Robert’s websites make everything seem so simple, I think he nailed it for his audience!
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Very good episode, lots of good advice. Ahrefs was mentioned a lot, but I got the impression that Robert talked about it more in context of evaluating other sites. Does it give you actionable insights and ideas about your own site, that you couldn’t get from Analytics or Google Search Console? With focus on actionable. The cheapest plan is $99 per month and that sounds a lot, especially when I’m not working on SEO most of the time. It’s just one of the activities we bootstrapers do. Is it useful if it’s used just for month or two or it makes sense only if used on ongoing basis?
Ahrefs is probably too expensive if you are a bootstrapper just using it to evaluate your own site. If you are going all-in on SEO, perhaps it starts to be worth it. But even then…
For bootstrappers who want to lift their SEO game, I recommend starting with Sitebulb. Their cheapest plan is $13.50/month.
Ahrefs has just announced that they’ve made some of their tools freemium: https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools
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Yeah, unfortunately the part looking at other sites is left out.
Awesome episode, really like the topic and understanding the needs of people starting out with SEO better.
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Thanks! I enjoyed recording this episode, too. I was learning a lot, and as soon as the interview as over I started making some of the website changes Robert recommended.
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Awesome, would be great to hear about the results later.
Nice! This free Ahref already pointed to some technical problems on my site so it already proved useful.
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The free plan includes a site audit, right? That alone is well worth doing!
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Hey! What you could do is to share one Ahrefs account with other people. Not sure if that’s against their ToS but hey, it is an expensive piece of software. I haven’t seen any other SEO tool as useful and easy to use as Ahrefs.
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yup, that one is included.
Hey, yeah, we did this for a while - the ‘regular’ account constantly logged you out when someone else went in. So sharing became a pain really. Definitely great tool set, but the price tag is heavy. What else are you using besides Ahrefs?
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I was reducing the cost by subscribing for a month, exporting a ton of CSVs, and then disabling the subscription for at least a few months if not half a year. Backlinks and keyword do not change that much inside one year and working in spreadsheets is faster anyway.
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Yep, both are great to explore before starting to work on a new product because it more or less answers what do people have in mind when they search for something related to your idea, how hard would it be to get to the top search results on the first page, and where your future competitors have been getting reviews and backlinks so far.
Ah, so you use it to evaluate product ideas? Most people use it for content creation
Yes, for market research and possible SEO strategies, but I think the same CSV-exporting approach will work for content creation too (unless you create something time-sensitive that needs weekly monitoring).
Right now I’m returning to one project after a two-year hiatus and the exports I got from Ahrefs in late 2018 are still viable because the niche is not too busy. 
Interesting, thanks for sharing the idea!
Hi, missed your question about other tools. We use:
- Screaming Frog for site crawls to find (technical) SEO errors
- AccuRanker and SE Ranking for keyword monitoring (rankings)
- Hexometer for general website health monitoring (finds broken links!)
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