You’ve built a solid website. It looks sharp. The content is great. But there’s one problem—your traffic isn’t growing. Here’s the thing, getting traffic isn’t just about publishing content and crossing your fingers. It’s about knowing what’s working, what’s not, and where the opportunities are hiding.
Enter Ahrefs. You’ve probably heard of it—one of the biggest names in SEO. But what you might not know is that Ahrefs offers a suite of free tools that can give you actionable insights and help you drive traffic without spending a penny. Let’s break it down.
Why Ahrefs? And Why Free?
Ahrefs is like the Swiss Army knife of SEO. You can track backlinks, analyze keywords, and monitor what your competitors are doing. Essentially, all the things that make Google sit up and take notice. Here’s the good news; you don’t need a premium subscription to start making progress. Ahrefs’ Free Tools give you just enough firepower to make smarter decisions and build a traffic-generating machine. If you’ve been wondering whether free tools can really move the needle, here’s a tip: they absolutely can, but only if you use them consistently and strategically. At Design Theory, we’ve seen firsthand how small, focused efforts can add up to big wins when you know where to look.
Step 1: Start with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT)
Let’s kick things off with the foundation—Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT). Think of this as Google Search Console’s more insightful cousin. It does everything GSC does, but with a sharper eye for SEO opportunities.
How to Set It Up:
Go to Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Sign up for a free account and connect your website
Verify your site ownership using DNS, HTML, or Google Search Console
Once you’re in, you’ll get access to critical data on:
Site Health: Identify technical SEO issues that might be holding back your rankings. Backlinks: See who’s linking to you and which pages are driving the most authority. Keyword Rankings: Find out where you’re showing up in search results, and where you’re not.
Our Theory: Set up AWT as soon as possible and schedule regular crawls. Even if everything looks great now, staying ahead of potential issues saves you headaches down the road. A quick monthly audit can reveal opportunities to improve and flag errors before they cost you traffic.
Step 2: Run a Site Audit and Fix What’s Broken
You wouldn’t drive your car without checking under the hood every now and then. The same applies to your website. A Site Audit through AWT gives you a clear roadmap of what’s working and what’s holding you back.
How to Run a Site Audit:
In your AWT dashboard, select “Site Audit.”
Crawl your website and review the results.
Pay attention to:
404 Errors: Broken pages that frustrate users and search engines.
Slow Load Times: Google penalizes slow sites, and visitors won’t wait around.
Duplicate Content: Competing pages that confuse search engines and dilute your rankings.
Our Theory: Don’t just fix errors—prioritize high-impact pages. If a 404 error or slow-loading page is on a critical service or product page, that’s where you focus first. Pro tip: Redirect or fix 404 errors immediately, and use canonical tags to consolidate duplicate content.
Step 3: Use the Keyword Generator to Discover Hidden Gems
Now that your site is running smoothly, it’s time to focus on getting in front of the right audience. Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator helps you uncover keyword opportunities you might have missed.
How to Use It:
Go to Ahrefs Keyword Generator.
Enter a broad keyword related to your business or niche.
Review the list of keyword suggestions along with search volume and keyword difficulty.
Here’s where the magic happens. Long-tail keywords (those 4 to 5-word phrases) might not bring massive traffic, but they attract highly targeted visitors who are ready to engage. For example, instead of chasing “digital marketing,” go after something more specific like “how to automate marketing for small businesses.”
Our Theory: Focus on long-tail keywords that align with your services and content strategy. These terms might have lower search volume, but they’re easier to rank for and often lead to higher conversion rates.
Step 4: Analyze Your Competitors with Site Explorer
If you want to win the game, you need to know what the competition is doing. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer gives you a backstage pass to your competitors’ strategies so you can learn from their wins (and their mistakes).
How to Use It:
Go to Ahrefs Site Explorer.
Enter a competitor’s URL.
Analyze their:
Top Pages: Identify their highest-traffic content and spot opportunities to create something better.
Backlinks: See which sites are linking to them and explore opportunities to build similar links.
Organic Keywords: Discover gaps in your own content strategy by targeting keywords they’re ranking for that you’re missing.
