Description
Automate content audits and grow organic traffic to your WordPress website with Ahrefs SEO plugin.
The Ahrefs WP plugin shows you how each article on your blog performs for a chosen target keyword based on Ahrefs, GA and GSC data. Then, it suggests what you can do to improve their performance.
Content audits
Most of us are so focused on publishing new content that we neglect the content we already have.
This is a mistake because not everything you publish will be a home run. Sometimes, it’ll fail to rank on Google, or convert, or contribute to your business goals in any meaningful way.
When this happens, you shouldn’t just leave the page to die a slow, painful death. You should revisit it, figure out what went wrong, and take action to improve its performance.
The Ahrefs WP plugin automates the entire content audit process and kicks back recommendations.
Related guide: How to Do a Content Audit
Unique to Ahrefs SEO plugin
There are a lot of other SEO plugins in the market. So you must be thinking, why another one? Since the Ahrefs WordPress plugin focuses on content audits, it complements other SEO plugins rather than replaces them.
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Content audit
The plugin regularly conducts content audits of your website and gives actionable suggestions on improving article performance for a target keyword based on Ahrefs, GA and GSC data. -
Performance score
The plugin puts audited pages in 1 of 3 buckets based on their performance (well-performing, under-performing, non-performing). Besides evaluating individual pages, it also calculates the performance score that reflects the overall performance of the website’s content -
Integration with GA and GSC
We don’t just pull data into your WordPress Admin and show you the same information that you can see on your GA and GSC dashboards. Your GSC and GA connection helps us to provide you with better target keyword recommendations and ideas of what to do next, so you can take actionable steps towards getting more search traffic. All GA and GSC data is stored in your website’s database and is never sent to Ahrefs. -
Integration with other SEO plugins
If you have preconfigured target keywords in Yoast, RankMath or AIOSEO, you don’t need to enter them in our plugin. Ahrefs SEO will pull and update them automatically with every content audit.
And the usual best-practices
Other than the unique features, we make sure that we adhere to the best-practices for WordPress plugin development.
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Lightning fast
The plugin puts a minimal load on your WordPress servers. -
Easy to setup and configure
The setup wizard is a three step configuration that gets you started in less than 5 minutes.
Read more
Screenshots
Simple setup wizard with Ahrefs and Google connectors 
Audit your website content to improve your Performance Score and optimize your organic traffic 
Get suggested actions for each of the page on your site 
Set or change target keywords for your pages based on target phrases from other plugins, top queries from Search Console or our analysis
Installation
Getting started with Ahrefs SEO consists of just two simple steps: installing and setting up the plugin.
From within WordPress
- Visit ‘Plugins > Add New’
- Search for ‘Ahrefs SEO’
- Install Ahrefs SEO once it appears
- Activate Ahrefs SEO from your Plugins page;
- Go to “after activation” below.
Manually
- Upload the ‘ahrefs-seo’ folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory;
- Activate the Ahrefs SEO plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress;
- Go to ‘after activation’ below.
After Activation
- Click on the Ahrefs SEO tab;
- You should see the Ahrefs SEO setup wizard;
- Go through the setup wizard and follow the steps to connect Ahrefs to your site;
- Voila, that’s it – you’re ready to use the plugin!
FAQ
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Can I use the plugin if I am not a paying customer of Ahrefs?
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Yes you can. You can opt for a free Authorization code during the plugin activation and perform a full content audit for your site. However, the free code is temporary and expires every few weeks, so you’ll have to reconnect the plugin each time this happens.
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I am a paying customer of Ahrefs. How does this affect my subscription?
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Your subscription of Ahrefs comes with Integration Rows that will be consumed with each API request. You can check the remaining balance in the plugin under ‘Settings’ or in your Ahrefs account under ‘API profile’.
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How does the content audit in Ahrefs SEO plugin work?
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A content audit is where you analyze the performance of all content on your site to determine whether it should be kept as-is, updated, deleted, consolidated, or redirected.
This results in a healthier site with fewer underperforming low-quality pages.
It’s the online equivalent of a spring clean. You’re getting rid of anything and everything you don’t need and freshening up the place for your visitors—and Google.
Read more about how the plugin works here.
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Do I need to connect Ahrefs & Google accounts for this plugin to work?
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Ahrefs, Google Analytics & Google Search Console are required connections for the plugin to work. Giving actual site organic traffic & keyword position data to the plugin will allow the content audit to perform optimally, giving you better and more accurate recommendations.
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Does this replace other SEO plugins that I have installed?
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No this does not. The Ahrefs SEO plugin focuses on auditing your site content and is meant to work alongside some of your favorite WordPress SEO plugins.
It works perfectly well with other plugins like Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress.
Reviews
Contributors & Developers
“Ahrefs SEO” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
“Ahrefs SEO” has been translated into 1 locale. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate “Ahrefs SEO” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
0.10.4
Release date: September 4th, 2024
Integration with AIOSEO plugin has been restored following recent updates to AIOSEO. Errors caused by the update have been resolved, and target keyword syncing is now working properly again.
0.10.3
Release date: July 15th, 2024
The Ahrefs SEO 0.10.3 release includes minor bug fixes and small improvements.
0.10.2
Release date: November 8th, 2023
In the new Ahrefs SEO 0.10.2 release, we added the ability to cancel a running audit. Now, if you want to change the settings of an already running audit, you will not need to wait for it to complete. Just cancel and start again. In addition to that, we made a couple of small UI improvements and a few minor bug fixes.
0.10.1
Release date: June 8th, 2023
The Ahrefs SEO 0.10.1 release includes a bunch of small improvements and bug fixes.
