Using Ahrefs Site Scanner To Make Your Website SEO Amazing

If you have a website, then you want to get people to see it. Rather than paying for ads, you try to organically increase your traffic with through Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Using Ahrefs site scanner to make your website SEO amazing is by far the simplest solution I’ve found.

Before I get started, I’ve also written this post on Medium and Facebook!

First of all, what is Ahrefs? Ahrefs is a popular and powerful SEO tool used by professionals around the globe. It provides a huge array of features including: backlink analysis; keyword research; rank tracking and the one we’re interested in today. Site Auditing.

This is a fairly new process I’ve been doing for my websites – mainly because I didn’t know that Ahrefs had this function. And to be honest, website scanners have always seem really gimmicky to me. The notion of a website scanning my website to give it an arbitrary score seemed pointless.

I know know that I was just being ignorant.

These tools offer a huge variety of ways to gain insights into our websites and improve them. If the tools give us a better score, then intuitively it means your website has the best chance possible of ranking for Google search results.

Using Ahrefs Site Scanner to make your website SEO amazing allows anyone with a website to assess how optimised it is for free. It does this by covering the major aspects that search engines use when determining what should be served back to the user. What are those main aspects? Website Crawling; Indexing Analysis; Technical SEO Audit; On-Page SEO Analysis and Backlink Profile Evaluation. I’ll cover each of of these below:

The Site Scanner will programmatically sift through your entire website. Looking for anything amiss, it searches high and low for improvements that can be made to your website.

This step is important as it’s the basis for all search engines. Every single search engine operates on website crawl data to determine which ones should rank highest in the search results. Which is why this tool is so useful. If it finds a bunch of 404 pages, insecure results or missing image tag, you know that Google has found the same. This could be the reason your website isn’t gaining the traffic you’d like.

Building from the previous point – Ahref will check how well your website is ranking in the search results. This is called indexing. It can also provide reasons for poor indexing performance such as: crawler errors; broken meta tags or missing links.

Moving away from just robots crawling your website to find errors, this section covers any technical reason for your website’s poor performance. Some points found here are: site speed, responsive design, HTTPS security and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

This is useful because if the bots say your website doesn’t display correctly on mobile, is very slow or has a shifting layout then your website will struggle to index on search engines.

This covers everything on a single page or post for your website and is mainly focused on the content, layout and quality.

We’ve all been on websites that might look nice, but the content is useful or unrelated to the headline. They’re awful and quickly removed from indexing.

A useful thing to remember is that the keywords are picked up from this section and it’s also where your internal links are evaluated and scored.

Whilst this is by far the most nuanced aspect of SEO, backlinks are extremely useful to show search engines that your website has a good reputation. If you didn’t know, backlinks are created whenever another website links to your site.

We’ve seen this being abused recently through a method called ‘Parasite SEO‘, in which malicious creators will use AI to spam a bunch of links back to their website on multiple platforms. Which artificially raises their domain rating, making search engines see them as more reliable and indexing them higher.

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Enough introduction and learning, lets get our hands dirty.

First, head over to https://ahrefs.com/website-checker and create a free account.

This only takes 5 minutes and is super easy. It also gives you access to a bunch more free tools:

Once you’ve created an account, you can enter your website address and continue with the setup.

You’ll need to authorise Ahref before it can actually run a scan of your website. Thankfully, this is easy and can be done via two methods: GSC or Manual

After this step, you can select which site you want to scan. You can also tell Ahref to scan your website periodically and tell it to crawl external links. I tend to need the external links disabled as I’m only interested in the actual website:

After this step, the website audit will start and it could take a while to complete.

Once it is complete – you will see something similar to the screenshot below. I’ve used my own website as an example and let me tell you that it took a lot of work to get it to have a health score of 99!

It’s from this first scan that you should base any website improvements off of. I’ve ran a total of 8 scans – getting up from a health score of 56 to where I am now. And with 5000 free page scans a month, that should be plenty for even a large business to run 2 or 3 scans a month.

If you click into the project, you’ll find more information on everything that’s important for your website. Including the issues that need fixing along with helpful hints on how to actually fix them!

I’ll also leave an example of this below so that you know you’re looking at the right section:

Well that’s everything – you now know how I keep my website healthy and indexing on all the major search engines.

If you need any further clarification, Ahref actually made a video to cover this exact topic which might be useful for you. I’ll link that here.

If you have any questions for me, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Enjoy! 🎉