On today’s show, I wanted to talk briefly about a free tool called ahrefs. Many of you have probably already heard of them, but I’m not sure if everyone knows they have a free version you can use by connecting your Google Search Console data. It allows those specific sites to have access to some features in ahrefs.
On today’s show, I wanted to talk briefly about a free tool called ahrefs. Many of you have probably already heard of them, but I’m not sure if everyone knows they have a free version you can use by connecting your Google Search Console data. It allows those specific sites to have access to some features in ahrefs.
On today's show. I want to talk about a tool called AHREFS. I'm not sure if everyone knows they do have a free version you can use by connecting your Google search console data. It allows those specific sites to have access to some features Welcome to the opinionated. SEO Where we talk about recent news and updates in the digital marketing world of SEO paid advertising and social media that impact you as a marketer. Also throw some of my opinion into the mix. Now we're talking about AHREFS and if you go to a ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools. You can sign up there and you connect your Google search console to their site, and it allows you to use a lot of the features for free. so I'm going to go through. All of the free parts. None of this is paid. I do have a paid account that I use for other things, but this one is pretty good. What I want you to do, site now, hit pause, play this in the background. And walk through any site works. Any site that you have connected to Google search console. All right. let's go ahead Start. At the beginning. So after you log in, you're going to end up in the dashboard. The dashboard is going to show all of your projects in an overview setting. It's going to give you your health score. It's going to talk about how many times it's been, crawled, redirects, anything that's broken or blocked. It's also going to give. A domain rating. The number of referring domains, your backlinks, organic traffic, organic keywords, and a few other things, but in this free mode, some of those aren't available. So let's just talk about this health score is just when it runs an audit, how did it do? I have some that are in the nineties. I have some that are in the teens. And all of those for different reasons. One of my favorite things to do here is to click on the G S C performance tab. And what this is going to do is it's going to give me my Google search console data at a glance. So your total clicks, total impressions, average click through rate and average position. But I can see this on all of my sites where normal, you have to click between different pages in search console . This allows you to see them all at a glance, which is really great. If you're looking at maybe two or three sites, almost side by side, and I could see some trends here. I have a couple of that are in real estate. I have a couple that are in medical. And so I can see if there's any trends that are aligning, even though they may be have different locations. We're going to go ahead and click on one of these and we'll go ahead and see what kind of information we get from it. this takes you right into the site explore. And when you get into the site explore, you can see that there's just a ton of links. There's about 15 different things that you can start looking at. Not everything's available, but in general, this is going to give you a really good idea of where you're at. It's going to give you things like your AHREF's rank. Number of referring domains and a visualizes, everything. And your number of referring pages, your domain rating. Lost referring new referring domains and backlinks. It also shows you the anchors that links have come in from, because a AHREFS in itself is really a great tool for looking at backlinks. I actually want to jump into a couple of these things. there's a backlink profile and you can dive into each of these. So you could start looking at this specific backlinks. Again, if you start clicking through these, you'll start seeing that some of these are available, some required paid. If we go through the backlink profile, really the biggest ones is looking at back links and referring domains. What I like doing then is going into the organic search section. You can start looking at organic keywords. This is really useful to see what kinds of keywords are actually driving traffic to your site. And you could start making some decisions here to see, Are there areas that maybe you aren't showing up that you'd like to, and maybe there's keywords where you are showing up where you weren't expecting it and you can make some adjustments. Start looking at the URL. And check to see if there's anything that's not the homepage. Because ideally you want as many as you can, that aren't the homepage. They're more specific if you're seeing everything going to the homepage. That's going to give you some ideas of what to do, and that's going to be one of those things under organic search, where you can look at top pages. And if you're really only seeing that homepage. Probably want to work on some of your internal linking and some of those sub pages to really get that working better. You can start looking at competing domains as well. You're limited to what you could see, but you could see about the top 10. And that shows you what some of your competitors in the area are doing. And so that's going to help give you some ideas., We've looked at the overview really nice idea of what kind of backlinks you're getting, things like that. You do have the ability to run audits on your sites. And I believe the max is 10,000 pages per month. So I'm going to go into one of mine and actually we'll take a look at theopinionatedseo.com site. And it's going to give me some ideas of what we're doing. So the health score on this is a 99 out of a hundred. feeling pretty good about that. It looks like we do have one error and I can click into the all issues and it does look like we've got a no index page or an orphan page. And I think that might be a category tag that we're not using anymore., it does show me a crawl log, which is going to go ahead and let me know how many times it's crawled, how many pages and we have about 130 URLs on the page. So I'm not using too many of that 10,000. This is really useful to just see how long things are taking to crawl when it's crawling. What size it is, and it gives you some really nice information. I'm in the site audit, but I click on page explore, and this starts showing me all the pages that I have. And one of my favorite things to do is I've got all this data, but what else can I do with it? Because it's given me the URL, what kind of traffic, if it's indexable the number of InLinks, things like that, those are going to really help me understand. Now there's a little checkbox or a slider button for show changes. It will show me. Any changes since the previous crawl that I had, and I can see how many things have changed and I have new pages that have shown up. I have different InLinks that have come up. Backlinks that have increased or decreased and increase in organic traffic. One of the things that I like doing is going into the column section and adding a couple of different titles. So I go ahead and I add the SERP title, and is the page title used in SERP and click apply. And then I can start looking at this. And it's going to go ahead and show me. What the title is that I have for the page, what the search result page title. And if it's the same and I can start seeing how Google is changing. And one thing that Google does is it strips away. A lot of the branding I have, or some of my titles are too long. And it's just putting ellipsis. My top pages, interestingly enough, Google is not changing the URL. going back to the site auditor. I can also look at the link. Explore. Link opportunities. And also the structure Explorer, which is going to give me an idea of how they're seeing the page being structured. I also can pull some reports on internal pages and index ability and look at any kind of issues. I do have a no index page and that's something where I can click the view affected URLs. It's going to go ahead and show me that. And it's exactly what I was expecting it to be. It's also going to show me some information on performance and I can see what pages are taking a long time to load and which ones are not taking a long time to load if you wanted to upgrade and get things like rank tracking or the content Explorer or going in through the keywords, explorer. Those are all paid components, but what I would definitely suggest go ahead and connect your sites. Get some audits running, have them going. On a regular basis, at least maybe weekly or monthly, and really take a look at. What your sites are doing, and it's going to send you a nice email after every one of the audit are completed and give you just an overall health overview. I think this is a great free tool. That everyone should just have set up. If you have a really large site. The pricing is trivial. For someone who's maybe just got a blog or you're just starting out and you want to learn the tool. This is a great way to get some sites connected. If you don't have a site that your already have data for, see if you can ask a friend or ask someone to help out and you can connect it in there and start looking at some of this data. It's really helpful. this is AHREFS and the free components there. When you connect it through your webmaster tools or Google search console. I'll leave the link in the show notes. If you guys have any questions, feel free to reach out. Have a great day and look forward to talking to you again soon.