Our Theory: Don’t just copy what your competitors are doing, make the extra effort to improve on it. If their “5 SEO Tips for Small Businesses” is getting traction, create a more detailed version like “10 Proven SEO Strategies to Double Your Website Traffic.” Then, reach out to the websites linking to your competitors and offer your upgraded content as a valuable resource.
Step 5: Build Backlinks with Broken Link Building
Most people ignore broken links, but smart marketers see them as opportunities. Broken Link Building is one of the most effective (and underutilized) ways to gain high-quality backlinks.
How to Do It:
Use Site Explorer to analyze websites in your niche.
Look for broken outbound links on high-authority pages.
Reach out to the site owner and suggest your content as a replacement.
Why does this work? Website owners want to maintain a high-quality user experience, and fixing broken links is part of that. You’re not just asking for a favor—you’re helping them improve their site.
Our Theory: Aim for relevance. A backlink from a niche-relevant site will do far more for your SEO than a generic one. When you offer a solution to broken links, make sure the content you’re suggesting is closely aligned with the original link.
Step 6: Track Your Progress and Refine Your Strategy
SEO is not a one-and-done game. The beauty of using Ahrefs is that it allows you to monitor your progress and refine your strategy based on real data.
How to Track Progress:
Use AWT to schedule regular site audits.
Monitor keyword rankings to see where you’re gaining (or losing) ground.
Analyze which pages are driving the most traffic and focus on doubling down on successful content formats.
Our Theory: Make tracking a habit. Set a monthly review date to assess your SEO health and make adjustments. Small, consistent improvements will compound over time and lead to sustainable growth.
Video Highlight | New features recently released
Closing Theory: Why This Matters for Your Business
Using Ahrefs’ free tools isn’t just about fixing broken links and finding keywords, it’s about understanding how search engines see your site and positioning yourself to win. The insights you’ll uncover with these tools give you a clear path to making your website a high-performing, lead-generating asset.
With us here at Design Theory, we’ve helped many business owners transform their websites from digital brochures into powerful growth engines. The truth is, most of them started with small tweaks that led to big gains over time. If you’re ready to take the guesswork out of growing your website traffic, it’s time to dive into Ahrefs and let the data guide your next move.
Ready to make your website work harder for your business? Schedule a consultation with either Jean or Nicole and let’s talk strategy.
Is your website making the right impression? Often the first point of contact between a business and its potential clients, that requires specific targeting and lead capturing strategy.
The Challenge:
Our latest project is for Indelible Consulting where their company website faced the challenge of modernizing its online presence. Their original website, built on WIX, lacked the contemporary design elements, functionality, and mobile responsiveness needed to effectively engage clients. With an expanding client portfolio of consulting services, it became crucial for Indelible Consulting to present a professional and user-friendly online experience.
Our Custom Solutions:
Understanding the specific needs of Indelible Consulting and the ICP of their clients, we embarked on a comprehensive redesign project. Our primary objective was to create a modern, visually appealing website on WordPress, incorporating the company’s brand color scheme and enhanced content. Additionally, we custom-built a Learning Management System (LMS) to facilitate the delivery of their educational courses.
Key Features:
Modern WordPress Design: We developed a sleek and modern WordPress website that aligns with Indelible Consulting’s brand identity. The new design includes updated content, intuitive navigation, and visually appealing elements to engage visitors.
Learning Management System (LMS): A custom-built LMS was integrated into the website, offering four courses that clients can purchase, consume, and complete through a full self-service process. This LMS ensures a seamless educational experience, enabling clients to access valuable content at their convenience.
Enhanced User Experience: The redesigned website is optimized for user experience, featuring clear calls to action, easy navigation, and a responsive design that works flawlessly on all devices. This ensures that potential clients have a positive and engaging experience when visiting the site.
Brand Color Scheme: The website design incorporates Indelible Consulting’s brand color scheme, ensuring consistency across all digital touchpoints and reinforcing brand recognition.
