June 9, 2022 • 9 mins
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.
Go to https://ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools and you can sign up there.
Let me know what you think!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Philip (00:00):
On today's show.
(00:00):
I want to talk abouta tool called AHREFS.
I'm not sure if everyone knowsthey do have a free version
you can use by connecting yourGoogle search console data.
It allows those specific sitesto have access to some features
(00:21):
Welcome to the opinionated.
SEO Where we talk about recentnews and updates in the digital
marketing world of SEO paidadvertising and social media
that impact you as a marketer.
Also throw some of myopinion into the mix.
Now we're talking aboutAHREFS and if you go to a
ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools.
(00:43):
You can sign up there and youconnect your Google search
console to their site, andit 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 accountthat I use for other things,
but this one is pretty good.
What I want you to do,site now, hit pause, play
(01:03):
this in the background.
And walk through any site works.
Any site that you have connectedto 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 toshow all of your projects
in an overview setting.
It's going to giveyou your health score.
(01:25):
It's going to talk abouthow many times it's been,
crawled, redirects, anythingthat's broken or blocked.
It's also going to give.
A domain rating.
The number of referringdomains, your backlinks, organic
traffic, organic keywords,and a few other things,
but in this free mode, someof those aren't available.
So let's just talk about thishealth score is just when it
(01:46):
runs an audit, how did it do?
I have some thatare in the nineties.
I have some thatare in the teens.
And all of those fordifferent reasons.
One of my favorite thingsto do here is to click on
the G S C performance tab.
And what this is going to do isit's going to give me my Google
search console data at a glance.
(02:08):
So your total clicks,total impressions,
average click throughrate and average position.
But I can see this on all ofmy sites where normal, you
have to click between differentpages in search console . This
allows you to see them all at aglance, which is really great.
If you're looking at maybetwo or three sites, almost
side by side, and I couldsee some trends here.
I have a couple of thatare in real estate.
(02:30):
I have a couplethat are in medical.
And so I can see if there'sany trends that are aligning,
even though they may behave different locations.
We're going to go ahead andclick on one of these and we'll
go ahead and see what kind ofinformation we get from it.
this takes you rightinto the site explore.
And when you get into thesite explore, you can see that
(02:52):
there's just a ton of links.
There's about 15different things that
you can start looking at.
Not everything's available,but in general, this is going
to give you a really goodidea of where you're at.
It's going to give you thingslike your AHREF's rank.
Number of referring domainsand a visualizes, everything.
And your number of referringpages, your domain rating.
(03:13):
Lost referring new referringdomains and backlinks.
It also shows you the anchorsthat links have come in
from, because a AHREFS initself is really a great tool
for looking at backlinks.
I actually want to jump intoa couple of these things.
there's a backlink profile andyou can dive into each of these.
So you could start lookingat this specific backlinks.
Again, if you start clickingthrough these, you'll start
(03:34):
seeing that some of these areavailable, some required paid.
If we go through the backlinkprofile, really the biggest
ones is looking at backlinks and referring domains.
What I like doing then is goinginto the organic search section.
You can start lookingat organic keywords.
This is really useful tosee what kinds of keywords
are actually drivingtraffic to your site.
(03:56):
And you could start making somedecisions here to see, Are there
areas that maybe you aren'tshowing up that you'd like
to, and maybe there's keywordswhere you are showing up where
you weren't expecting it andyou can make some adjustments.
Start looking at the URL.
And check to see ifthere's anything that's
not the homepage.
Because ideally you wantas many as you can, that
(04:17):
aren't the homepage.
They're more specific ifyou're seeing everything
going to the homepage.
That's going to give you someideas of what to do, and that's
going to be one of those thingsunder organic search, where
you can look at top pages.
And if you're really onlyseeing that homepage.
Probably want to work on someof your internal linking and
some of those sub pages toreally get that working better.
(04:37):
You can start looking atcompeting domains as well.
You're limited to what youcould see, but you could
see about the top 10.
And that shows you whatsome of your competitors
in the area are doing.
And so that's going tohelp give you some ideas.
, We've looked at the overviewreally nice idea of what
kind of backlinks you'regetting, things like that.
You do have the ability torun audits on your sites.
(05:00):
And I believe the max is10,000 pages per month.
So I'm going to go intoone of mine and actually
we'll take a look attheopinionatedseo.com site.
And it's going to give me someideas of what we're doing.
So the health score on thisis a 99 out of a hundred.
feeling pretty good about that.
It looks like we do have oneerror and I can click into
the all issues and it doeslook like we've got a no
(05:22):
index page or an orphan page.
And I think that mightbe 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'scrawled, how many pages and we
have about 130 URLs on the page.
So I'm not using toomany of that 10,000.
This is really useful to justsee how long things are taking
(05:44):
to crawl when it's crawling.
What size it is, and itgives you some really
nice information.
I'm in the site audit, butI click on page explore,
and this starts showing meall the pages that I have.
