How to Use Ahrefs Webmaster tools for SEO (Beginner's Guide)

That means many of their premium features including tracking keywords ranking position, backlink’s profile, site explorer and site audit are free to use.

With the site audit tool, Ahrefs will show you all the errors that your site is facing to ranking in search engines and suggest solutions to solve them.

So you can make your site those errors free and boost SEO.

In fact, I already added my blog in ahrefs webmaster tools and removed all errors that had previously.

Here's the result now,

Previously my blog got a 53% health score when Ahrefs first time scanned it and showed me all the SEO errors like missing description, duplicate content, sitemap errors etc.

Then with the help of ahrefs suggestions, I removed them and now my site is scoring 98% health score.

Of Course, it still has shown many errors as warnings and notices but they are small and avoidable.

And in this article, I am going to share techniques and methods that I used to remove the errors so you can also use them to boost SEO health score for your site.

What ou learn in this article,

• What features are now free in Ahrefs webmaster tools
• How to sign up for “Ahrefs webmaster tools”
• Steps to add your blog in ahrefs free account
• How to remove SEO errors to increase site health score

What features are now free in Ahrefs webmaster tools

Many features in Ahrefs webmaster tools are like Google search console but created by ahrefs itself.

Even ahrefs stated this in their post

Like, google search console shows you the errors that your site has, AWT will also show SEO errors, but more conveniently and even suggests the solutions to solve them.

So you can otimize your site to boost SEO.

To do this Ahrefs gives free access to site audit and site explorer features but here’s the important thing that you must know.

These features are free only for verified sites.

Yes, you can see data and use free features only for the sites that you will verify in Ahrefs account.

To use all features, you still need to buy its plan.

Features, which are free in Ahrefs webmaster tools

Unlimited Projects

To verify your blog on ahrefs dashboard, you will need to add them as projects. 

But the best part is, with the launch of AWT now you can add an unlimited number of projects in ahrefs.

It doesn’t matter if it's your or your client’s, you can add them as long as you can verify their ownership.

But a free ahrefs accout will crawl only 10,000 pages/month. To get more you need to upgrade for paid plans.

Site Audit

As soon as you will verify the ownership of the site, Ahrefs began the site audit of your blog.

And soon will show the results and SEO errors that your site is facing.

On the basis of crawled pages, site audit gives a site health score between 1 to 100 (higher is better).

Site Explorer

Once your site is verified, you can see and use features,

• site’s overview
• backlinks profile
• keywords ranking  positions and all keywords that your site is ranking
• Organic traffic
• Competing blogs and posts
• Top performing content
• Broken links
• And many more

How to sign up for “Ahrefs webmaster tools”

To use the ahrefs webmaster tools, you need to sign up for a free account.

Go to- https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools and click on “Sign up for free”

On the next page, you can sign up either using your email or using Gmail and Facebook account.

Steps to add your blog in ahrefs free account

Once you log in click on “new project”

On this page, you can add sites as projects by 2 methods- 

1. Import from GSC (automatic verification)
2. Add manually (manual verification)

My suggestion is to import from GSC as it will import everything from your google search console and verify the sites automatically with extra efforts.

To import from GSC, click on import and then click allow to allow the import.

Now all your sites from GSC will be imported as projects in ahrefs.

How to remove SEO errors to increase site health score

After the import, it will take some hours to audit & fully crawl your site.

Don’t worry Ahrefs will send an email to notify you, once it’s completed.

When this is done, you can see the health score and different issues of your site.

These issues will be categorized in the colour forms.

1. Red as errors
2. Yellow as warnings
3. Blue as notices

Our main target to remove Red errors as they are harming more than the other two.

Most common errors that most sites have,

• Meta description tag missing or empty- add description to solve this error (use Yoast SEO plugin to add meta description tag)
• 3XX redirect in sitemap- remove non-canonical URLs from sitemap to solve this
• Redirected page has no incoming internal links- interconnect the links of these pages to solve this error
• Duplicate pages without canonical- delete or add links as of original post on these duplicate pages to solve this. You can use Yoast SEO to solve this issue.

Just removing these 4-5 errors can improve your site’s health score to 80.

When you click on any error. Ahrefs will show what this error is and how you can solve them.

To check all the affected links with that particular error, click on “View affected URLs”.

You can even search on google and youtube on how to solve these errors.

But it will take time as there will be many affected URLs for older sites.

Conclusion

Ahrefs webmaster tools can be very helpful to find these errors and solve them. 

This was paid before but now ahrefs made them free to use.

So it’s your time to get free ahrefs account and use AWT to optimize your site.

Tell what you like most in this Ahrefs guide and if you are facing any issue or have any question drop them in comments.

I will be happy to answer them,

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Basant Kumar

Basant Kumar is the founder of Semclouds & a freelance writer for hire with a background in Blogging, SEO and Content Writing. He helps people to grow their web visibility by writing highly engaging content for their blog/business.