Whenever you browse anything on search network and if something wrong happen you often come across with 404 errors. Such error messages are shown when website page content is been shifted to some other link. Thus such type of error messages can break the chain of traffic coming towards the website. However it becomes important for promoters to identify such mistakes and rectify as soon as possible without losing much users from the page not found URL. There are number of other reason that can create 404 error messages such as:
- The URL or its content deleted or moved
- The URL was typed incorrectly into the search browser
- Sometimes even a server is responsible for the website or the connection is broken
- The entered domain name doesn’t exist
Let’s understand how to fix this error and try to drive more traffic towards the website:
Promoters can identify the 404 error easily but still there are number of tools online available that can help you to analyze this message. Google search console, crawlers, third-party tools are few of the options. These sources can help you to get adequate amount of traffic and it is important to monitor the internal and external pages. One can even take the help of Google analytics tool to analyze with desirable data.
Step One: Login into your Google Analytics account. Go to any 404 error page and check its title tag. Most probably one can understand 404 error messages as page not found, page does not exist etc.
Step two: Navigate to Behavior, click on site content, and check all pages. When you enter all page section then select ‘Page Title’ as a Primary dimensions.
The above screenshot can help to understand the Title Tag of all pages consumers have visited on the website.
Step Three: Search for the 404 page title that you could view in the first step.
You can take the help of search bar to find the 404 page not found error message and that will help you to navigate the page viewers landed on.
Step Four: Click on the Title Tag to explore all the URLs that return a 404 status code.
Now you can browse down into every page and monitor the real URL which does not exists.
Step Five: You can add a secondary dimension to check the source and medium of the visits.
The analysis will rectify the sources that have brought your users to those landing page that has error. You can even monitor how did they landed to the particular page. If your page and targeted landing page is different than it is easy to search errors within your internal navigation.
Step Six: You can export the list of pages and sources to prioritize properly.
Step Seven: Fix the errors
Option one – Fix the internal error if you have controlled over it.
Option two – Redirect the URL returning 404 to the one returning 302. This will help your users to redirect to the new page rather then returning the visitors.
However the above seven steps are dynamic way to identify and fix the error pages that will help you to acquire revenue and traffic to your website.
