How to Do Free Website SEO Audit Using Ahrefs [Step-By-Step Guide]

Last Updated on September 5, 2022

Ahrefs is a tool to check backlinks of website and perform a website SEO audit. And today, we’re going to use the Ahrefs SEO audit tool so you can do your competitor backlink audit.

If you’re not using Ahrefs, then you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities. So, follow along and in the end, we’ll provide you with amazing Ahrefs pricing. Although, you can get Ahrefs free trial as well which is only available for 14 days.

Six Steps to Perform Competitor Backlink Audit Using Ahrefs Free Tool…

1. Starting With the Project

So, this is where you’ll have to define which project you’re working on. If it is your first project of SEO site audit, then you’d probably see a screen like this.

Enter the website you’re going to perform a website SEO audit on. Click enter.

2. Scope & Seeds

Now, this is the main part on where your entire SEO site audit will be based on.

3. Scope

It is going to define the area where you want Ahrefs to perform your desired website SEO audit. In this part, you can instruct the Ahrefs backlink checker whether it will be performing the audit on a specific page or on other pages or the entire domain.

Now you can also define where the Ahrefs keyword explorer will start crawling from.

Now, we’re going to keep the Ahrefs SEO audit tool to do the auditing from the homepage only. So, we’ll select the Specified URL option only.

Also, make sure that your Seeds are within your Scope.

Now, let’s move forward. Click the Next option and you’ll get the option to do the Ownership Verification.

So, this part is optional and you don’t necessarily have to do this. But, by doing this would help you get your website SEO audit done faster and unlock some advanced features.

So, for now, we’re skipping this part and moving forward.

4. Crawl Settings

Now, this part won’t take much time for you to figure out. The only thing we’ll recommend having a look at is to enable Execute JavaScript option. This would let the Ahrefs site explorer analyse all those parts of the website which are dependent on JavScript.

Now, if you have a new website or an older website. Then, you might have to change the number of crawled pages option in the tool.

If you have a new website, then you don’t have to change these settings and let them stay like that. Otherwise, you would have to change the number of pages to crawl and the allowed duration.

After that comes the Advanced setting. Here, we can define which pages should the Ahrefs SEO audit tool will crawl and leave.

Now, suppose you want to include the pages that have the word “blog” and you want to include the pages having “product” in their URLs, then you can define all this here.

In this case, the SEO audit tool will include pages such as:

5. Scheduling

Now, this is the final step to do the website SEO audit with Ahrefs free from any hard work. This is where you can schedule website SEO audit weekly, monthly or so. In the end, you’ll notice an option to start crawling now.

6. SEO Audit Report

Once the SEO audit tool is done, you’ll be redirected to a Dashboard where you can see some pie charts.

All these colored parts are clickable and you can see which pages represent the data in these pie charts. Green-colored pie shows the pages which have no critical errors. So, if we click on the red part, we’ll see the pages which have 400 series errors on them. Ahrefs backlink checker can give you accurate data for all the pages it has crawled.

Now, the backlinks that you see here which are broken, need to be fixed. So, if you click on the red part of the Ahrefs backlink checker Dashboard, you’ll see the pages having broken links.

Now, you NEED to fix these links. So, you can do one thing. Prioritize these pages in the Manage Columns option. Search for “dofollow”, select No. of dofollow backlinks and you’ll see the pages with Dofollow links to them.

Sort the new column that you see in the descending order and you’re done.

Now, you can export the results in CSV format and get the broken pages fixed as per the priority.

Now, let’s move back to the Ahrefs site explorer Dashboard and see what other options we get.

So, here we can see an option which says HTML tags and content.

So, this option is also self explanatory where the content information is available. The major focus should be laid on the red and peach part.

Along with the Not set or empty part, you should also focus on the bad duplicates. As these pages might harm your site ranking and confuse Google’s crawlers. You can use Ahrefs site explorer to understand the importance of Canonical links.

Now, you can click on any of the pages and see how many duplicate pages you have on your website. This is a very critical issue and should be fixed for a good SEO score. Also, the Ahrefs SEO Audit Tool also gives you the ways to correct the errors.

Now, this part would give a structured analysis of the errors the Ahrefs site explorer found during the audit.

Ahrefs call them errors, issues, and warnings that are sorted in the order of importance. Here, we would recommend you to get the Errors sorted out first. As these errors could be making your website susceptible to any Google algorithm’s penalty.

So, that’s it for the website SEO audit using the Ahrefs site explorer tool.

Now, it’s time for the BONUS part!

Special Ahrefs Pricing for You All

You can get this amazing Ahrefs backlink checker at an outstanding discount of ___% and make it yours for __.

That’s it.

Get Ahrefs pricing offer by clicking on this link.