Ahrefs Tutorial Part 4 - Site Audit

hey guys in this video we're going to take a look at the ahrefs site audit tool so stay tuned [Music] ahrefs offers this really great site audit tool there are many site audit tools on the web for seo there's the crawling spider which is entirely free uh and there are a few others there's woo rank but they all are limited in some way this uh the screaming frog application that does a site audit it's very messy and it's it's difficult to navigate the the woo rank site audit only you does your homepage which isn't very helpful if you're trying to fix technical issues on your entire website so i really like the ahrefs site audit so you can see here i already have a project here i'm going to go ahead and show you how to set up a new project i'm going to show you the settings that i use so uh when you want to do a site audit they force you to go through the whole project setup so remember on the dashboard they want you to set up a project so you basically have to do that here so i'm going to show you how to do that you can import from gsc and uh the benefit of that is that the crawls will be faster but and also you have less likely less likely to get 500 response errors from your server because sometimes the the the firewall will activate on this ahref spot because it sees that your site is getting a lot of requests and that will mess up your site audit but for the most part i haven't had any trouble adding it manually i recommend you just try it manually if you see some serious issues then uh you could try to um import your gsc verification to whitelist the ahrefs bot so i'm going to go ahead and type in my own website so the ahrefsbot is just going to try and access my website to see if it's accessible and i'm just going to add test here so i can differentiate it so right away you see a few settings here just like in the site explorer you have a few settings you can choose to crawl the entire site with all the subdomains just the subdomain sorry just the domain itself without the subdomains adjust the path so if you're looking at you're trying to crawl your services everything domain.com services slash whatever if you just want to crawl that path or if you just want to crawl the single url so if you just want to crawl the home page briefly uh then you would choose one of those settings you don't have to change any of this in fact i would recommend you don't so let's move on this is uh just trying to get me to verify the site so i can whitelist the href spot i'm going to skip this and now here we have the site audit settings so you do want to go through this and change a few things around so uh run scheduled crawls so i'm going to turn that off i always turn it off because otherwise it's just going to run a crawl every single week it's going to eat up my crawl budget so unless unless you're constantly working on your website i wouldn't recommend you run scheduled crawls unless you actually have a huge website in that case you may want to run scheduled crawls because it's going to take days to crawl your entire website so i am going to keep this setting in place roll run my first crawl now so let's take a look at the url sources i would keep this as default i have been in situations where the default options would uh eat up my entire crawl budget for the month if you are on the light plan you only get 10 000 internal web pages per month that you can crawl so i have sites that have a huge amount of location pages and sometimes i was running into crawl budget issues so i had to select the custom url list and uh just add the core pages of the website and then just one location page uh so that i could analyze if there was anything wrong with with the important pages and without getting into all of the thousands of nearly identical location pages but generally for most websites you're just going to leave the default options leave the website leave the auto detected site maps that's perfectly fine now here in the crawl settings there are a few things that you're going to want to change around i like to keep all of this default but i do like to change this down from 10 000 to 1000 because if you do reach 10 000 web pages you're not gonna be able to any more site crawls that month you're gonna have to wait a full 30 days before you can do any more site audits uh and then the last one is the max depth level from the seed i'm just gonna put that to eight so this is going to limit how deep the site crawl can go into your site generally this this won't affect anything negatively but um i like to drop it down a little bit just to keep just in case there is something there that will make the site audit go out of control um and then use up my whole crawl budget uh i like to keep that low you notice i keep referencing referencing this crawl budget it's it's a big deal because if you mess up the crawl budget and you don't get a good quality site audit then uh you're going to be out of luck for a full 30 days until you you get another 10 000 web page crawl limit so i'm going to click continue and now it's going to ask me to add keywords because it wants me to set up the full project i'm going to skip through this and this and it should begin crawling my website right away i created this test so if we click into this you can see that the crawl is starting so let me go back to my other project you can see here it's already completed so it can get a bit confusing here with a site audit um with the uh sorry with the site audit tool let's see here if i click into this project you're going to see something like this and you're going to say okay this is all it's about no that's not all it's about you have to go down here to the crawl log and this is going to show you the crawl that i just did today it took four minutes and 41 seconds because it's a relatively small site and you have to actually click on this to actually see the results of the crawl so once you click on that you can see your health score and you can see a number of other tabs here the ones you're going to stick to are in the all issues tab and then you're going to want to sort these by importance always start with the errors so let's go through through a few of these so you get an idea of how this works what i like to do is just open all these up in a new tab all of my errors and let's take a look at these one by one so these pages are returning a 500 error uh this may be like i said because of my firewall so i may want to go back and import my gsc verification so a 503 error is a forbidden error so if i actually go to this website i go to this web page it's likely not going to give me a 503 error it's likely just filtering out this bot traffic so i do