Today, I'm introducing a brand new tool called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools or AWT.
It's a completely free SEO tool that allows you to get deep and actionable insights on
any website you own.
So if you own a website and want to improve your SEO without dropping a dime, then stay tuned.
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For many years, Google has provided data on websites you own through Google Search Console.
And while it's a great tool to get insights on things like impressions and clicks to your site,
it leaves a lot to be desired.
It checks for a handful of SEO issues, but not many.
Plus, there's limited advice on how to fix those issues.
You can see some backlinks and keywords, but not all of them.
And without having all your data at your disposal, it's tough to make sound data-driven decisions
to improve your SEO.
So we created AWT to fill that gap.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools will give you a holistic view of how your website is performing in search.
And more than just "knowing how you're doing," we provide actionable insights, tips, and strategies
right within our toolset so you can actually get tangible results.
So let me take you on a tour of what you'll get and I'll share some use cases you can use
immediately to analyze and optimize your site for search.
So first, go to ahrefs.com/awt and sign up for a free Webmaster Tools account.
After you've signed up, you'll need to verify your website.
So I'll do that by logging in with Google Search Console since it's the fastest method.
Next, you'll need to choose the websites you want to verify with AWT.
And it's important to note that the tool will only work for websites that are verified.
As for the settings, I'll choose to run the first audit now, schedule weekly audits,
and I'll touch on the value of this in a bit, and I'll also choose to crawl external links.
Let's import the site and your audit should begin.
Now, there are two parts to Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
First is our website audit tool called Site Audit.
Site Audit allows you to scan for over 100 issues that could potentially be hurting your
website's performance in search.
So my audit for Ahrefs.com is already done, so let's head over to the Overview report.
Here you can see the website's Health Score, a breakdown of the top issues we found on the site,
and the number of URLs that have the issue.
Now, since some of these issues may be foreign to you, we also provide details on what the issues are,
and how to fix them.
Now, let's take look at a workflow of fixing one of these issues.
Here you'll see that there are 126 pages on our website that link to a broken page.
So to see these pages, just click the number and right away, you can see all URLs that link
to both internal and external broken pages.
Then it's just a matter of removing or replacing those links on your site.
Now, a great thing about this tool is that you can customize the columns in any way you want.
Just click Manage columns, find data you want to add, drag and drop it to the position
you want, click Apply, and now you'll see your customized table which you can easily export.
Now, if your site has a ton of issues, then you might want to work on the issues by category.
That's why we've created some convenient reports you can access here in the sidebar.
For example, if you want to see on-page issues, click that in the sidebar and you now have a nice
summarized report on things like word counts, title tags and meta descriptions.
You can also click on the Issues tab to see an itemized list of issues which are labeled
by importance, so you can prioritize appropriately.
Now, we've only scratched the surface with what you can do with the website audit tool in AWT.
But there's actually quite a few advanced features which we'll get into in future tutorials.
Now, one of the great things about auditing your website with AWT is that you can actually
monitor changes that are happening to your site on a regular basis.
If you remember from earlier, we set up weekly scheduled audits when we imported
our site to AWT.
And the reason I recommend doing this is because starting from your second crawl,
we'll show you changes that have been made to your site.
So you can passively monitor your site for new URLs with issues, as well as see the URLs
where issues have been resolved or removed.
Now, conducting website audits is just half of what's inside Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
The second part of AWT is our Site Explorer tool, which gives you a look into backlink and
search traffic data.
Since Ahrefs crawls the web in a similar way as Google, we're able to collect a ton of raw data
and present it in an easy-to-digest way.
In short, this tool lets you see important information like the pages that link to you,
the pages they're linking to, and SEO metrics which can help you understand the influence
they might have on your pages.
In addition, we show you all of the keywords your website ranks for broken down by country.
Let's take a deeper look into this tool.
So starting from the Dashboard, I'll click on our project which will bring us to the Overview Page.
On this page you can see top-level metrics for your website like Domain Rating, which
represents the overall strength of your website's backlink profile, the total backlinks, total
referring domains, which are unique websites that link to you, the number of keywords your
site ranks for, and the estimated search traffic your website gets.
And right below that is an interactive graph of your website's growth in referring domains.
This graph shows how fast you're acquiring new backlinks, which is a good thing to keep
an eye on.
There's also a graph to see historical search traffic data under the Organic search tab.
But keep in mind that our organic traffic data are estimations, whereas your Google
Search Console or Google Analytics data will give you more precise numbers.
Let's head over to the Backlinks report.
Here, you can see all of the pages that link to your website.
Now, instead of just showing you a URL with no context, like in Search Console, we actually
show you useful things like website and page authority metrics for the linking page,
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 handy filters to really drill in on data you want to see.
For example, let's say Ahrefs opened up an affiliate program.
Naturally, we'd need to find affiliates.
And one of the best places you can start is by looking at the websites that are already
linking to you.
After all, if they're linking to you without compensation, then they could potentially
make great affiliate partners since they probably know what your product does and why it's valuable.
So assuming we wanted to find people who have linked to our Site Explorer landing page,
let's change our target URL to ahrefs.com/site-explorer.
Next, I'll choose the One link per domain filter, since we don't need to contact the same website
multiple times.
And since I'd only be able to email them in English, let's set the language filter to English.
From here, you can export up to 1,000 results and reach out to potential affiliate partners.
Now, let's switch our target back to the full domain and head on over to the Organic keywords report.
This report is similar to the Search results report in Search Console, in that it shows
the keywords your site is ranking for.
But unlike Search Console, we let you see all your keywords instead of the top 1,000
and also show keyword metrics like Search Volume, a Keyword Difficulty score, and
the position we saw this page ranking in on this date.
And just like in the Backlinks report, we have some helpful filters.
So let's say you want to optimize pages for keywords that are ranking on the second
page of Google.
To start, I'll set a filter to show keywords in positions 11 through 20.
From here, you can click on the SERP button for a keyword you want to optimize, see the SEO
metrics for the top 10 ranking pages, and create an appropriate strategy to outrank
your competitors.
And I talk about doing keyword analysis in our full keyword research tutorial, so I'll link
that up in the description.
Another great report in Site Explorer is Top Content.
This report ranks content pages on your website by a social metric that we call "social power,"
which takes the median social shares across all social networks that we track.
You can also click on one of the social media icons to see which pages had the most shares
on those networks.
Now, if you wanted to see the most authoritative pages on your site by a measure of link authority,
there's a similar report to this called "Best by Links."
Now, on top of these tools we'll also send you monthly email reports that'll break down
new and lost backlinks to your site, as well as new keywords it ranked for.
So you might be wondering why are we all of a sudden opening free access to some of Ahrefs'
tools, while tens of thousands of SEOs are happily paying to access this data?
Well, not all websites are intended to make money, but that doesn't mean they don't have
great content that deserves to be found.
And that's what we want to help you do by giving you solid data, tools, and learning
materials to keep your site in good health.
So if you've been hesitating to get a premium Ahrefs account, then now you can sign up for
AWT for free.
And if you require more data for other sites, you can always upgrade your account to get
full access to all of our SEO tools.
And if you're already an Ahrefs user, then I recommend watching our announcement video
from our product updates channel which will give you the rundown of how AWT affects and
benefits you.
Now, if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share and subscribe for more actionable
SEO and marketing tutorials.
I'll see you in the next one.