0.10.0
Release date: December 23th, 2022
The new Ahrefs SEO v.0.10.0 release makes it easier to connect your Google account to the plugin. The plugin now asks for fewer permissions on Google’s oauth consent screen. The whole authorization process is now simpler and takes fewer steps in the UI.
0.9.12
Release date: November 24th, 2022
The Ahrefs SEO 0.9.12 release includes updates in GA4 API functions due to changes in the Google Analytics API, as well as usual minor bug fixes and small improvements.
0.9.11
Release date: November 8th, 2022
In the new Ahrefs SEO 0.9.11 release, we’re switching the plugin to Google’s new and more secure authorization flow for third-party apps. To continue using the Ahrefs SEO plugin, please go to Settings and reconnect your Google account before December 31, 2022.
0.9.10
Release date: September 9th, 2022
The Ahrefs SEO 0.9.10 release includes minor bug fixes and small improvements.
0.9.9
Release date: July 15th, 2022
The Ahrefs SEO 0.9.9 release includes minor bug fixes and small improvements.
0.9.8
Release date: May 23rd, 2022
The new Ahrefs SEO 0.9.8 release greatly improves on content suggestions. Our recommendations for improving your rankings are now more actionable and targeted for each article.
Notable improvements:
- Additional keywords the page is ranking for outside of the top 3 positions. There’s an opportunity to better optimize content for these keywords and improve rankings and traffic to the page. Since a post may simply lack comprehensiveness, a list of the underperforming keywords can help you figure out important subtopics you may have missed or not fully covered.
- Number of referring domains linking to the page. Compare it with your competitors on the SERP to check if you have enough backlinks to potentially rank for your target keyword.
- For the redirect recommendation, we now show other pages of your site linking to the current one so that you can swap out any internal links pointing to the redirect.
And as always, we did a bunch of smaller improvements and bug fixes.
0.9.7
Release date: April 26th, 2022
The new Ahrefs SEO v.0.9.7 release includes several small but long-awaited improvements:
- Content audit data management has become more flexible. You can now choose to either keep or delete all audit data from your website’s database when you uninstall the plugin.
- Sometimes, WordPress sites have different settings and plugins installed that affect non-canonical, noindex and redirect tags on pages. Because of that, the Ahrefs SEO plugin can incorrectly assign those statuses to pages on occasion and automatically exclude them from the audit. Now, you can manually include such articles in your audits and reset their assigned status.
- The Select target keyword modal design was improved. It now fits better in smaller displays.
- And as always, we did a bunch of other small improvements and bug fixes.
0.9.6
Release date: March 22nd, 2022
With the new Ahrefs SEO 0.9.6 release, you can now select a specific country in your plugin settings to make your content audit results more accurate.
Before, we always showed the average position for target keywords across all countries. So if a website did business in the UK and ranked well there, but ranked pretty low in average position worldwide, we reported that their content was performing poorly. Now, they can select “UK” in the plugin settings and see that they’re performing well in their country of choice.
0.9.5
Release date: March 9th, 2022
The new Ahrefs SEO 0.9.5 release is dedicated to one big feature: support for user roles. If there are several people working on articles for your website, they can now all access the Content audit report and monitor the performance of their articles. Here’s how it works:
- Authors now have access to the results of content audits and can modify their articles.
- In addition to that, Editors can run new content audits, export content audit reports, and customize the scope of audits.
- Admins have full access to plugin settings, can change the audit schedule, and manage connected Google and Ahrefs accounts.
0.9.4
Release date: February 14th, 2022
The new Ahrefs SEO 0.9.4 release adds two long-requested features:
- Export of the Content audit report. Now you can export to a CSV file all metrics for all analyzed articles or only for articles with a selected performance status.
- Include tag pages in audit. If your tag pages are intended to rank in organic search, you can now include them in your content audit.
This release also contains a bunch of smaller improvements and bug fixes:
- Support for more specific GA and GSC configurations and improved auto-detection of the best profiles.
- Updated UI for the Scope of audit settings.
- Resolved some incompatibility with the Redirection plugin.
- Improved handling of the plugin and website configuration errors.
- Fixed a bug where pagination was reset after manually including or excluding an article.
0.9.3
Release date: January 18th, 2022
- Updated GA Admin API functions due to changes in the API.
0.9.2
Release date: January 13th, 2022
The new Ahrefs SEO 0.9.2 release brings a couple of new features:
- We now support the Redirection plugin. If you have redirects set there, we’ll know and automatically exclude redirected articles from the audit.
- It’s now possible to adjust the speed of scheduled audits. Look for the “Delay between requests” option in the plugin settings.
- And as usual, we did a bunch of smaller improvements and bug fixes.
0.9.1
Release date: December 2nd, 2021
The new Ahrefs SEO 0.9.1 release is focused on canonical tags:
- Identifying non-canonical posts. We now recognize non-canonical posts and automatically exclude them from the audit. We support canonical tags set in Yoast, RankMath, AIOSEO and in WordPress itself.
- Support for the primary category set in Yoast. Previously, if your post fell under multiple categories and you included a category in your URL permalinks, we might not have correctly identified the primary category set in Yoast and hence analyzed an incorrect URL. This has been fixed.
Other improvements:
- Audit progress indication. This is now more responsive and smoother. In the past, it might have seemed like the audit was stuck, especially on larger websites. But now, the real-time audit completion percentages let you know that all is going well.
- Design and description of suggested actions. The reasons why we put a post in a particular category now look clearer and more informative.
- Some other small bug fixes and improvements.
0.9.0
Release date: November 10th, 2021
With the new Ahrefs SEO 0.9.0 release, you can now import target keywords from AIOSEO in addition to the two plugins we already support: Yoast and RankMath.
We also improved the handling and reporting of misconfiguration and server errors during DB upgrades, plus fixed a bunch of smaller bugs.