have some extra security features on my website so if i want a proper crawl i'm going to have to import my gsc verification but sometimes you'll see in your list of issues you're going to see 404 xx error pages and those are not caused by firewalls those are actually pages that return a 404 error or something like that and you're going to want to fix those but this is nothing to fix i just need to verify my website to do a proper crawl this is kind of the same thing these web pages are returning 500 errors now this gets looks a little confusing when you first get into this so page has links to a broken page so all of these pages have links to a broken page often you'll see a 404 error here but i'm seeing 503 errors which means that my crawl wasn't wasn't done properly because my firewall was stopping the ahrefs spot but this is how you navigate the site audit so if you want to fix your web page you're going to click on the web page that has the problem and it'll give you more information in this box that slides out and this box is all about this web page if i click on this it'll take me to the actual web page so if i'm logged in i can actually edit it so i am logged in so i can actually turn on my builder and i can make my edits and i can uh go through the issues one by one to find the issues you're gonna have to click on these tabs so uh i'll start with the end links i'll show you the in links are my internal links and you can see that there are no problems there rather this is just a list of my internal links now here's where it will show you the error codes outlinks internal so these are my internal links again but now it's showing me the status as well so these returned 500 errors so how to tell if your content is being shadow banned that is something that returned to 500 error so i just copied the anchor text and now i'm on the web page i'm just going to paste it into uh my finder here and so it's going to highlight uh what link is returning a 500 error so it's this one right here we already saw that this 500 error is incorrect so i'm going to ignore those you can see all my internal links are in good condition they're all returning 200 codes so let's look at my external links and uh there's nothing much to see here i think that i have to go back and i have to run this crawl again with with some new settings as you can see these weren't crawled so i so for some reason one of my settings stopped this crawl but this is the site audit you get the idea you're going to want to have to go back uh and redo the crawl um if you start getting errors like this but my website is in very good shape um so there aren't many errors to begin with let me go through the rest of these tabs here and then i'm going to show you how to do the crawl the right way if you run into errors like i just did 500 errors so this says orphan page no internal incoming internal links so that's uh that's fine this is my 404 page it's my thank you page and this is my landing page so i'm i don't really care if those don't have internal links so this one says meta description tag is missing or empty so on these pages i don't have a meta description set so what i would do is i would just click on the link to bring up the more information i would open up the webpage i would go to edit the post and then i would add my meta description using my seo plugin if obviously if you have a hand coded site you're going to have to go into the code and specify the meta description in html but i'm using wordpress and i'm using rank math so i can specify my description like this so the next problem is duplicate pages without canonical these are all my category pages and author pages where you see duplicates of my blogs i don't care about these because these are not no indexed these aren't being indexed by search engines anyways so i can ignore that so sometimes you'll come across across problems that um are not really issues so here's the 5xx error pages it's saying that they're in the sitemap now so i can skip that so you can see i really don't have a lot of issues on my site i can sort it by level of importance the title is too long on these three pages so they're talking about the meta title you can see the meta title here and i just want to have to go back into this and shorten it so to fix crawling issues like you just saw where i got a bunch of 500 errors there's a few things you can do obviously you can verify your site by connecting gsc you can also go into your crawl settings and you can change your seed depth and things like that so you can make the c depth larger i think that what would help me the most now is to verify my ownership so um this this would prevent my firewall from from shutting the ahrefs crawl down so this is a fairly simple process i just have to upload an html file connect google search console or add an html tag to my site if you don't know how to do that just look up a video i think the easiest thing to do and the less invasive thing to do would be to just add an html file so that's the one i would recommend but you can do this any way you want in whichever way is easier if you add an html tag i would recommend you you take that off of your site after you run your crawl just because these html tags will slow down your loading speed so that is the site audit that is really all there is to it um and uh if you want to crawl a new site you can just go back to the settings and you go to the scope and you change the scope and you run a new crawl so that is the site audit if you guys found this video helpful if you guys have any questions for me please leave it in the comments there are a lot of different types of issues in the site audit that require a technical understanding of how your website works they're going to give you errors like this page has links to redirects and it's going to show you that these external outlinks these sorry uh outlinks external uh are showing 301 errors or 302 errors and so you're just going to have to replace the the link inside your blog or your web page with the the new link that happens very often websites are always changing their urls especially these government websites and these science websites because they don't really have a good understanding of seo so you're always going to be changing redirects and just let me know if you have any other questions and i hope to see in the next video thanks [Music]

Channel: Correct Digital

Views: 737

Keywords: correct digital, correctdigital.com, site audit, ahrefs site audit, ahrefs tutorial, site audit tutorial, how to use ahrefs site audit, how to do a site audit, fix wordpress issues, technical seo

Id: ZthgaqjbUck

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020