Did you know Ahrefs has free SEO tools? Well, in this article, I’m going to show you five of Ahrefs’ best free SEO tools and how you can use them together actually to improve SEO for your site.

So over the past year, Ahrefs released around14 free SEO tools, most of which can be found in the footer of the Ahrefs website. Now, because I know you love workflows and processes, this article is going to show you 5 Free SEO Tools by Ahrefs to Improve SEO to use them together and hopefully gain some traction from organic search.

Ahrefs’ Webmaster Tools (AWT)

So let’s kick this off with our first free SEO tool that’ll help you keep your site in good health. And that’s Ahrefs’ Webmaster Tools or AWT. AWT includes two of core tools and will work for any websites you own. The first tool is Site audit, which will scan your website for over 100 technical and on-page SEO issues and organize them into digestible reports.

So let’s head over to the Overview report. Here you can see things like your website’s health score, which represents the percentage of URLs that don’t have errors, and you’ll also see a list of the top issues right below that. Now, if you’re unsure of what to do with these issues, we also provide details on what the problems are and how to fix them.

So let’s say you wanted to fix pages that link out to broken pages. To see the URLs, just click the number, and you’ll be taken to Page Explorer, which shows the affected URLs and the broken pages they link out to. Just export the results and now it’s just a matter of removing or replacing those broken links.

Now, a great feature in Site Audit is that you can set up scheduled audits on a weekly basis. And this allows you to monitor changes that are happening on your site starting from your second audit.

So looking at the second audit for ahrefs.com, you’ll see the change in the number of URLs for each issue, the number of new cases, as well as the number of URLs that no longer have the issue. Stay on top of your weekly audits and you’ll be on your way to a healthier site.

AWT Site Explore

The second tool in AWT is Site Explorer, which gives you a backlink and search traffic data. So let’s go to the dashboard and I’ll click on our verified project, which will bring us to the Overview Page. On this page, you can see top-level metrics for your website like Domain Rating, total backlinks, total referring domains, which are just unique websites that link to you, the number of keywords your site ranks for, and the estimated search traffic to your website.

And right below that is an interactive graph that shows how fast you’re acquiring backlinks from unique websites, which is a good indicator of your website’s popularity on the web.

Let’s head over to the backlinks report. Here you can see all of the pages that link to your website. And it also provides helpful metrics on the linking pages and domains like website and page authority values, the number of referring domains it has, estimated search traffic to that page, and the context of the link, which is super convenient.

You can also use these filters to drill down on specific data sets or export up to 1,000 backlinks if you prefer to work in Google Sheets or Excel. Site Explorer also allows you to see the keywords your website ranks for. Just go to the Organic Keywords report and you’ll see the keywords you’re ranking for, their search volumes, keyword difficulty scores and the positions we saw these pages ranking in on these dates.

And again, it has some excellent filters you can use to find ways to improve your site’s visibility. For example, let’s say you wanted to find opportunities to rank for featured snippets. To do that, just set the Positions filter with a minimum ranking position of two and a maximum of seven. Then click the SERP features filter, and select Featured snippet, which will narrow down the results to keywords where a featured snippet was on the search engine results page. And as you can see, we have quite a few keywords where we could go after featured snippets for more search traffic.

Now, if you want to see who you’re competing against for these keywords, just click the SERP button to see the top 10 ranking pages along with their SEO metrics, which is very helpful to understand ranking difficulty.

Now, there are tons of use cases I could go through, but we still have four other tools to get to. We’ve also created a video on AWT that goes into more detail, so I’ll leave a link to that in the description. Now, AWT only lets you see data on your own site, which is critical in making optimizations for your site. But it won’t necessarily help with link building. And that leads us nicely into our next free SEO tool.

Ahrefs Backlink Checker

With Ahrefs free Backlink Checker tool, you can see the top 100 backlinks pointing at a URL or domain. So let’s say you found this page on coffee statistics and discovered that the data was super out-of-date. Now, to see if there’s an opportunity to be had, the first thing you’d want to do is check and see if the page actually has backlinks pointing at it.

To do that, you can paste that coffee stats URL into the free Backlink Checker tool. And as you can see, there are around 660unique websites that are linking to that page! And seeing as the backlinks look decent, you can create your own page on the topic and reach out to relevant websites and ask them to link to you instead.

Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator

Alright, the next tool is Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator. This tool lets you find keyword ideas for search engines like Google, Bing, YouTube, and Amazon. Just select your search engine and enter a broad keyword related to your niche. Let’s go with “routers” and search through US data. We’ll then show you the top 100 keywords that include your phrase along with search volumes and keyword difficulty scores for the top 10 keywords.

Now, if you’re looking for just keywords for blog posts, then click the Questions tab, which will show keywords that contain your target keyword phrased as a question. This query, “how long do routers last,” looks promising with a low KD and high search volume. But what do we do with this now? That’s where the next free SEO tool comes into play. And that’s SERP Checker.

Ahrefs’ SERP Checker

SERP Checker shows you the top 10 rankings plus the SEO metrics for the top 3 pages. And beyond metrics, you can see non-personalized search results from 171 countries. So let’s search for “how long do routers last” with the US set as our country again.

From here, you can use the DR, UR and Referring Domains metrics to assess ranking difficulty and look at the estimated traffic to these pages to gauge traffic potential. I talk quite a bit about keyword analysis in our keyword research tutorials, so I’ll link those up in the description. So now that we’ve covered SEO tools for technical SEO, link building, and keyword research, the last one is useful for a bunch of different SEO tasks. And that tool is Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar.

Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar

If you’re familiar with this tool, then you know that people with a premium plan can see cool things like keyword metrics and SEO metrics right within Google Search. Plus, you can see both pages- and domain-level SEO metrics while you browse any page. But what you may not know is that we have quite a few free features in here where no account is required.

After you’ve installed the toolbar, visit any page and you can see redirect paths and HTTP headers for the page. You can click this link icon, which will then scan the page you’re on for broken outgoing links. Click this icon for a full on-page SEO report. And then, this second link icon will show you a breakdown of the types of outgoing links.

Now, these are just five of the free SEO tools we have at Ahrefs, and they’re great when you’re just starting out. And I’ve left links in the description to all of the tools that I’ve mentioned, so try them out, pair them together and get your pages ranking higher in search. Now, if you enjoyed this article, make sure to like, share, and comment for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials. I’ll see you in the next one.