Everyone interested in digital marketing must have come across the magical word SEO, meaning Search Engine Optimization. Is it worth spending time optimizing your websites for search engines? Yes, it is! 🙂 How shall you begin? With a free SEO tool!
Ask yourself a question: How good is the SEO of my website? What can I do to make my SEO better? One of the easy ways to answer these questions is to start using some SEO tool that helps. You could use many other tools, but I recommend Ahrefs; for me, it is a perfect SEO toolkit that helps you with your website’s overall SEO performance. Some parts of Ahrefs reporting are free, making this tool ideal for startups and bootstrapped projects. Let’s have a look at some SEO data you can gain by using Ahrefs.
How good is the SEO of my website?
The basis of an excellent working website is that there are no errors. All pages are accessible, no broken links, and so on. Health Score, which you find in Site Audit – Overview, reflects the proportion of pages with no error.
In an ideal case, you aim for 100, which means you have 0 critical mistakes or errors on your website.
What can I do to make my SEO better?
If you have some errors on your website, the Ahrefs webmaster tool will create a report filtered by the importance of the issue or any chosen category. The best way is to start fixing RED critical issues. This way, you can focus on improving problems, for example with:
- internal pages – e.g., a page is not found (404 error)
- links – if some pages have links to a broken page
- redirects – if it is broken or in case of a redirect chain
- on the page – meta description tag missing or empty
For those who don’t consider themselves an SEO master, Ahrefs free SEO tool explains why it is an issue and guides you to fixing the addressed problem.
How good is the SEO performance of my website?
Here we come to the other part of a free feature that Ahrefs offers – Site explorer. This feature shows you an overview of how well your website performs in the organic and gives you high-level SEO and backlink metrics.
Backlinks and domains
It is disputable how crucial is the role of backlinks in SEO nowadays. Some say that the importance of backlinks decreases, and you can rank with your website better even if you have fewer backlinks than your competitor. On the other hand, if any backlink generates relevant traffic to your website, it is a good backlink. Of course, backlinks are near related to the referring domains (domain where the link is). Thanks to Ahrefs free SEO tool, you have the main metrics present on the overview dashboard.
If you are interested in some particular part of the overview dashboard, more graphs and data you find beneath that.
In the backlink profile, you can see the historical performance of how good you rank compared to other websites, the best performing website having the rank #1.
Also, you can get an overview of recent and lost backlinks and their type. Check also how many referring domains do you have together with the number of referring pages. The more referring domains and pages you have, the stronger your domain will become.
Organic search result for SEO optimization
In the organic search data, you find all the ranking keywords of your website. Also, you see the volume (search potential) of those keywords in the SERP, what is actual monthly traffic and what position your website shows in organic google search.
If your website promotes a product worldwide, you appreciate graphs of your historical performance filtered by a country and whether your organic traffic increases or decreases over time.
It is also a good idea to check what organic keywords you already rank for, what positions and traffic they receive. By filtering high volume keywords combined with a low keyword difficulty (how hard it is to rank in organic search), you find keywords that you should start improving to rank better, which can bring more organic traffic to your website. You can also check what pages bring you the most traffic and how many keywords are on each page.
Conclusion
Ahrefs is a powerful free SEO tool, that’s certain. Even a free version gives you valuable insights, much more details than we covered in this short overview. You can also check other tracking tools and find the perfect fit for your business. I hope that you have enjoyed this article, and stay tuned for more articles about tools for startups like TOPOL.
Product Marketing Manager
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