And one of my favorite thingsto do is I've got all this data,
but what else can I do with it?
Because it's given me theURL, what kind of traffic,
if it's indexable the numberof InLinks, things like
(06:05):
that, those are going toreally help me understand.
Now there's a littlecheckbox or a slider
button for show changes.
It will show me.
Any changes since theprevious crawl that I had,
and I can see how many thingshave changed and I have new
pages that have shown up.
I have different InLinksthat have come up.
(06:26):
Backlinks that haveincreased or decreased and
increase in organic traffic.
One of the things that Ilike doing is going into the
column section and adding acouple of different titles.
So I go ahead and I add the SERPtitle, and is the page title
used in SERP and click apply.
And then I can startlooking at this.
(06:47):
And it's going to goahead and show me.
What the title is that Ihave for the page, what the
search result page title.
And if it's the sameand I can start seeing
how Google is changing.
And one thing that Googledoes is it strips away.
A lot of the branding I have, orsome of my titles are too long.
And it's just putting ellipsis.
(07:09):
My top pages, interestinglyenough, 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 seeingthe page being structured.
I also can pull some reports oninternal pages and index ability
(07:32):
and look at any kind of issues.
I do have a no index page andthat's something where I can
click the view affected URLs.
It's going to go aheadand show me that.
And it's exactly what Iwas expecting it to be.
It's also going to show mesome information on performance
and I can see what pagesare taking a long time to
load and which ones are nottaking a long time to load
(07:55):
if you wanted to upgrade andget things like rank tracking or
the content Explorer or going inthrough the keywords, explorer.
Those are all paidcomponents, but what I would
definitely suggest go aheadand connect your sites.
Get some audits running,have them going.
On a regular basis, at leastmaybe weekly or monthly,
and really take a look at.
(08:17):
What your sites are doing, andit's going to send you a nice
email after every one of theaudit are completed and give you
just an overall health overview.
I think this is agreat free tool.
That everyone shouldjust have set up.
If you have a really large site.
The pricing is trivial.
For someone who's maybejust got a blog or you're
(08:39):
just starting out and youwant to learn the tool.
This is a great way toget some sites connected.
If you don't have a site thatyour already have data for, see
if you can ask a friend or asksomeone to help out and you can
connect it in there and startlooking at some of this data.
It's really helpful.
this is AHREFS and thefree components there.
When you connect it throughyour webmaster tools or
(09:01):
Google search console.
I'll leave the linkin the show notes.
If you guys have any questions,feel free to reach out.
Have a great day andlook forward to talking
to you again soon.
On today's show.
(00:00):
I want to talk abouta tool called AHREFS.
I'm not sure if everyone knowsthey do have a free version
you can use by connecting yourGoogle search console data.
It allows those specific sitesto have access to some features
(00:21):
Welcome to the opinionated.
SEO Where we talk about recentnews and updates in the digital
marketing world of SEO paidadvertising and social media
that impact you as a marketer.
Also throw some of myopinion into the mix.
Now we're talking aboutAHREFS and if you go to a
ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools.
(00:43):
You can sign up there and youconnect your Google search
console to their site, andit 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 accountthat I use for other things,
but this one is pretty good.
What I want you to do,site now, hit pause, play
(01:03):
this in the background.
And walk through any site works.
Any site that you have connectedto 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 toshow all of your projects
in an overview setting.
It's going to giveyou your health score.
(01:25):
It's going to talk abouthow many times it's been,
crawled, redirects, anythingthat's broken or blocked.
It's also going to give.
A domain rating.
The number of referringdomains, your backlinks, organic
traffic, organic keywords,and a few other things,
but in this free mode, someof those aren't available.
So let's just talk about thishealth score is just when it
(01:46):
runs an audit, how did it do?
I have some thatare in the nineties.
I have some thatare in the teens.
And all of those fordifferent reasons.
One of my favorite thingsto do here is to click on
the G S C performance tab.
And what this is going to do isit's going to give me my Google
search console data at a glance.
(02:08):
So your total clicks,total impressions,
average click throughrate and average position.
But I can see this on all ofmy sites where normal, you
have to click between differentpages in search console . This
allows you to see them all at aglance, which is really great.
If you're looking at maybetwo or three sites, almost
side by side, and I couldsee some trends here.
I have a couple of thatare in real estate.
(02:30):
I have a couplethat are in medical.
And so I can see if there'sany trends that are aligning,
even though they may behave different locations.
We're going to go ahead andclick on one of these and we'll
go ahead and see what kind ofinformation we get from it.
this takes you rightinto the site explore.
And when you get into thesite explore, you can see that
(02:52):
there's just a ton of links.
There's about 15different things that
you can start looking at.
Not everything's available,but in general, this is going
to give you a really goodidea of where you're at.
It's going to give you thingslike your AHREF's rank.
Number of referring domainsand a visualizes, everything.
And your number of referringpages, your domain rating.
(03:13):
Lost referring new referringdomains and backlinks.
