On the 20th of September 2022, Ahrefs retired the free “Organic Keywords” report, including the “New” and “Movements” tabs. Previously, you could access them by clicking on the left-hand side links like this:
Instead, they redirect users to the “Calendar Report” as shown here:
There’s just one problem – the Calendar report requires a paid upgrade, as you can see in this screenshot:
This is a massive loss to the SEO community for small website owners who can’t afford the $99/m.
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Ahref’s Organic Keywords Movement Report was Unique
As someone who monitors my site’s SEO, I found the free Ahref’s organic keywords report the most helpful feature. I logged in every day to see which keywords had risen or fallen for my website. While other SEO tools can also track your keywords, the Ahrefs organic keywords report would list keywords that you weren’t explicitly tracking.
The Free Report Was Perfect for Small Websites
Ahrefs focuses too much on big websites that generate thousands of dollars in revenue. What if a site makes just $500/m? A business owner can’t justify spending 20% of their site revenue on an SEO tool and can’t afford to hire an SEO expert. This move by Ahrefs will reduce the number of users who sample Ahrefs and then perhaps upgrade when their site starts generating serious revenue. But no one will spend a hundred bucks a month to access the organic keywords report.
Eventually, Ahrefs will remove the links to the organic keywords area, and we’ll never even know that it existed.
Organic Keywords Movement – No Real Alternatives
Unfortunately, there aren’t any real alternatives to the Ahrefs tool that provide the same functionality. There are plenty of rank trackers, some of which I’ll discuss below, but they don’t show you the movements of all untracked keywords on your site, and you have to manually create a list of keywords to receive ranking updates.
Every day, I would open the “movements” report and often think, “Hey, that’s interesting! My site is ranking well for this weird keyword. Maybe I should give it some love and push it even higher”. This way, I would be exposed to new keyword ideas I’d never considered. It also alerted me when my ranking for some keywords dropped, so I would know to try and improve those pages.
So while the report no longer exists, here are some free alternatives to the Ahrefs “Organic Keywords” tool.
1. SEMRush Keyword Position Tracking
For position tracking, I use SEMRush. I used to avoid it because the website was excruciatingly slow, but they’ve improved a lot lately, and it’s a great tool with a lot of functionality for free users. The closest equivalent it has to Ahref’s organic keyword is the position tracking tool. You can access it by clicking on the link on the right-hand side of the dashboard.
Unlike with Ahfrefs, you must create a list of keywords to track. You can track 10 keywords for free users and must upgrade to a paid plan if you need more.
2. Google Search Console – Single Day Report
Ahrefs outperforms every other keyword tool except for Google itself. So it’s not surprising that I turn to the Google Search Console report to see which new keywords I’m ranking for. To replicate the organic report functionality, I set the date range to just a single day and see which keywords generated unexpected traffic:
You can filter out the known keywords and sort by impressions or clicks to find new ones you hadn’t considered. Unlike SEMRush, you’ll see new keywords for which you rank but haven’t thought of yet. Unfortunately, to view ranking changes, you must click each keyword individually and see the graph.
3. Ahrefs New Organic Keywords Report
Ahrefs has another organic keywords report that lists your site keywords, volume, traffic, and position.
Unfortunately, the ability to compare it to the previous day is once again only available to paid subscribers. So it’s pretty useless as a substitute, but it’s better than nothing because it gives you a list of keywords you haven’t manually tracked. But the Google Search Console is better for this.
Ahrefs Isn’t Worth Upgrading for This
Much as I admire Ahref’s crawling capabilities – their spider is second only to Google – I can’t recommend upgrading to a monthly paid plan just for this report. And I know what you’re thinking – it has much more to offer, and I agree. The keyword research tool alone is peerless. Unfortunately, Ahrefs is just too expensive for small business owners and websites. So until then, we have to make do with other less useful tools.
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