Broken links—those leading to 404 error pages—can degrade user experience and waste your site’s “SEO equity.” When a visitor clicks a link expecting helpful content but hits a dead end, it signals potential site negligence, possibly reducing trust. From a technical standpoint, search engines may allocate crawl budget to links that don’t work, slowing indexing of your functional, more valuable pages. Regularly auditing your website for broken links—both internal and external—helps maintain a seamless experience. Tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console can pinpoint these problematic URLs. Fix them by either updating the link to a valid page, creating a relevant redirect, or removing the link altogether. In the context of Essex SEO, broken links might cause local users to bounce quickly if, for example, a “Book Now” button leads nowhere. Keeping your link structure clean and functional is a simple but impactful way to bolster your site’s overall performance.