I'm not a SEO guru, I admit, I entered this world recently and on tiptoe, but I understood one thing on my shoulders: how heavy pages with 404 errors can be . Crawl budget wasted, spider that doesn't find other pages to analyze and above all, without wasting too much time on big words: disservice to the end user.
But why are 404 errors so annoying ? Can they be solved quickly on a site that has importance of lawyer database published more than 2,000 pages or do you have to call a wizard?
Pages not found problems
I'll tell you directly about my personal case: having corrected 150 pages with 404 errors has increased the visits to one of my sites in a very short time and I've found that the changes have had their effect.
Increased visits after fixing 404 errors
Increased visits after fixing 404 errors
But not only that, we know very well that the numbers don't count, or rather, they do count, but there are much more important things, such as the bounce rate, one of the most determining parameters according to Google's Quality Raters.
The bounce rate has dropped by almost 4 points, which is a great result. I have noticed in the behavior flows on Google Analytics that users who exited after 1 click have decreased by visiting other pages. Great!
Think about it: how much does it bother you personally when you are surfing a website and at some point you literally end up in a dead end? You are annoyed, and most of the time you close the page. This is also the behavior of other users, and especially of Google spiders.