Ahrefs Webmaster Tools: Free SEO Tool to Improve Your Website

8 min readSep 26, 2020

Being on the top Search Engine Results Pages(SERP) is nothing less than competing for a race that can be won with consistent and effective SEO practices.

While paid promotions work rigorously, SEO works your way up organically for better visibility, traffic, and lead generation.

Ahrefs just launched Ahrefs Webmaster Tool that is a free SEO tool for your SEO project. This webmaster tool will help you with all the SEO tactics to stay updated with every issue on your site.

What is Ahrefs Webmaster Tool?

Ahrefs Webmaster Tool is a totally free SEO tool that helps to analyze your Websites’ SEO performance and helps to detect any issues that can hinder your website’s overall performance.

Following are some of the features available under the Free SEO Tools called The Site Explorer Tool and The Site Audit Tool of the Ahrefs Webmaster Tool.

Ahref Webmaster Tool enables you to monitor your website’s performance, offers content for crawling, diagnoses issues, dismisses content you do not need to list, examines the search queries that guided guests to your site, and screens backlinks.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tool is a dashboard that closely observes your website and its performance.

Thus, Right from the inhouse marketers to any freelance SEO Consultants, Ahrefs Webmaster tool is one of the most reliable tools that can be used to increase a Website’s Rankings.

Therefore Start with Signing up for the free SEO tool and insert your website from the Google Console or manually add your website to further verify its ownership and start using the free SEO Tools.

What’s included in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools?

Site Explorer Tools

The Overview tab under the Site Explorer’s page of Ahrefs Webmaster Tool gets you top-level metrics for your page like

URL Rating
Domain Rating
Backlinks Profile
Referring Domain which are unique sites linked to your website.
Organic Keywords which are the number of keywords your site ranks for
Organic Traffic, which is the estimated search traffic to your website.
Traffic Value

Let us begin to study the top three features.

Backlink profile: Find the backlinks of your website. These backlinks are as good as a job recommendation because the more authentic websites that link to your website, the better rankings, and traffic it gets. You will get the bifurcation of do-follow, no-follow, UGC, Sponsored, and so on. You can even find out new and lost backlinks count. You can click on Backlinks from the left-side menu to see all your backlinks.
Organic search: You can find organic traffic, organic keywords, organic positions, and more. You can also find keywords with the highest-ranking about your content on the top SERPs. Find out the keywords and top pages that bring you the most organic traffic. You can click on Organic Keywords from the left-side menu to find all the keywords that your website is ranking for.
Paid search: Paid search advertising allows you to market on SERPs through pay-per-click or pay-per-view. Understand which ad is performing better and for which keywords. You can even find out the top landing pages of your ads. If you are not running any ads, you won’t find any details in this section.

Please understand that the Site Explorer tool is the starting point of your SEO task you want to complete in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

Here, you get to know how your site is performing and where it needs improvements

Site Audit Tool

When you set up a website, you need to plan an audit of some predefined issues that linger around it.

SEO Audit Tool which a part of Ahrefs Webmaster Tool automatically sorts these predefined issues and draws printable reports on all of them through measurable charts and colorful graphics using its Data Explorer.

Similar to the health reports, you will find top issues reports.

Performance: heavy pages, too-large CSS that is nothing but the Cascading Style Sheets the surface of a website to analyze the gritty control over the style, fonts, and all visual aspects of a website or HTML
HTML tags: missing, duplicate, or non-optimal length of title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 tags
Social tags: unfinished or missing Open Graph tags and Twitter cards
Content quality: low word counts, unconsolidated pages
Localization: all issues with Hreflang
Incoming links: identifying orphan pages, issues with nofollow links
Outgoing links: identifying links to redirects, broken pages
Resources: problems with images, JavaScript, CSS
External pages.

One of the greatest benefits of a Site Audit Tool is a feature that observes any changes on your site on a regular basis, just import and select the relevant projects.

From presenting data on a specific property for a segment of pages to screening it out entirely across every crawled page, Data Explorer does it all through a cloud-based solution with a Movement of data into the log anytime with no processing costs on your end., automated save of every crawl and automated software updates.

Hence Ahrefs Webmaster Tool supports a site audit that can scan up to 5000 pages and 100 such issues disturbing the performance of your website.

Further, you can drive along the Overview Tab to procure reports on your health score and other similar options that lists the top issues faced by your website.

How to use Ahrefs Webmasters Tools?