The Benefits of WordPress
WordPress powers over 40% of all websites on the internet, making it the most popular content management system (CMS) globally. Here are some compelling reasons why WordPress is an excellent choice for your business:
Flexibility and Customization: WordPress offers an extensive range of themes and plugins, allowing you to create a highly customized website that fits your unique business needs.
SEO-Friendly: WordPress is built with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind, making it easier for your site to rank higher in search engine results.
Mobile Responsiveness: With the increasing use of mobile devices, having a mobile-responsive website is crucial. WordPress themes are designed to be mobile-friendly, ensuring a seamless user experience across all devices.
Security: Regular updates and a robust security framework make WordPress a secure platform for your website.
Scalability: Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation, WordPress can scale with your business, accommodating your growing needs.
Why Redesign Your Website?
A website redesign can significantly impact your business. Here are some reasons why a small business might need to consider a website redesign:
Outdated Design: An old or outdated website can make your business appear unprofessional and out of touch.
Poor User Experience: A confusing or difficult-to-navigate website can frustrate visitors and drive potential clients away.
Lack of Mobile Responsiveness: With more people accessing the internet via mobile devices, a non-responsive website can result in lost opportunities.
Low Conversion Rates: If your website is not effectively converting visitors into clients, it may be time for a redesign.
SEO Performance: An outdated website may not be optimized for search engines, making it harder for potential clients to find you online.
Signs Your Website Needs a Redesign:
High Bounce Rates: Visitors leave your site quickly without engaging with your content.
Slow Loading Speeds: Your website takes too long to load, which can frustrate visitors and negatively impact your SEO.
Dated Visuals: Your website looks old-fashioned or does not align with your current brand identity.
Difficult Navigation: Users struggle to find the information they need.
Low Mobile Traffic: Your website is not optimized for mobile devices, resulting in a poor user experience on smartphones and tablets.
Enhancing with a Learning Management System (LMS)
For Indelible Consulting, adding an LMS was a strategic move to offer value-added services to their clients. Here’s why integrating an LMS can be beneficial:
Monetization: Offering premium courses can create a new revenue stream for your business.
Client Education: An LMS allows you to educate your clients on your products and services, enhancing their knowledge and engagement.
Brand Authority: Providing educational content positions your business as an authority in your industry.
Self-Service: Clients can access and complete courses at their own pace, leading to higher satisfaction and retention rates.
By implementing these custom solutions, our agency Design Theory significantly enhanced Indelible Consulting’s digital presence. The new website not only showcases their consulting expertise but also provides an intuitive platform for clients to engage with their services and educational content. This redesign positions Indelible Consulting as a modern, client-focused consulting firm, ready to meet the needs of their growing client base.
Landing Pages are a very necessary part of your digital strategy toolkit when it comes to your online efforts. While you may have heard about Landing Pages often enough, there are some things you should know about them if you are not yet using them on your website, or if you’re not sure about ways to effectively use them.
This video defines what landing pages are and also provides examples on how to use them. You can really level up your marketing efforts by utilizing several different landing pages on your website with different flavors and offerings of your products and services with items that provide value to your visitors and readers.
We’ve all been there. Some of us more than others – yet still the idea of a redesign initially starts out with great aspirations, then leads to feverish or lackluster enthusiasm weeks later. Let me back up and explain my story.
It’s been probably three or four years since our last redesign of the Design Theory Website. Years ago I can remember when I first tried WordPress and had a blog in a sub-domain while having our main website in HTML on the root. It worked out better than I could have expected and within about nine months I was ready to convert everything into one site on WordPress.
Fast forward to present day, and I can honestly say that I’ve been working on this redesign for about two months. Not consistently, more on-and-off. Reason being is that, well, we’ve been busy. Being busy is a good thing when you’re a creative but only to a certain point. Some of our best ideas get filtered into our client websites and strategy efforts, meanwhile our own website gets the cold shoulder.
Why Are We Taking So Long
To be honest and short, we want a really good and clean experience for you. We want all of our services laid out in a way that is easier to navigate, lead/sales funnels created with purpose, and products easier to identify and purchase. What we’ve learned over the years is that the customer experience is what matters the most in any website. It kind of needs to be catered to them more so than what I think the website should be designed like.
