, keywords, and even mentions. These reports can be delivered to you daily, weekly or monthly depending on your needs.
Ahrefs even has a site auditor that will monitor your SEO health. Scan your website for common SEO issues. Provide feedback on how to fix these issues.
Ahrefs dashboard will give you your site’s world wide rankings, URL rating, backlink count, newly acquired backlink count, referring domains, new referring domains, organic keywords and even your tracked keywords. All of these categories have multiple sub categories to explore as well. Making AHREFS a complete SEO Tool.
Unfortunately AHREFS as beneficial as it is. Its expensive and comes with daily limits. If your light user there is no way to justify AHREFS, and their free version comes with so many restrictions that you will burn through your limits in a matter of an hour maybe two. Forcing you to wait until the 11th of the next month to use it again. If aware of how SEO works and the capabilities of all this data the first two membership packages will only annoy and frustrate you with their daily limits.
Anyone with any SEO skills will need to sign up for the $400/month membership that still comes with daily limits! Its an expensive with a lot of benefit and potential, but unless your making thousands of dollars day its hard to justify! And the real kick in the pants is they have no referral or affiliate program, but they have pages on their site dating back to 2016 stating “affiliate program coming soon! Leave your email to get notified when we launch.” Guess they would rather just keep all the money for themselves.
I don’t pay for any SEO tools or any website tools. EVER! But I would gladly pay AHREFS a monthly fee if there weren’t so many restrictions and limitations. I paid their $100/month fee for 2 months. Never again! Every day was a new notice about how I needed to upgrade my membership to access “insert whatever here”. In 10 years I have never purchased any tool, besides those two months. It’s a wonderful, but hard to justify at those price points with those limitations and restrictions. You can pretty much game the same information from Serpstat for only $20/month, or KWFinder for only $30/month. You just need to do more things manually and dig a little deeper, or just use the free versions of all of these SEO tools and deal with the limitations.
While Ahrefs is a research tool. Yoast is a guideline tool. A wonderful tool at that. There is a paid & free version of Yoast, but I know bloggers that get over a million unique page views every month who still use the free version. Like I said Yoast is a guideline. If you listen to its directions all it does it give you a better chance to rank for the keywords you targeted, but there is no guarantee. If your targeting the word travel you have about a million competitors in front of you to outrank. Just because you got all green lights doesn’t mean you will rank, but it will help you.
Yoast
Yoast will give you suggestions on how to create titles for your blog posts. Giving them a better chance to rank. Yoast will also give you guidance on to write better. By giving you suggestions on word count, uses of words, Flesch reading ease, percentage of passive voice & transition words. Yoast will point out where you need to add your keywords to put your best foot forward in the eyes of google. This handy little tool will even help you to craft your meta tags. The introductory text you see below websites on search results pages.
You can even use Yoast to dictate how it is displayed when people share your link on social media. By choosing which image will be displayed as well as what text will be displayed next to the image. Yoast is a handy little tool I like to call SEO on training wheels. It’s helpful if you know absolutely nothing about SEO. Take its recommendations with a HUGE grain of salt. Yoast is a guide of what you should do, not what you have to do. Sometimes using long sentences in passive voice with a shitty title is the way to go. Yoast will tell you to fix all of it. But its your site, your voice, your audience. Use Yoast as a guidance to talk to google, but only you know how to talk to your audience.
Yoast alternatives- webtext tool & all in one SEO.
Web text tool has a 30 day free trial, and it was my first real time SEO guidance tool. It is head and shoulders above Yoast or All in one. I don’t have it on my current site because it constantly fights with my theme. So I have installed on a site I don’t use and run all my content through it over there before publishing here.
All in one seo has a free and paid version just like Yoast. I have never used All in one SEO, but my friend switched from Yoast to it and constantly reminds me to switch.
3 Comments
Thanks for the article. It does clarify well the differences between those two. I agree with you to not pay an upgrade of a tool, until and unless I am already making more than what I’m going to spend. There’s a lot of free resources we could use, the price is time. But once you got them figured out, easy peasy lemon squeeze.
Hey thanks for this analysis, it helped me a lot. I was unaware of the difference between them and was actively comparing the two. Also your direction to the other platforms was good too.
Rankmath is also another good alternative to yoast that offers more in depth SEO guideance when writing a blog post, but glad you found this article helpful.