How To Fix Broken Links In SEMrush

Broken links are inaccessible web pages. Clicking on one will return an error message or error codes such as “404 Page Not Found” and “400 Bad Requests.” Broken links are like dead ends that will point a user to nowhere.

They will not only affect your SEO negatively, but they can also severely harm your website’s customer experience. From a user’s perspective, a broken link equates to a terrible experience. As a result, the potential customer will leave the page and search somewhere else.

What Are the Reasons for Broken Links?

Broken links occur may be because of the following reasons:

• The website’s structure has changed
• The website has been renamed or moved
• The linked content has been removed from the server
• There are broken elements within the page
• The website owner mistyped or misspelled the URL
• Web pages were lost during a site migration

How Can Broken Links Affect SEO?

User experience is a major factor in search engine rankings. It can be measured through smooth navigation, ease of use, page load time, and more. As a website owner, your goal must be to offer the best experience to users through trustworthy and relevant information. In return, your customer will stay longer on your site and continue to navigate.

That said, broken links can have a massive negative effect on your SEO. They can increase your bounce rate, lower your ranking on search engines, and impact your revenue. A user that encounters broken links will leave your site with a bad impression and go to another site instead. 

Google will note your bounce rate and use this to determine your rankings. As a result of broken links, Google will also find it hard to understand your site completely since its bots cannot crawl and index your site.

Find and Fix Broken Links

Broken links that remain unaddressed can cost a lot in the long run. In order to find and fix them, you can rely on SEMrush’s Site Audit tool. This tool has over 120 different on-page and technical SEO checks that will assist in finding any linking errors.

Steps in Setting Up a Site Audit

To fix the broken links using the Site Audit tool, you can follow these simple steps:

1. Create a project for your website. Look for the “Management” option in the main toolbar, choose “Projects.” Then, select “Add a New Project.”
2. Click on the site audit card to configure your audit settings.
3. Analyze issues and broken links. When the audit is completed, you’ll see a list of issues on your website, including linking errors. To view any linking issues, you can use the search input.
4. Lastly, update or remove the broken links to fix the problem. If a broken link is an external backlink, you can raise the issue to the website’s owner and ask them to update the URL.

Bonus Tip: You can also use different tools to check the broken link issues. For example, one such tool is the Broken Link Checker by Sitechecker.

Final Thoughts

Broken links can occur on your website and can destroy the user experience. The best way to prevent them from breaking your reputation is to run a regular site audit using SEMrush. That way, you can determine if there are any linking issues and be able to solve them right away.

If you want to learn more about the valuable features of SEMrush, check out Page Kits’ guide on how to use SEMrush for paid search!