Learning how to use Ahrefs for ecommerce competitor analysis is one of the fastest ways to understand why a rival store outranks you, where their traffic actually comes from, and how hard it would be to catch them. At IWD, we run this exact workflow whenever we scope a new store build, a replatforming project, or a CRO engagement. Before we touch a line of code, we want to know what the competitive landscape looks like, because that context changes what we build and where we tell clients to spend.
This guide walks through that process using Ahrefs Site Explorer. After a few repetitions, a full competitor read takes about five minutes.
Start with the Site Explorer overview
Drop a competitor's domain or a specific URL into Site Explorer and Ahrefs gives you an overview dashboard with the core metrics grouped into three buckets: backlink profile, organic search, and paid search.
Backlink profile metrics
Ahrefs is best known as a backlink index, so these four numbers sit at the top:
- DR (Domain Rating): Ahrefs's estimate of how strong the entire site's backlink profile is, on a 0 to 100 scale, relative to every other site in its database. The biggest sites on the internet (Facebook, YouTube, Amazon) sit in the high 90s, while major retailers typically land in the 80s to low 90s. A niche ecommerce store with a DR in the 40s to 60s is doing solid work.
- UR (URL Rating): The same idea, but scoped to a single page instead of the whole domain. If UR shows as empty, Ahrefs usually has not crawled the page recently enough to populate it. Check back after the next crawl.
- Backlinks: The raw count of links Ahrefs has found pointing at the target. On its own, this number does not tell you much. A thousand links from one spammy directory are worth less than ten links from relevant, trafficked pages.
- Referring domains: How many unique websites those backlinks come from. This is the number that matters more. If all of a page's links come from a single domain, the profile is thin no matter how big the backlink count looks.
How to judge whether a competitor's backlinks are actually strong
DR and referring domain counts are a starting point, not a verdict. Click into the backlinks report and evaluate the referring pages themselves:
- Domain traffic: How much organic traffic the linking site gets overall. A domain with zero traffic is sending a weak signal, but high domain traffic alone does not guarantee the linking page itself performs.
- Page traffic: Far more useful. A link from a page that actually ranks and attracts visitors is worth more than a link buried on a dead page of a busy site.
- Referring domains (of the linking page): How many sites link to the page that links to your competitor. Zero here suggests the page has no authority of its own to pass along.
- Linked domains and external links: How many other sites and pages the linking page points to. A page that links out to hundreds of destinations dilutes the value of each link. Fewer outbound links generally means each one carries more weight.
The pattern to look for: a competitor with a modest backlink count but links from relevant, trafficked pages is often harder to beat than one with a huge count of junk links.
Read organic search the right way
Two metrics here, not equally important:
- Keywords: How many queries the site or page ranks for. Do not put much stock in this number by itself. Ranking for 10,000 keywords means nothing if those rankings sit on page four and drive no visits.
- Traffic: This is the number that matters. It estimates monthly organic visits, which tells you what a similar page could realistically earn you. Ahrefs traffic estimates are directional, not exact, so calibrate them: run your own store and a few of your own pages through Site Explorer, then compare the estimates against your analytics. Once you know whether Ahrefs runs high or low for your niche, competitor estimates become far more useful.
Check paid search for intent signals
The paid section shows how many keywords the competitor is bidding on and how much traffic those ads capture, along with an estimated paid traffic cost. For ecommerce scoping, this is a useful tell. If a competitor pays real money for a set of keywords month after month, those terms almost certainly convert. That informs both content priorities and, in our client work, which landing pages deserve CRO attention first.
Pull the keyword report on a competitor page
Open the organic keywords report for the specific page you are studying. The columns are straightforward:
- Keyword: The query the page shows up for.
- SERP features: What the results page looks like (shopping results, featured snippets, image packs). This shapes both the type of page you would need to build and how much traffic each position actually delivers.
- Volume: Estimated monthly searches.
- KD (Keyword Difficulty): Ahrefs's 0 to 100 estimate of how hard the keyword is to rank for.
- CPC: What advertisers pay per click, a rough proxy for commercial value.
- Organic and paid traffic: How many monthly visits the page earns from that keyword through each channel.
- Position: Where the page currently ranks.
