Cutting Budget Pressure: Ahrefs Releases Free Product To Help Compete In Google

Ahrefs, an SEO toolset for digital marketers, today releases a brand new free product – Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – to make SEO more accessible for all website owners. The initiative aims to help level the playing field for content creators by helping those who can't yet afford to invest in SEO to compete with the big players that often dominate search results.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) scans any verified website for 100+ technical issues that might hinder its performance in search, highlights what they are, and explains how to fix them. It also shows website owners their backlinks, most linked pages, keywords they rank for, and estimated monthly organic search traffic.

“Our goal is to facilitate the infrastructure of the free and independent web, where everyone has an equal opportunity at getting discovered online. The competitive advantage should lie in the utility and quality of the information you produce, not in the knowledge of optimizing it for search engines.” – Dmitry Gerasimenko, CEO & Founder at Ahrefs.

For those who promote their websites on social media, the Top Content report ranks pages by their median social shares across all social networks.

“In an ideal world, great content would show up at the top of search results. In reality, lack of basic SEO knowledge makes the quality content unheard.” – Omid Ghiam, Content Marketing Manager at Webflow.

Small businesses, nonprofits, and educational institutions can rarely justify paying for professional SEO tools or hiring an SEO specialist. That gives big players with deep pockets the upper-hand in organic search and makes it difficult – if not impossible – for small players to compete, regardless of the quality of content they produce. Once SEO becomes more accessible for website owners, the budget pressure reduces significantly, and their content chances go up to be discovered.

“Great content always needs to be the starting point. However, any result beyond the first page won’t get found. Through our current SEO strategy, we’ve seen traffic increases up to 62%, and Ahrefs' toolset has been a key part of that." – Fergus Taylor, SEO Specialist at Typeform.

While most content creators already have access to Search Console (GSC) – a free offering from Google giving insights on site's search visibility and technical health – it leaves a lot to be desired. Amongst other things, GSC lacks 'authority' metrics, scans only for a few common technical and on-page SEO issues, and shows only the top 1,000 backlinks and keyword rankings. AWT fills these gaps by showing website and page authority metrics, scanning for over a hundred common technical and on-page issues, and showing all the site's backlinks and keyword rankings.

“Google has a great way of identifying sites that don’t invest too much in content optimization and promotion. As a result, these websites lose their positions and fall behind in search,” – Ihor Bankovskyi, SEO Team Lead Depositphotos.

Written by Daria Samokish, Customer Success & Marketing Team at Ahrefs.