Ahrefs offers a wide range of free SEO tools for digital marketers on a tight budget.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through each tool and when to use it.

Setting up your website for success means starting with the basics: making sure it’s in good shape, both from a technical and backlink standpoint.

This involves a technical audit to check your website’s SEO performance, as well as a backlink audit to see if there are any spammy backlinks that could hinder your future link building efforts.

1. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools 

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) is the right tool for the job. It gives you access to two of our core tools: Site Audit (for the technical audit part) and Site Explorer (for the backlink audit part).

Once you’ve created a free account and imported your projects from Google Search Console (GSC), AWT will automatically run a comprehensive crawl of your website to check for 140+ predefined SEO and on-page issues.

These are more than what GSC covers. You can access them from the All issues report in Site Audit, where you can sort them by importance and tackle them accordingly.

Click on the question mark beside each issue to get detailed information and learn how to fix it.

Among its other useful reports, our free site audit tool also has an Indexability report. This is important because pages can’t rank if they’re not indexed by search engines—because they get no traffic.

Pay close attention to misplaced “noindex” tags, but also to pages with