Business
You log into Google Analytics or your Google Search Console, and you’ll see that you have a ton of 404 errors. Don’t worry every website has them and get’s more of them over time. First off, when someone goes to your website and the page they’re going to doesn’t exist, they’re going to get a 404 error page. The reason these pages don’t exist is because the chances are you had a page there, and then you ended up deleting it. Or someone ended up linking to your website, but they linked to the wrong page or a page that doesn’t exist. That’s why people have 404 error pages. You’re always going to have them, and the bigger your website gets, the more errors that people are going to end up seeing. Usually, these pages are handled by showing a small text that explains to the visitor that the page wasn’t found, along with a description of why this could have happened. Most 404 pages are quite boring, and annoy the ? out of your visitors because they didn’t find the page they were looking for, and they go straight back to Google. For this reason, it is very important that you don’t just stop your visitor on this 404 page and send them straight back to where they came from, but you actively help them find what they were looking for in the first place. Or as Renny Gleeson puts it: A simple mistake can tell me what you aren't. Or remind me why I love you. So how can you recover the traffic and get more leads from them? The first thing you want to do is figure out which pages are no longer in existence and generate those 404 errors. If you go to your Google Search Console, click on coverage in the left menu, and click on “Excluded”, Google gives you an overview of the pages that are excluded from their index. In this list you can click on “Not found (404)” and you will get an overview of all the pages that need your attention. Now that you know the pages that are generating 404 errors let’s make them generate more traffic to more relevant pages that do still exist and are more relevant. Well, you can redirect it, using a 301 redirect, or permanent redirect, to your latest and greatest post, depending on your CMS and your server configuration you have to do this manually. For example, the Yoast SEO premium plugin on WordPress can assist with this for you, but there are also dedicated stand-alone and free plugins. If you redirect those old non-existent pages to their newer counterpart, you end up with still getting the traffic that would otherwise be lost. That way you’re still getting the traffic. And although this works for after the fact when people are already going to pages that don’t exist and are identifiable, it is always best to stay ahead of the curve. Letting your visitor arrive on a generic 404 page that your web server is generating is only going to make things worse. You need to have a 404 page that helps the visitor when they end up on that page with a solution to their problem. You can include a search bar on your 404 page so that the visitor can try to find what they were looking for. Based on the URL you can already to guess which items they were looking for and provide suggested search results, or provide a quick link to the most popular article on your site that drives sales and conversions. Or you can link to product pages, show an overview of your most popular products, give your contact details so they are able to talk to you directly. These things will create an opportunity for a conversion. Finally, don’t be afraid to add a touch of personality, sometimes a 404 page is someone’s first interaction with your website, with your brand. Wouldn’t you want to make this as positive and on-brand as possible? It's now time to go take action and increase your website traffic.