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I'm using Ahrefs.com for backlink analysis.

The site has grown significantly in last months - this website. The number of indexed pages is around 1040 at the moment. Also, our blog has produced some decent, shareable (around 1-2K shares) content recently. The number of organic keywords in top 100 is higher than our competitors.

In all these categories, site outperforms some competitors. Despite this, Ahrefs is reporting organic traffic 2-3 times lower than them. Why?

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    I'm not sure where Ahrefs gets their data, but it isn't likely to be super accurate. Does it match your analytics and Google Search Console data?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Jun 15, 2017 at 9:30
  • Yeah, Ahrefs organic traffic is not accurate, but as they mention in this article ahrefs.com/blog/seo-metrics if you multiply by 5 it becomes really close. And this way it's quite handy to check out competitors. The question is why all SEO metrics are growing in Ahrefs, but not organic traffic - what could be the reason?
    – Andrii Gorokhovskyi
    Jun 15, 2017 at 10:22
  • But is your organic traffic actually growing? Does Google Search Console report that it is?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Jun 15, 2017 at 10:39
  • Yes, according to Analytics it has grown around 10% (if compare last 30 days and previous period) and around 20% compared to February.
    – Andrii Gorokhovskyi
    Jun 15, 2017 at 10:47
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    No web site can measure the performance of a website in search. It is that simple. They can only make a highly uninformed guess at the very best. Only the search engines can tell you what is going on. Don't waste your time anymore. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Jun 15, 2017 at 16:29

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All third party tools(Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Majestic) are inaccurate when it comes to analysis traffic, because webmaster have not shared any information with them. Neither they are search engine like Google and Bing, which can show you how much traffic you're getting from search result pages.

So use them to get rough idea about your competitor, don't use it for own website. Use search analytics reports where you can see the list of queries on which you're getting traffic, and there may be you'll see other type of keywords as well, which third party tools does not aware about it.

They are accurate on backlink analysis, because they can crawl the web like Googlebot do. But for traffic analysis, don't expect 100% accurate data.

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  • They don't have the resources to crawl as extensively as Googlebot. So even their backlink data isn't as good as what Google has.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Jun 17, 2017 at 7:20
  • Crawling is not big part as far I know, but indexing big data may required lot's of resources. Ahref sometimes show backlinks data earlier than search console, because they just crawl, and index only link and anchor text. Search console is lazy, but it's more accurate.
    – Goyllo
    Jun 17, 2017 at 7:58

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