In this 15 minute video tutorial, we’re going to show you how we use tools like Google Analytics and Screaming Frog SEO Spider to find 404 errors (page not found errors) on our websites. Importantly, we’ll show you how we use these tools to diagnose the errors, find the source, and fix them!

Using Google Analytics to Find 404 Errors

In the video, we review using both standard Page Reports and Custom GA Reports to find 404 errors. While standard reports are okay to use, we recommend using one of our free Google Analytics templates which have the right filters applied to help you with this.

Mentioned in this video

  • Google Analytics Template to find internal causes of 404 errors (internal broken links): https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=0ni9x2CITjSwV1zcVNELAQ
  • Google Analytics Template to find external sources of 404s: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=k06WPUKrQ0OK4fvOPhMURw

To utilize these free templates:

  1. Sign in to your Google Account (which has access to your Google Analytics properties)
  2. Copy and paste the link into your browser
  3. Google will walk you through the rest!

Using Screaming Frog to Find 404s

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a piece of software which approaches finding 404s completely different than does Google Analytics. We recommend doing both!

Questions/comments, please add them below!