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How to run a basic SEO audit using Ahrefs Site Audit
Executive overview
Most websites accumulate technical SEO issues — broken pages, duplicate content, missing meta descriptions — that quietly cost organic traffic. Ahrefs Site Audit crawls your site and surfaces these issues in a prioritised dashboard with actionable fix instructions.
Fix errors first, then warnings, then notices — prioritise by link equity, not raw issue count.
Setting up a site audit
- Create a new project in Ahrefs Site Audit and enter your domain
- Set scope (the crawl boundary): full domain, subdomain, subfolder, or exact URL
- Set seeds (the crawl starting point): homepage, sitemaps, backlink URLs, or a custom list — seeds must be within scope
- Enable Execute JavaScript to accurately audit Angular, React, or JS-dependent pages
- Set maximum pages and crawl duration to match your site size (default 10,000 pages / 48 hours; raise for large or long-running sites)
- Schedule recurring crawls (daily, weekly, monthly) to track health score over time
Reading the overview dashboard
- Health score = percentage of crawled URLs with no critical issues (e.g. 30 critical pages out of 100 = score of 70)
- HTTP status code graph shows 400-series errors — these are likely broken 404 pages
- HTML tags and content graph highlights missing or duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate content
- Every graph element is clickable and opens Data Explorer with pre-filtered results
Prioritising 404 errors with link equity
- Add a DoFollow backlinks column in Data Explorer (Manage Columns → Ahrefs Metrics → DoFollow)
- Sort descending to surface 404 pages wasting the most link equity
- Export to CSV for self-remediation or assign to a freelancer in priority order
Fixing duplicate content
- Duplicate content appears when two URLs serve identical pages (e.g. trailing slash vs. no slash)
- Check whether a
canonicaltag is present in the page source - Fix options: add
rel="canonical"in the<head>, correct the internal link to the right URL, or do both - Use the number of inlinks column to confirm which URL is the canonical version
Working through the issues table
- Filter by Errors first, then Warnings, then Notices
- Click the info icon on any issue for an explanation and fix guidance
- Export each issue list as CSV to assign to team members or track progress
- Recheck health score after each scheduled crawl to measure improvement
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