Audit your website

A website audit is an analysis of page performance and its SEO Strategy. Auditing your website can resolve whether or not it’s optimized to obtain your traffic goals, and if not, how you can better it to improve the performance.

Website Performance Assessment

Here are the assessments you can make while using the Ahrefs Webmaster Tool for auditing your website.

Is your website optimized for technical SEO? This helps you to know if your website has any technical errors as mentioned above in the Ahrefs Webmasters Site Audit tool.

Get to know about all your backlinks

Your backlink profile represents the sites that link to your website. Each Backlink works as a vote of confidence and Google monitors the number of backlinks linked to your website to perceive the authenticity of your content which then decides its utility to the reader on the web.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tool allows you to understand your backlink profile.

It classifies the backlinks based on filters like Language; Link-type (“do follow” / “nofollow”); Platform; Domain Rating (DR); URL Rating (UR); Referring domains.

Once you have found the backlinks used, Ahrefs’ Webmaster Tool tells you the organic traffic each one of them carries.

The In-depth Analysis of Ahrefs’ Webmaster Tool also allows :

See followed and no-followed links
Backlink anchor text
Disavow link spam
Export to PDF and CSV
Inbuilt filters, in every report

Use the Best by links report to View the most linked-to pages and comprehensive categorization of all outbound links utilizing the Linked domains report, Ahrefs’ Webmaster Tool also shows the target’s broken outbound links in the Broken links report and a full breakdown of outbound linking anchor text in the Anchors report.

View keywords you are ranking for

Ahrefs Webmaster Tool gives you the list of all the keywords your website is ranking for. The tool also aids you with a filter that sorts keywords by search volume, Keyword Difficulty, the presence of SERP features in the search results.

Ahrefs Keyword difficulty is a feature that measures your difficulty on a scale of 1 to 100 to rank amongst the top 10 search results.

Page-Level performance

Number of Links present in each page & its performance.
Anchor Texts present that gives signs to both your website’s user and search engines.
Keywords they are ranking for.

It’s equally important to examine your website pages. Ahrefs simply makes these 3 things easy to understand.

Find content gaps

It’s important to be updated with all the content that your competitor creates. The only distance between your dream visibility and the reality is the competitor’s content that is currently raking on the top.

Find those precious keywords and Cut this distance down by traveling through Ahrefs The Content Gap Tool and discover places on the web your website has never been too including the common domain rating between you and your competitor.

SEO strength

Detects almost 100 SEO issues & tell you how to fix them in detail.

Limited Solution in comparison to Ahrefs Webmaster Tool

Backlinks

Provides with a clutter of
- Broken links data (Internal and external links)
- SEO metrics (domain & page level),
- Shows link types (nofollow, UGC, etc)

Google Search Console limits only to the provision of the top 1000 such links.
- No Broken link data.
- No SEO metrics.
- No link types.

Keywords

Provides for Organic Search Traffic of limited yet relevant and known Keywords with
- SERP features
- SEO metrics
- SERP snapshot with competitor data.

Supports the top 1000 keywords.
- No SERP features
- No SEO metrics
- No SERP snapshot with competitor data.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools vs Google Search Console

Key Takeaways

No limit to the amount of “verified” plans on your Dashboard

Your Ahrefs’ plan’s allowance decides the number of projects that you can attach to your account but it now allows an unlimited number of verified websites to your Ahrefs account like your clients’ websites and other websites you have access to.

Extra “per project” limits for verified websites

If you are an existing user, Ahrefs’ Webmaster tool has published a new class of credit called “per project limits” for you which only applies to the verified website in addition to your existing plan limits. This is how you can gain extra 5,000 free monthly crawl credits for each verified project.

Lite plan developments

Once you confirm your ownership of keywords, you can inspect all the keywords that your websites are ranking for in the top 100 positions, the limit of top 20 keyword rankings for all verified websites has now been removed.

JavaScript rendering ready for all

Previously, JavaScript rendering wasn’t available on Lite and Standard plans. It’s now available on all plans.

Simply saying Ahrefs Webmaster tools provide what a google search console doesn’t.

They crawl much like search engines do to store the data about many websites of how they connect and what keywords they outrank in search results.

Best known for its large database and great backend infrastructure developed for assembling, processing, and storing huge amounts of data for marketing professionals.

S EO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when used accurately, can advance to pay bonuses over time.

If you present a solid piece of content that merits ranking for the right keywords you deserve the right SEO tools to send the right traffic to your site.

Hence the Ahrefs Webmaster Tool is just what you need and is highly recommended.

Originally published at https://vikenpatel.com on September 26, 2020.