I was eating toast over the sink on a Sunday in February when the Ahrefs renewal email landed. $129. For a while I just looked at the number, and then at my two sites’ earnings for January: $412.
I didn’t like that ratio.
I run two small review sites, one about camping stoves and one about trail shoes, alone, out of a spare bedroom in Tacoma. Every month since 2018 I’ve paid for a backlink tool, and not once did I ask myself if I had to. So this spring my wallet became the experiment. Two months on something cheaper, one month on nothing, then an honest look at what I’d missed.
What I Need One Of These For
It’s three jobs. Who links to me, who links to the sites beating me, and which of my links quietly died last week.
The list ends there, though it took me years to admit that. Dee, a friend who sold a far bigger site than mine in 2023, says it better than I do. “You’re not buying data,” she said. “You’re buying back the hour you’d spend guessing.”
Remember that line. I ended up judging every tool by it.
Trying Majestic For Two Months
Majestic Lite is $49.99 a month, less than half what I’d been paying, so that’s where I went in March.
I liked Trust Flow and Citation Flow. They’re two numbers side by side, and inside a week I could glance at a site and know if its links were worth chasing or just plentiful. I haven’t used anything quicker for sizing up a prospect.
What I didn’t: Lite gives you the Fresh Index only. The Historic Index, the one that goes back years, sits on the Pro plan at $99.99, and at that price the savings start to shrink. The reports were harder for me to read, too. Habit, maybe. After six years of staring at one layout, I ended up exporting to a spreadsheet more often than I wanted.
It does links and nothing else. For some people that’s the appeal.
A Month On Free Tools
In May I paid for nothing. Google Search Console gives you a Links report for your own site. Ahrefs also keeps a free tier for sites you’ve verified, capped at roughly a thousand backlinks on screen.
For my own two sites, honestly, that was enough. I could watch new links arrive and old ones drop off.
Then a competitor passed me on a stove roundup I’d held for two years, and I couldn’t see why. With free tools you can see your own house. Looking over the fence isn’t included.
In June I Went Back To Ahrefs
So I paid the $129 again. (I looked hard at the $29 Starter plan. The limits were too tight for the digging I had in mind.)
In one evening I had a list of 23 sites linking to two of my competitors and not to me. I emailed nine of them, and three added a link. One of those, as far as I can tell, explained why I got passed in May. I’ll never be sure about cause and effect with rankings, though.
I could probably have built that list in Majestic, with more patience than I’ve got.
Where Semrush Comes In
I won’t pretend, because I didn’t test it this year. Its plans start at $139 a month now, and that pays for a lot besides links, like keyword research, site audits and rank tracking. Through most of 2021 I used it, and I liked it for everything except deep link work. For someone whose week only has a little link work in it, it might be the smarter buy. From memory, I can’t rank it fairly.
So, The Best One?
Ahrefs, still. If you need to study other people’s links on a regular basis, it’s the best backlink analytics tool I’ve used, and my cheaper spring didn’t change my mind.
This is what changed. I’d assumed I needed it twelve months a year. I don’t. My link building happens in bursts, maybe three months out of twelve. Paying only for those months costs me $387 a year, and paying all year costs $1,548.
So in July I cancelled again. The quiet months are covered by Search Console, and I’ve set a reminder for September.
The toast, you can skip.