Sort by traffic, not by keyword count, and you will see in seconds which handful of queries carry the page.
The big caveat on Keyword Difficulty
KD deserves extra scrutiny because it routinely understates the real difficulty of commercial ecommerce keywords.
Ahrefs calculates KD primarily from the linking domains of the current top ranking pages. Backlinks matter, but they are not the whole story. Take a keyword like "men's flannel shirts": tens of thousands of monthly searches with a KD in the 40s, which Ahrefs labels merely "hard."
Then look at who actually holds page one: Amazon, Nordstrom, Duluth Trading Company, Macy's. Brand recognition drives clicks, and click behavior appears to influence rankings. Displacing household names your market already trusts is dramatically harder than the KD score implies, and building links alone will not close that gap.
The fix is simple: always search the keyword yourself and look at the actual results before deciding a term is winnable. We do this on every keyword list we review during a store health check, because chasing unwinnable head terms is one of the most common ways ecommerce teams waste a year.
Review the competitor's internal links
The last step is checking the internal links pointing at the page you are analyzing. Internal links from within the same site help bolster a page's rankings, much like external backlinks do.
Ignore header and footer links. They appear on every page by default, so they say nothing about deliberate strategy. What you want are contextual links from blog posts and guides.
Filter the internal links report down to blog sources and you can see exactly how a competitor's content operation feeds authority into commercial pages. A post about a closely related topic linking into a category page is doing real work; a post about something unrelated is just noise. That picture tells you what you would need to replicate or beat.
Internal linking structure is also one of the first things we examine when scoping design and build work, because a store's information architecture either compounds its content investment or squanders it.
What to do with the analysis
After these four steps you know how strong the competitor's link profile really is, which keywords actually drive their traffic, which terms are winnable versus brand locked, and how their internal architecture supports their rankings. That is enough to make real decisions about what to build, what to write, and where to spend.
When we combined this kind of competitive analysis with structured site and conversion improvements for QC Supply, the result was a 61.72% increase in revenue, an 18.29% lift in conversion rate, and 44.46% more sessions.
Frequently asked questions
Is Ahrefs worth it for ecommerce stores?
For most stores doing meaningful revenue, yes. The competitor visibility alone typically justifies the cost: you can see which keywords and pages drive a rival's traffic before committing budget to content or a rebuild. Smaller stores can start on a lower tier plan and still run everything in this guide. Just remember the tool only pays off if you act on the findings.
What is a good Domain Rating for an ecommerce site?
There is no universal threshold because DR is relative. A DR 35 store can dominate a narrow niche while a DR 70 site struggles in a brutal category. Compare your DR against the stores that actually rank for your target keywords, not against the internet at large. If page one for your money terms is full of DR 80+ brands, the honest answer is to target different keywords.
How accurate is Ahrefs traffic data?
It is an estimate built from ranking positions and clickthrough models, so expect meaningful variance in both directions depending on the niche and how much traffic comes from branded search. Calibrate it by running your own pages through Site Explorer and comparing against your analytics, then apply that correction factor when reading competitor numbers.
Can I do competitor analysis without Ahrefs?
Partially. Google Search Console shows your own performance, and manually searching your target keywords reveals who ranks. What you lose without a tool like Ahrefs is the competitor side: their traffic estimates, their full keyword footprint, and their backlink profile. Semrush and similar platforms offer comparable data. The workflow in this guide matters more than the specific tool.
Why does Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty feel wrong for product keywords?
Because KD is calculated mostly from the backlink profiles of the current top results, and commercial SERPs are often held by big brands whose advantage is recognition, not just links. A KD of 42 can hide the fact that page one belongs to Amazon and national retailers. Always check the live SERP before treating a keyword as attainable.
Related reading
How IWD increased QC Supply's revenue by 61.72% · Ecommerce replatforming · Ecommerce web design
Work with IWD
IWD has been building and optimizing ecommerce stores since 2008, with 300+ brands served and a 94% client retention rate. The workflow in this guide is the same one we run before scoping a build, a replatform, or a conversion program.
For an outside read on where your store stands against the competition, start with a store health check audit. For bigger questions about platform, architecture, or growth priorities, our ecommerce consulting team can help you build the roadmap.