It also shows you the anchorsthat links have come in
from, because a AHREFS initself is really a great tool
for looking at backlinks.
I actually want to jump intoa couple of these things.
there's a backlink profile andyou can dive into each of these.
So you could start lookingat this specific backlinks.
Again, if you start clickingthrough these, you'll start
(03:34):
seeing that some of these areavailable, some required paid.
If we go through the backlinkprofile, really the biggest
ones is looking at backlinks and referring domains.
What I like doing then is goinginto the organic search section.
You can start lookingat organic keywords.
This is really useful tosee what kinds of keywords
are actually drivingtraffic to your site.
(03:56):
And you could start making somedecisions here to see, Are there
areas that maybe you aren'tshowing up that you'd like
to, and maybe there's keywordswhere you are showing up where
you weren't expecting it andyou can make some adjustments.
Start looking at the URL.
And check to see ifthere's anything that's
not the homepage.
Because ideally you wantas many as you can, that
(04:17):
aren't the homepage.
They're more specific ifyou're seeing everything
going to the homepage.
That's going to give you someideas of what to do, and that's
going to be one of those thingsunder organic search, where
you can look at top pages.
And if you're really onlyseeing that homepage.
Probably want to work on someof your internal linking and
some of those sub pages toreally get that working better.
(04:37):
You can start looking atcompeting domains as well.
You're limited to what youcould see, but you could
see about the top 10.
And that shows you whatsome of your competitors
in the area are doing.
And so that's going tohelp give you some ideas.
, We've looked at the overviewreally nice idea of what
kind of backlinks you'regetting, things like that.
You do have the ability torun audits on your sites.
(05:00):
And I believe the max is10,000 pages per month.
So I'm going to go intoone of mine and actually
we'll take a look attheopinionatedseo.com site.
And it's going to give me someideas of what we're doing.
So the health score on thisis a 99 out of a hundred.
feeling pretty good about that.
It looks like we do have oneerror and I can click into
the all issues and it doeslook like we've got a no
(05:22):
index page or an orphan page.
And I think that mightbe 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'scrawled, how many pages and we
have about 130 URLs on the page.
So I'm not using toomany of that 10,000.
This is really useful to justsee how long things are taking
(05:44):
to crawl when it's crawling.
What size it is, and itgives you some really
nice information.
I'm in the site audit, butI click on page explore,
and this starts showing meall the pages that I have.
And one of my favorite thingsto do is I've got all this data,
but what else can I do with it?
Because it's given me theURL, what kind of traffic,
if it's indexable the numberof InLinks, things like
(06:05):
that, those are going toreally help me understand.
Now there's a littlecheckbox or a slider
button for show changes.
It will show me.
Any changes since theprevious crawl that I had,
and I can see how many thingshave changed and I have new
pages that have shown up.
I have different InLinksthat have come up.
(06:26):
Backlinks that haveincreased or decreased and
increase in organic traffic.
One of the things that Ilike doing is going into the
column section and adding acouple of different titles.
So I go ahead and I add the SERPtitle, and is the page title
used in SERP and click apply.
And then I can startlooking at this.
(06:47):
And it's going to goahead and show me.
What the title is that Ihave for the page, what the
search result page title.
And if it's the sameand I can start seeing
how Google is changing.
And one thing that Googledoes is it strips away.
A lot of the branding I have, orsome of my titles are too long.
And it's just putting ellipsis.
(07:09):
My top pages, interestinglyenough, 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 seeingthe page being structured.
I also can pull some reports oninternal pages and index ability
(07:32):
and look at any kind of issues.
I do have a no index page andthat's something where I can
click the view affected URLs.
It's going to go aheadand show me that.
And it's exactly what Iwas expecting it to be.
It's also going to show mesome information on performance
and I can see what pagesare taking a long time to
load and which ones are nottaking a long time to load
(07:55):
if you wanted to upgrade andget things like rank tracking or
the content Explorer or going inthrough the keywords, explorer.
Those are all paidcomponents, but what I would
definitely suggest go aheadand connect your sites.
Get some audits running,have them going.
On a regular basis, at leastmaybe weekly or monthly,
and really take a look at.
(08:17):
What your sites are doing, andit's going to send you a nice
email after every one of theaudit are completed and give you
just an overall health overview.
I think this is agreat free tool.
That everyone shouldjust have set up.
If you have a really large site.
The pricing is trivial.
For someone who's maybejust got a blog or you're
(08:39):
just starting out and youwant to learn the tool.
This is a great way toget some sites connected.
If you don't have a site thatyour already have data for, see
if you can ask a friend or asksomeone to help out and you can
connect it in there and startlooking at some of this data.
It's really helpful.
this is AHREFS and thefree components there.
When you connect it throughyour webmaster tools or
(09:01):
Google search console.
I'll leave the linkin the show notes.
If you guys have any questions,feel free to reach out.
Have a great day andlook forward to talking
to you again soon.
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