I don’t mind paying but a reasonable price - it’s for a small business website - and so something not too expensive but still reliable would be appreciated.
Not as feature-rich, but signup for a free account at Majestic - https://majestic.com/ - and then verify your domains. After verifying you’ll get basically the paid feature set but just for your own domains.
Thanks - done it.
It has a 30 day activity requirement which is irritating.
The cheapest plan is $30 odd a month…
If only they offered a prosumer plan.
No clue, give it a shot though. I login and check my personal sites at minimum once a month, but more often weekly, so this isn’t really a concern for me.
They run their own index of the web trying to emulate Google’s - and then apply their own version of Google’s PageRank algorithm and others to try and determine link quality. So you can use it to look at links to your own sites or your competitors to see where you could get the same/similar quality links.
IMO Ahrefs has the better index, but Majestic is quite good - especially for free and I sorta prefer their TrustFlow/CitationFlow metrics over Ahrefs’ URL Rating/Domain Rating. But because of the weaker index I can’t just accept it on its own.
This is a good post from Ahrefs though explaining their metrics:
Thank you, I did give it a try, but the free tier seems to be pretty limited, and the results I got there could easily get those from Google Analytics <.<. After 2 minutes using it, it just said I couldn’t use it more for today. Meh.
Yeah. If you’re looking into competitors and stuff you need the paid version. If you verify your domain you can run their reports and campaign tools on your own domain for free though.
Not sure which results those would be, as this is focused on link metrics not traffic. I assume you’re looking at like referral data or something to see where you got links from?
The better comparison, albeit much more limited than the external tools, would be Google Search Console - Google Search Central (formerly Webmasters) | Web SEO Resources | Google Developers - which gives you the data Google knows about your domain (crawl issues, indexed pages, keyword you’re ranking for, (some) of the sites linking to you, etc)