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Site Audit by Ahrefs — Cloud based website analysis for 100+ SEO issues
Site Audit by Ahrefs is a cloud-based crawler that will scan your entire website (no matter how large it is) and report everything that is wrong with it from an SEO perspective. User-friendly UI and a variety of visual reports will help you make sense of the data and present it to your clients.
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John-Henry Scherck
I like Ahrefs and have been a user for ~4 years. I consider them a cutting edge tool for link data. They are the only link data source I use. I respect them a lot and like the site explorer tool.
They iterate quickly, so I expect this site audit tool to get better. I'm not sure what i was expecting, but I was expecting more. There are a dozen or so analogous solutions in the market. The only real problem this solves is consolidating your tool provider count, I'm not seeing unique insights or things that will save me more time - which is really what i want.
Here's the type of site audit I would like: use NLP tech like Narrative Science to turn their data into insights that humans can read and understand. An audit with automatically generated human-readable insights that would be something to really clap about - that would be useful and new for SEO (and that I would fork over money for).
I don't mean to be negative, but this feels like table stakes for the SEO industry and it doesn't appear to be as powerful as a tool like URL Profiler or Deep Crawl (unless I am missing something). Perhaps this feature was something that was requested by their users and will be well liked.
When I think of Ahrefs, I think of the link data platform, it's in their name. Ahrefs is moving upmarket and the solution is getting more expensive. As a user, I want to buy best in class software for my work. This audit solution does not feel best in class right now. I get the sense this (along with other recently released features) will be used to justify a price increase for the platform soon.
Part of me fears Ahrefs is going to go down the path that Moz did where they start trying to do everything and release a bunch of "kind of okay" tools and ignore the core product.
Love the site and content explorer tools, the keyword data is useful, but this feature/tool doesn't seem to be there yet compared with other parts of the platform.
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@jhtscherck Hey John, thanks a lot for expecting more from Ahrefs! I'm really glad that our brand has this kind of perception in the industry :)
I absolutely agree that the current release is more or less on par with the other available solutions and doesn't offer much on top of them. We were working on this tool for about a year, and we felt that it's good enough to be released and start bringing value to our customers.
At the same time, we don't plan to stop working on it. And I'm sure many of the things that we have on our roadmap for Site Audit will impress you.
If you have any specific feature requests or suggestions on how we could improve Site Audit, feel free to send them to me directly at timsoulo@ahrefs.com - I'll make sure to discuss them with our team.
@jhtscherck @timsoulo Love the idea of an NLP feature - I've been slowly building something similar in a spreadsheet and it's super cool but also takes forever. That's definitely a huge opp for a site audit tool.
I use Screaming Frog and URL Profiler, and those are great and I think this Ahrefs tool is complementary to them and adds some features those don't have, primarily:
- Love that it's a cloud crawler, I can start the run and don't have to worry about my machine crapping out (upgraded to the newest MacBook partly for that reason!)
- Scheduling - and daily - super cool. I wasn't subscribed to any really good cloud site crawlers with scheduling so this is super cool
- Adjusting the crawling factors and issues - this is huge, and the fact that you can add your own and change priority. I want a crawler to be both opinionated on its own, but allow for flexibility
Would love to see:
- A 360 degree view of a site using all of Ahrefs data. Imagine if the site audit also included all keyword data, all link data, and all competitor data that Ahrefs already has! That would be truly the killer site audit. I think site audit tools need to give us more than data and charts: they need to give us Insights and Assisted Decisions. As in, they need to tell us exactly what to do, and then the human can approve or decline each recommended decision. That would be the killer app.
Definitely think there's room for improvements, but glad it was released now, rather than waiting another year for 5 more features to make it "perfect".
This is awesome. The team at AHREFs continues to deliver.
Tim/Dmitry, is this embeddable as well? IE can I embed it on my site and use for lead gen?
@dohertyjf hey John! No, I'm afraid right now we don't have any widgets of that sort. We do plan to invest some time into "client reporting" features, so creating a lead gen form should not be a big problem in future.
@dohertyjf How is this better than other solutions on the market? I'm not really seeing the wow factor here.
@jhtscherck obviously it's not meant to replace a full site audit, but it does seem to go deeper with better link data than everything else on the market at this entry level. I think it's a smart play for AHREFs to introduce to have "table stakes" as you say below, and over time I am sure they will iterate and improve on it.
Congrats @timsoulo and the Ahrefs team
Love the ahrefs platform and it's good to see an audit tool from you guys. Will test it out soon to see how it stacks up against the others.
While having a quick look at it I did see that there was an option to verify ownership which mentioned " Verification your website will allow to crawl as fast as you like and enable some advanced settings. " Can you let us know what those advance settings are?
Also only having one site audit on the $99 plan is a bummer :(
@saijogeorge hey Saijo, thanks a lot for stepping by!
Verifying ownership is meant to unlock crawl speed settings. Otherwise people could use our Site Audit to put down sites of their competitors :)
As for "enable some advanced settings" - it looks like these settings weren't included in the first release of Site Audit, so I guess we'll need to remove that part for now. Thanks for noticing ;)
As for one Site Audit project on $99 Lite plan - please keep in mind that Site Audit is not the only tool that is included in your plan :) It would also be fair to mention, that there are many standalone site audit tools that charge even more for a single tool.
@timsoulo Thanks Tim.
I don't doubt the usefulness of ahrefs as a platform and understand that the audits reruns after x days which is quite helpful but at times I might just want to run an audit on a site as a once off thing and it would appear that is not possible on the paid plan, which was a disappointing for me.
We used to use Botify when it costed $50/mo, it was fun. Ahrefs pretty much reminds that, and it came free with our current subscription.
