Internal links are important to have a great user experience. But nobody likes mistakes and 404 errors are the worst for your site visitors. In other words: you don’t want them to appear!
How do you know if your site has a major problem and how can you fix it?
Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool that helps people get higher Google rankings. In this article, we will tell you the story of how Butter managed to achieve 100/100 in the Ahrefs Health Score.
Ahrefs Heath Score is a metric used to determine the proportion of internal URLs that don't have errors.
It gives insights that will help you improve the way search engines see and understand your site.
Health Score is measured using a simple formula which is mentioned below:
Health Score = [1 - (internal URLs with errors) / (total internal URLs)] * 100
For example, if 100 internal URLs are crawled by site Audit, and 10 URLs showed an error, then Health Score would be:
HS = [1- (10/100)] * 100 = 90%
At Digital Butter, we have achieved a 100% Ahrefs health score in just 30 days. Back on 14th Dec 2021, it was 88% and by 14th Jan 2022, it turned to 100%.
Let's now understand how we made it possible to achieve our goal by identifying the issues and how we worked on them.
Issues are filters that you can apply to the crawled pages of your site. Issues can be an error, warnings, or notices. You can configure the pre-set issues and create new custom issues based on the level of importance.
Steps in the process of identifying the issues include:
Based on your goals for the site, you should prioritize the issues (Errors/Warnings/Notices). Generally, errors are the most critical issues.
There can be multiple goals for various sites. Let us take an example to understand the process flow:
We should always cross-check the issues with other tools. We can either come up with a new solution or get a better understanding of our problem.
In this case, we will be using the ''Webspeed test'' tool and the "Ezgif" tool.
The best way to solve issues is to break them down. You can follow the approach mentioned below:
You can perform site auditing using SEO Site Audit Tools on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis as per your team's bandwidth. You can also divide the issues by technical & content SEO.
This is the part where most people get stuck. Hence, it is better to identify in advance who is going to perform the task.
Be it fixes for JS/ CSS files from the development team or removal of glitches from the technical team.
📌 For example - if the website audit is carried out weekly:
1. You could just set a day to focus on the site auditing & prioritizing issues.
2. Set another day for fixing the identified issues and reviewing the same issue with another crawl.
Important note: You should aim to do one thing well. That is why you should try not to stuff all the issues in just one go.
Score movement from 88% to 90%
We focussed on Javascript issues and we were able to increase our score to 90% on 30th December from 88% on 14th December.
On 30th December, we checked our web performance and identified security & time to first byte issues. For the first byte issue, deleting some running processes helped. Additionally, we could see a process was hogging CPU resources. We killed that process and saw an improvement in first-byte times. In addition, we double-checked the external URLs we use to make sure they were loading properly.
We learnt a lot through this process of building the perfect Ahrefs Health Score (and we are pretty proud of this achievement)!
We do hope you found some useful tips in this article that could help you improve your website's or blog's overall health as well. If you need help in getting the same results for your website — contact our experts today!
Do check out part 2 of our process to find out more details.
Tiffany is a Biochemistry graduate from CUHK. After graduation, she worked as a Digital & Analytics intern at L'Oréal APAC for more than a year before joining Butter as part of the Graduate Programme. Tiffany now works closely with the Strategy and Business Development Team to meet output expectations and contributes to managing client projects within Butter.
