How to use Ahrefs - SEO Toolbar (2024)

Ahrefs SEO Toolbar is a free extension for Chrome and an add-on for Firefox, used daily by over 200.000 SEOs and marketers worldwide.

You can get it in the Chrome Web Store and the Firefox Add-ons Directory.

Opening the reports and tools

While browsing web pages, click on the extension icon to open the main window containing on-page SEO reports, tools, and settings.

You can also use a keyboard shortcut to call this window:

• Cmd+Ctrl+S (MacOS)
• Alt+S (Windows)

Another shortcut toggles the metrics bar on the pages:

• Cmd+Ctrl+A (MacOS)
• Alt+A (Windows)

Connecting your Ahrefs account

Ahrefs SEO Toolbar provides numerous free features, but if you have an active subscription, you can connect your Ahrefs account to get SEO metrics for the pages, websites, and keywords right into your browser.

Feel free to skip this section if you don’t have a subscription with Ahrefs.

To link your Ahrefs account, click the Sign in button either in the:

1. Main window
2. Metrics bar
3. or SERP

Then, authorize the connection.

Page tools and reports

The following tools and reports are accessible from the main extension window:

Content

The Content tab displays the page's title, description, published and modified dates, word count, and H1-H7 subheaders.

Unlike many similar tools, our extension can distinguish between the titles in raw HTML and JS-rendered code. It also displays multiple titles if they exist on a page (for any reason), as it happens to be the case for this page explaining Angular components.

This is useful, since JavaScript can modify the meta tags on a page. Multiple titles can confuse search engines and almost always indicate some technical issue on a website.

Additionally, this report shows the length of meta tag contents, allowing you to optimize your titles and descriptions for better performance in SERPs. In our case, the meta description could be significantly shortened.

You can also take a peek at a page’s subheaders in case you’re looking for potential subtopics to cover. Just click on the “Copy headings” button and use them as a content brief.

Indexability

The example above shows the missing canonical URL and the “noindex” directive. The latter instructs search engine crawlers not to index the page in case. So you might want to remove it if you didn’t add it on purpose.

Structured data

The Structure data tab displays the structured data available on a web page in JSON-LD format.

In just a few clicks, you can send the page to Google’s Rich Results tester or use the Schema markup validator to see what Google results can be generated for your page.

Social

The Social tab shows the page’s Open Graph (OG) meta tags and Twitter cards. It will hint if one or more social tags are missing or empty.

Images

The Images tab lists all images found on a web page with their alt texts and titles. Use the quick filter buttons to find images with missing titles and alt texts.

Here, it looks like a few images on our blog are missing alt descriptions; an issue we should address.

HTTP headers

For example, the screenshot above shows a redirect chain from our blog's HTTP + WWW version. According to the best technical SEO practices, this should be replaced with a single redirect.

The HTTP response headers may include canonical links and the X-Robots-Tag, which can contain crawler restrictions like “noindex” or “nofollow.”

Here, you can see a canonical link declared in HTTP headers.

Outgoing links

Clicking the “Check status” button will check the page for broken links and redirects.

Once the check is complete, the “Status” filter becomes available for broken and redirect links.

This feature will prove invaluable for identifying broken links on your own pages and redirects that may inadvertently lead visitors to destinations unrelated to your website’s topic.

For example, if we’re looking to pinpoint broken links on our API v2 documentation page, all we need to do is to click on the “Highlight” button.

This will show us the exact location of each broken link on the page.

Page and website metrics

Once your Ahrefs account is connected, the Toolbar can show the most important SEO metrics for pages and websites. Here’s where you can find them:

Search results

With the “Results metrics” enabled in the Search tools tab, the Ahrefs extension will show SEO metrics for every organic search result directly on the SERP.

Additionally, you can choose to show keyword metrics just under the search box.

Metrics tab

SEO metrics are always available in the Metrics tab inside the main window.

Metrics bar

You can choose to keep the floating bar with page and website metrics on or off while browsing.

SERP Tools

Ahrefs SEO Toolbar enhances the search engine results with the following tools and features:

Keyword ideas

The extension can pull keyword ideas from the current Google SERP and show them in one place.

The Keyword ideas tab is a slightly advanced version of SERP's “Related searches” section.

The People also ask tab lets you pull more relevant questions from the “People also ask” section of the SERP. Click on the “Load more” button to pull more questions.

Local search results simulator

Ahrefs SEO Toolbar allows you to search on Google as if you were in a different country—without having to use a VPN.

This is useful because results can vary significantly across different countries and locations.

Just configure the desired location, along with Google's domain, language, and device, in the Search tools tab of the main window.

Then run a search in Google, and click on the orange icon to apply the saved local settings.

For example, while we’re ranking in position 1 for “SEO checklist” in the US, our position is lower in Spain.