Five free Ahrefs SEO tools and how to use them together

Executive overview

Most SEO tools cost money, but Ahrefs offers 14 free tools — five of which form a practical workflow for any site owner. Together they cover technical health, backlink analysis, keyword research, SERP assessment, and on-page auditing.

Used in sequence, these five tools take you from site health to ranking opportunities without spending anything.

Site health with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT)

• AWT gives you access to Site Audit and Site Explorer for any site you own.
• Site Audit scans for 100+ technical and on-page issues, organised into reports with fix guidance.
• Schedule weekly audits to track new issues and resolved ones over time.
• Site Explorer shows domain rating, backlinks, referring domains, keyword rankings, and estimated traffic.
• Use the organic keywords report with position and SERP-feature filters to find featured snippet opportunities.

Finding link-building targets with Backlink Checker

• AWT only shows data for your own sites — Backlink Checker works on any URL or domain.
• Enter a competitor or resource page to see its top 100 backlinks and referring domain count.
• If a page has strong backlinks but outdated content, create a better version and pitch those linking sites.

Discovering keywords with Keyword Generator

• Enter a broad seed keyword; the tool returns the top 100 related keywords with search volumes and keyword difficulty (KD) scores for the top 10.
• Works across Google, Bing, YouTube, and Amazon.
• Switch to the Questions tab to surface question-format queries — often lower KD and easier to target with blog posts.

Assessing ranking difficulty with SerpChecker

• Paste a keyword from Keyword Generator into SerpChecker to see the top 10 results plus SEO metrics for the top 3.
• Use DR, UR, and referring domain counts to judge how hard ranking will be.
• Check estimated traffic to the top pages to confirm the keyword is worth pursuing.
• Supports non-personalised results from 171 countries.

On-page and technical checks with the SEO Toolbar

• The browser extension offers free features with no account required.
• View redirect chains and HTTP headers for any page.
• Scan any page for broken outgoing links.
• Run a full on-page SEO report or see a breakdown of outgoing link types.