How does the Ahrefs SEO WordPress Plugin work?

Ahrefs’ search engine marketing plugin specializes in content auditing, an unmarried feature. Should content audits check the overall performance of all website content online and leave it because it is currently embedded in other pages, excluded from ratings, or removed? It’s the process of deciding whether or not. After setting up the plugin, you may see a setup wizard that requires you to attach Ahrefs and your Google account. After connecting the required accounts, you may be able to select which pages to include or exclude from scope. Disabling pages that aren’t optimized for natural search, such as About, Privacy Policy, and Business, will increase notifications and improve your performance score. You can also install daily, weekly, and monthly schedules to run content checks automatically. We recommend that you perform at least a monthly audit for websites that may be updated weekly.

Content inspection is time consuming as it involves multiple API calls to Ahrefs, GA, and GSC. In the meantime, the Pending screen shows when the validation process will complete. Find out more about the factors that can affect the speed of your audit.
You can also preview the report by clicking View Report.

When the analysis is complete, the report will contain a summary graph section containing two graphs. Performance Score Percentage of all pages with high performance (not including pages / posts excluded from analysis) Clickable Count Summary Pages associated with each proposed action.

Below is the graph section, you will see a list of posts & pages.

There are different suggested actions depending on the performance of the page across multiple metrics like keyword ranking position, amount of traffic & number of backlinks:

1. Do Nothing : If your post is among the top three results for the keyword you want to target.
2. Update : If your post ranks in the top 3–20 spots for its target keyword and the target term is unique across all pages, we recommend optimising it by adding new and unique content.
3. Merge : If your article ranks in the top 3–20 spots for its target keyword and the term isn’t unique across all pages, we recommend combining the material from all related articles into one.

As you can see from the assessment logic, selecting and approving the appropriate target term is critical.

You will be able to approve or change target keywords in each row. With data from GSC, the suggested target keywords are based on the top ranking keyword by position.

If you’ve already set target keywords in other SEO plugins (Yoast, RankMath, AIOSEO), we’ll assign and sync them automatically on each audit.

If not, we strongly advise carefully examining and approving or altering each proposed keyword. The target keyword will be protected from automated changes after it has been approved. You can still modify the term manually, but subsequent content audits will not change it programmatically.

If you want to modify the target term, the plugin will offer other lower-ranking keywords and keywords discovered using TF-IDF, giving you an idea of what other phrases the page might be optimised for. You might want keywords that have generated more clicks and impressions so that those metrics are visible at a glance in some circumstances.

While you can individually omit pages from the audit, some are excluded by default:

Automatically and manually rejected pages are not included in the computation of the Performance Score to provide a more accurate assessment of your content quality.