Another reason for the redesign is to make the new website load much faster than the current one does. Realizing that more web traffic is done via mobile browsers than desktops, we have to make sure that our website loads smooth and fast on hand-held devices. Make sure that it’s also Google Mobile Friendly is key too. It’s important to make sure that the almighty Google deems our website acceptable.
Lastly, we believe it’s time for a refresh. There are a lot of ideas that we want to do that include a rebrand, but we’re going to have to hold off on some of those bigger and more time intensive initiatives to be able to focus on tangible goals and a timeline. Good ideas are great but they’re truly a dime a dozen. It’s really about executing and to be able to launch some of our more necessary ideas we have to stay focused. When it comes to our customer redesigns we treat them the same. We come up with a lot of great ideas from improved functionality, new software, and new graphics, but we also stage things out in milestones so that there is always something to look forward to over the next several weeks and months.
As you can see we’ve got a lot to consider with our redesign. It’s more important to us that it’s done right than just putting together a new design and layout without constructive though behind it for usability. Have you been thinking about a redesign of your website? What is holding you back from getting started? Let us know in the comments below or contact us directly if we can help.
Another new year has begun and prior to January first, like most of you, I had a good few goals I wanted to begin come the turn of the year. I imagined myself doing them, I wrote a few of them down on paper, and I barely started two of them. And that’s me being honest.
That hype that you have about fresh and newness is the same attitude most of your potential customers and visitors are also expecting from your website too. Because they are expecting this, we don’t want to let them down. This is why I’ve started to renew the idea of writing a quality post at least once a week as well as post much more regularly my photographic work on my social media sites.
Being a creative you’d think that I’d have a ton of materials for my website and social sites all the time ready to go. Well, to be honest, as a creative we’re probably the most critical over our work than most others in different trades. So below are five great changes you can make to your website to give it a fresh look for the start of 2017.
1: Update Your Home Page Graphics and Hero Graphics
Whenever landing on a website your eyes are usually first intrigued by the images and graphics that are at the top. Those visuals may be accompanied by text to better describe the graphic or also with buttons that lead to other pages or to a call to action or product. Think about how much better some more relevant images could do for your website in better describing your products or services.
2: Change Some Colors
Not saying you should change your brand identity, but maybe use some of your highlight or accent colors in a different way. Be subtle but make a fresh impact that leads to something worth looking at or reading for your website visitors. I’m recently working with a client where their logo is their first name in gold and they have a couple of other websites that could use the same gold color in the logo to create a linking motive while keeping separate identities for each website. It’s kind of like finding an easter egg in a Marvel movie – when you see it, you smile.
3: Use Video
Video explains so much and when done right will capture and keep the attention of your visitors a bit better than regular text and more so than a static image. For those of you with products, how about creating a video that describes how to use the product, how it saves time, or even the difference of your product over a competitor product. Other video ideas could be you describing what the website stands for, why it’s relevant, or better yet video testimonials from past and current customers.
4: Create a Worth-While Call-to-Action
You’ve gotta create an incentive for people to come back. While “creating great content” is the common phrase you hear all the time, part of that content needs to be something that is engaging or offers some value. We’re all used to seeing the 10%-25% off stuff and even those sometimes don’t entice most consumers to buy alone. Why not offer something that your visitors will actually use. Try offering a free hour with the purchase of the first hour. Or suggest this product to two friends and you get this free.
5: Make it a Point to Post Once a Week
This may be the hardest thing to do. We’re busy, there are other things we must get done, we don’t have time, don’t want to make time, etc. I can give you plenty of excuses. But it’s 2017, there are too many services out there that you can sub-contract your busy work to. For me, Sunday nights are the best times for me to sit down and write out my posts and schedule my social media. I’m more in the mood to do it then and it helps me to get the weight off my shoulders when my week actually does start. Once you get on a roll with it, you’ll find how easy it is to keep going and making it a priority. Don’t forget to track with analytics to better curate your content.
