- Nobody likes to click on a broken link on a website
and especially search engines don't like to see
broken links, so how do we find and fix
all the broken links on our websites?
(upbeat music)
Let's start off this video by talking about
what actually causes broken links because believe it or not,
every single website that we ever look at as an SEO agency
always has broken links,
people always think that their website links are perfect.
Usually that's not the case in any website
we've ever looked at and this is caused by things
that can be extremely simple.
As an example, if you have a website
and your about page is /about and you get a new website
and then it changes to /about-us,
well if people were previously linking to,
or if any of your older contents,
such as an old blog post, was linking to your about page
or your /about, which is now /about-us,
that old URL doesn't exist anymore.
That's what can cause broken links.
Now there is a few other things that can cause broken links
or 404 errors as they're more commonly known,
but that is the main reason that people have broken links
on their website, is from changing URLs.
Now realistically, what you should do
every time you're changing any URL in your website
is implement what's known as a 301 redirect.
This essentially means that if someone tries to click
your old page, which in the example is /about,
but that page doesn't exist anymore,
instead of then leading to a broken page,
what will happen is, that 301 redirect
from your server will tell that person or a search engine,
that page doesn't exist anymore,
but here's the new URL of the content
that you're trying to look for.
But if you don't do that, what is the actual impact
of broken links?
Well, first of all as a user,
it's not unless you experience it all,
I can guarantee every single person who is watching this
video, at some stage or another,
has been on a website, tried to go to the next page
that they wanted to see and they were hit with a 404 error,
or a, this page does not exist.
Nobody likes to see those pages.
This causes a bad user experience,
so even if you had fantastic SEO,
but this was the only thing broken on your website,
this will mean that your conversion rate will decrease
because people are now going to bounce off your website
and go to somebody else who has similar content.
But what about the impact from a search engine,
such a Google?
Well think of it this way,
Google is constantly crawling your website
and what's going to happen is they'll go through the code
of your website behind the scenes
and they'll crawl every single piece of content,
including all different links that are on that page.
So if on that page you're then linking to a broken page,
whether it's from your own website
or from somebody else's website, well Google's gonna go,
hmm, this is a dead end here,
we don't really want to send our users to websites
that are leading people to dead ends.
Now it's not exactly as extreme as that,
but that is the way that you should think about it.
So how do we know if our website has broken links?
How do we find these broken links?
Well there's actually a few different ways.
First of all, you could use a tool like Screamingfrog,
or you could use Google Analytics or Google Search Console,
all of which you can have a free version of.
Now if you wanna learn a little bit more
about the steps that you need to take
in order to find your broken links using those tools,
you can actually click on our blog post that we have
about this in the description below.
However, in this video, I'll show you an example
of how we use Screamingfrog for this.
So when we open up Screamingfrog,
all we need to do is we need to type in the URL
of our website and we'll just start a crawl.
Once that crawl is complete,
we'll go over to the response codes tab
and we'll filter it to only show 4XX errors.
This will how any 404s that our website has,
where they are and what pages they are linking from
and what pages they are linking to
so that we can easily find and resolve these.
But how do we actually resolve these
when we found them on our website?
Well luckily enough, in most cases,
it's very, very simple to do.
Luckily enough, it can be as simple
as actually just going into that particular page
or post on your website, finding where that broken URL is
and just updating the link.
Usually it's that simple.
However, what I would recommend doing
is once you've made that change,
test that link to make sure that it's not broken
and that the new link that you've input
actually leads to a strong and relevant page.
Now bare in mind, you can also have 404 errors
for images that are on your website as well.
So when an image doesn't appear,
that's realistically a 404 error and a broken link.
This is also important, not only for you as a perspective
because they're not going to see an image
that they thought would appear,
or that your website thinks will appear,
but also for a search engine
because search engines also, as I mentioned,
will crawl all the different links that they find
on your site, but every single image on your website
has it's own unique URL.
So that's how images also can have 404 errors
and we've seen this many times in the past.
Scarily enough, we've had clients come to us
in the past and the first thing that we do
is we do an SEO audit,
which includes checking for broken links,
and we found that on a lot of clients websites
that we look at, sometimes their broken links
are in a very, very important section of their website.
Now what I mean by this is they may have a fantastic service
or product page that shows all the features and benefits
to a particular customer, somebody who wants to buy.
That's the case where someone has credit card in hand,
ready to hand over their details and their money
to this particular company on their website.
However, when they get down to the buy now,
or tell me more button
at the bottom of that page, it's broken.
This happens so, so often and businesses
are just not aware that this is happening on their website.
It's very scary.
So in an example like that,
that means that your broken links on your website
that you are unaware of
is actually costing your business money
because people who are trying to use your product
or service, trying to buy from you,
they can't because your website
is putting up a wall for them.
And I would highly, highly recommend checking this
at least once a month on your website
because 404 errors can pop up more frequently
that you would think.
So I'll wrap up today's video there.
Hopefully you got a bit of value from it.
Please let me know any questions
or comments that you have down below.
As I mentioned, I'll also link in the description
to our blog post that we have about this
that goes into a few more deeper steps
of how you can use those particular tools
that we mentioned to actually find broken links
and fix them on your own website.
Hopefully you got a bit of value from today's video,
hopefully you learned something
and hopefully you can now go and resolve
all of the broken links that you have on your website
so that people who are on your website
can actually go ahead and take the actions
that you want them to take.
Have a good day and we'll talk again soon. Bye.