Can Broken links Damage your Website’s Usability?

Want to ensure that your website offers a completely user-friendly experience? Read on to learn all about how broken links could damage your website’s usability.

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Ramzi Chamat / 8 Ways Media
2015-05-14 07:59:00

The internet is awash with links pointing in so many different directions. Your website alone probably has countless internal and external links, pointing to other pages of your own site and to pages from another site.

Performing a Health Check

Fixing broken links is yet another responsibility in the never-ending list of SEO obligations you need to perform monthly, but is so important to the overall health of your site. Broken SEO links can diminish the value of your website, particularly from an SEO point of view.

Improving SEO

When search engines scan through your site and find broken links, they will determine your site’s usability as poor. As such, they will not be able to index your site very easily, which will mean that people performing searches will not be able to find your site very easily.

Improving User Experience

When visitors do finally come across your site to find endless broken links, they will most likely give up quickly and visit a competitor’s website instead. Today, people want to find what they need quickly and easily with no hassles or frustrations. If your website can’t offer this, they will not think twice about looking elsewhere.

Improving Revenues

Broken links lead to poor conversions. No matter how long you’ve spent getting people to your website, if they’re unable to make it to the point of conversion then you are essentially wasting your time. This can have a serious domino effect as people are not afraid to spread the word about a negative experience. And we all know the power that word of mouth marketing can have for a business.

As you can see, broken links can seriously hurt your website’s usability, negatively impacting on your business’ success. As such, it’s essential to perform monthly checks on old and new links to ensure that they are still working and leading to the correct pages. Alternatively, there are countless SEO tools available to help you keep track of broken links automatically. These are particularly useful if you have a large website with lots of links.

To summarise, broken links can damage your SEO results, damage the overall user experience and of course, damage your revenues. As such, it has never been more crucial to perform link building audits and ensure that all links lead in the right direction.

We hope you found this guide useful. Please visit our news section for more articles related to link building, SEO and online marketing. 

 

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