For marketers working with a tight budget, Ahrefs provides a healthy set of free seo tools. Be it a website audit, keyword research, link building or content optimization, these tools are instrumental in helping you get more visibility on search engines without spending anything.
On that note, let’s look at each tool and how you can integrate it into your SEO strategy.
SEO Audits: Start With A Good Base
The starting point of a successful SEO strategy is to ensure that your website is technically sound and does not contain any malicious links. Thanks to Ahrefs’ free tools, this has become an easy and streamlined process.
1. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT)
Ahrefs Webmaster Tool is ideal for checking on-site errors that may lower your website’s rating. With Site Audit and Site Explorer at your disposal, you can diagnose and fix more than 140 problems arising from lack of objectivity regarding the site’s SEO.
- Site Audit:
AWT automatically checks your site for broken links, 404 error pages, sluggish pages, and duplicated content. The results are presented in order of urgency so you can fix the most serious issues first.
For example, you can employ The “All Issues” report to determine placement of missing meta tags or where there are crawling issues.
- Internal Link Opportunities:
The tool uses cross-page keyword occurrences to recommend internal links. This distributes link equity and enhances site structure.
- Site Explorer:
You can analyze referring domains and the quality of your backlinks. The “Performance” chart allows you to monitor the rate of change, and reports like “Best by Links” provide portraits of the pages that matter the most, thereby avoiding the disbursement of link equity on links that do not work
Keyword Research: Finding Keywords To Target Opportunities
Targeting the correct keywords plays an important role for potential web visitors. Ahrefs has numerous tools that can assist you in getting high relevance keywords.
2. Free Keyword Generator
Try out new keywords with this single search tool to come up with 150+ key phrases that are appropriate for you.
- Expand Keyword Lists:
For a broad keyword that states “drones”, suggestions can be made to state “drones that have cameras”. Afresh, attempting some of the suggested keywords can also provide additional suggestions that make it easy to narrow down the search.
- Cross-Platform Insights:
If you expand the keyword ideas, it is applicable not only for Google, Bing, and Yahoo, but for YouTube and Amazon as well.
3. Keyword Difficulty Checker
Here, we check how difficult it is to rank for certain keywords, from a scale of one to hundred.
- Example:
- “drone” could be quite a generic keyword roughly having a KD score of 75, indicating it might be rather difficult to rank for it, while a less common phrase “thermal camera drone for hunting” would have a lazy 3 rating, hence indicating a gap in the niche and a great chance to explore.
- Backlink Guidance:
This said tool even predicts how many backlinks will be necessary for battling for specific keywords.
4. SERP Checker
Generate website goals and traffic possibilities using Ahref’s SERP Checker.
- Analyze SERP Trends:
Type in related keywords and see which pages rank most and how many visits each page garners in a month. For example, it is entirely possible for a page that ranks for a keyword with little monthly searches to pull in traffic volume 10x that number.
- Search Intent Analysis:
Do the keyword’s top ranking pages have content pages, product pages or reviews? This will help you decide who your target audiences are and how you can approach them.
5. Website Traffic Checker
Creep on your competition via using the top performing or highest traffic pages that they own.
- Top Keywords and Pages:
Which are the most sought after or lucrative keywords that competitors have? Use them according to their strategy. This tool can help fill in gaps on possible topics you want to capitalize on.
- Monitor Competitor Trends:
Analyze which content and formats your audience is most interested in.
Link Building: Increasing Your Authority
For a domain authority and a ranking to improve, quality backlinks are a must. Thankfully, Ahrefs’ free tools help to make link building research easier and helpful.
6. Backlink Checker
Check where the top 100 backlinks of any domain or URL are pointing.
- Competitor Insights:
Take a look at the websites that link with your competitors and think of contacting them for reaching out for your own backlink chances.
- Analyze Anchor Texts:
Link their strategies to competitors where they are getting links so as to recreate them.
7. Broken Link Checker
Broken link building is a nice tactic which can be used to get backlink builds.
- Find Dead Pages:
Examine broken pages on competitor websites that have a huge number of backlinks. Provide a similar resource and get in touch with the linking domains to replace the link.
8. SEO Toolbar
This Chrome and Firefox extension offers real-time SEO service as you browsing.
- Broken Link Finder:
Enable you even easily locate broken links on any webpage.
- Follow vs. Nofollow Links:
Help see whether the external linking carries the link equity.
- Outgoing Link Analysis:
Assist to check the number of outbound links in order to estimate the possible benefits of being linked by that particular page.
- Content Optimization: Making the Most Out of Your Work
Once the content goes live, you need to polish it and track your content on a regular basis. With the help of Ahrefs’ tools, it is made easier.
9. Rank Checker
Track your positions on different keywords without being affected by search results customized to your preferences.
- SERP Overview:
Observe and understand how well your content is doing compared to the most favorable pages and make relevant adjustments and improvements.
10. SEO WordPress Plugin
Easily content audits from your WordPress dashboard.
- Automated Insights:
The underperforming pages are flagged and labeled as ‘Underperforming’. It also provides suggested course of action, for instance merging pages or rewriting the content on the pages.
Final Thoughts: Take Free of Charge SEO Improvement to a New Level
Ahrefs offers its free tools for all the process and not only for link building or marketing for traffic growth. They are great free resources for starters and professionals alike that do not break the bank.
As your traffic and rankings improve and you have the necessary budgets, you can at any point move up to the premium plans of Ahrefs for more in detail data and better features. For now, these free tools are all you need to begin your SEO improvement journey.