We've tested our recent release (we've rewritten the whole Icons8 in Vue.js recently).
Promptly, we've found:
1. Broken ahreflang
2. Missing alt texts
3. Non-matching canonicals.
Thanks, guys!
Meantime, I've got questions:
1. While Google crawler shows average _download_ time <200 ms, Ahrefs Audit failed to receive any of the _first bytes_ under 200 ms. How would you guys explain it?
2. It has some charts, but usually everything falls into a single category. We've got some monochromatic donut charts, and a monochromatic treemap mostly consisting of equal tiles.
3. Some things should be clarified. Do exceptions expect regular expressions or substrings? What are compliant pages?
Pros:Botify for a fraction of cost. Actionable insights.
Cons:Results representation is a work in progress
Love Ahrefs. Early days for this tool and looking forward to seeing it integrate with all of the other data they have.
Hey, I'm Tim, CMO at Ahrefs.
We tried our best to create a Site Audit tool, that would be very advanced and very user-friendly at the same time.
For people, who are new to SEO we have over 100 pre-configured SEO issues that we report after we crawl your website.
For advanced SEOs we have "Data Explorer" where they can slice and dice all crawled data by using 150+ metrics that we save for each URL.
Please feel free to ask your questions. The entire team is now watching this thread and ready to jump in :)
@timsoulo Awesome! This is the best feature I have could asked for. Earlier I used deepcrawl for this purpose but now AHREFS saves my money. Thank you Tim and AHREFS team for such an amazing work. I am a big fan of AHREFS besides being an avid user. Thanks for making it so easy for us. Your blogs have taught me so much. I am like really really thankful.
Hurray to AHREFS!
Take a 7 day trial for $7! It is not usual to see such a CTA text. Usually it is a free trial (btw)
@dainiskanopa yeah, in our case that is not just a trial of Site Audit tool alone, that is a trial of entire Ahrefs platform.
@timsoulo @asatwork @dainiskanopa if you’re not willing to spend $7 to evaluate a product like this you’re definitely not in its target market. I would have done the same.
@timsoulo @dainiskanopa @bhamrick I am not saying I am not willing to pay, I am saying this can't really be called a trial.
It is confusing, at first I thought I would have a trial period of 7 days and then pay 7$ to continue. This definitely needs to be rephrased imo.
I don't care being in their target or not, if I am providing a feedback is to help them. I think that having a clearer CTA or maybe a real free trial would improve conversion.
Hey @timosoulo will it be available with the API? Great presentation in Chaing Mai BTW!
@oscarsandstrom Hey Oscar. I don't think we have any API plans for Site Audit tool at the moment. But you can put your feature request here: https://ahrefs.canny.io/site-audit
PS: thanks for the kind words about my talk in Chiang Mai :)
Ahrefs is a power pack competitor analysis tool filled with information such as website traffic and top pages.
Pros:Probably the most extensive web crawler among SEO tools
Recent and wide-ranging keyword alerts sent to your email daily
Cons:Low limits and restrictions on the $99 plan make that plan not worth it
No integration with Google Analytics or Search Console
I love ahrefs. however, at first glance, this didn't seem as intuitive as woorank. Which I'm excited to ditch in favor of ahref once/if I figure it out. I've only spend 5 minutes in the site audit tool but just thought I'd share first impression reaction. I'll update my comments after I've drilled in to better understand it.
Ahrefs has been showing more than one time why it is a better solution than Semrush and here it does that again. Really happy to see tools trying to become an All-in-One SEO system. I am sure the capabilities of this tool are enormous so I would love to see some of your awesome blogposts (with the fancy header images) that teach some more indepth logics behind the tool for those of us that aren't knee-deep into tech SEO.
Pros:Integrated solution with the power to combine technical SEO with offpage SEO
Cons:Hard learning curve
@timsoulo how does javascript crawling works with Site Audit.
1) I submitted https://blog.adioma.com to test crawling pages, via infinite scroll on our blog. Will the crawler wait until JS loads and perform scroll action, just like human would scroll the page?
2) Does it wait until React components are rendered to follow the links in gird? I tested it here, chose 'exact URL' and it looks like crawler doesn't follow links, rendered by JavaScript/React:
http://visualizationuniverse.com...
@mark_vital hey Mark! Afaik the #1 wouldn't work, as we don't perform any "actions" (like scrolling) currently. But #2 should work. That is, when JS crawling is released. It is still in development :)
Wow, this is great. I was looking at a similar service on app sumo the other day, but it's good to see it comes with my Ahrefs account now. And there's more features.
Starting Price of Ahrefs, Semrush are almost same. Majestic is cheaper. But good point for semrush is that it provides some free data via its free api. Whereas the Ahrefs & Majestic or Similar web is only for rich pocket people and nothing for others. Like moz free api for da, pa you should also provide something free may be limited calls per month or per day..This will only help to boost your presence and in return get more sign ups!
please add a download feature to download the reports in well format (PDF) so, that we can share that report with our clients i will still use woorank for the same.
Pros:Nice feature
Cons:Can't download the site audit reports in PDF like woorank to share it with our clients
Hi Ritu, Might not be the right platform to answer but couldn't resist myself. Why don't you try RoboAuditor from Growth Robotics (www.growthrobotics.com)? It provides the white label pdf downloads as well as let you publish the tool on your website. It's in BETA currently and its FREE :)
Downloadable PDF version of similar style of site audit is available for Free at https://optimizi.com
A Detailed Crawl, one of the best in the industry
Pros:Indepth Crawl
Cons:Very Slow
I use this tool for backlink analysis and broken links.
Pros:Deep dive crawling of the website and good for overall site audit.
Cons:Very expensive. Very limited data is available in the free plan.