A great way to approach this comes from SEO expert Jeff Oxford, who explained on eCommerce Evolution that he organizes all SEO work into four buckets: Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, Content, and Link Building. Broken links and 404 errors fall squarely into that first bucket, Technical SEO, which is the foundational layer everything else is built on.
The process starts with accepting that your website is never truly 'done'. On the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, Steve Chou talked about how sites are constantly changing and it’s easy to get careless over the years with things like redirects and broken links. That's why the first step is to run a complete site audit. This isn't just a quick check, but a comprehensive crawl of your entire site specifically to find these issues. You have to actively look for them, because they multiply over time.
Once you're running an audit, you'll begin identifying the errors. Ismail, the SEO lead at Pilothouse, called this out on the DTC Podcast as one of the most common technical SEO mistakes brands make. These 404 errors can hide in plain sight. As Anthony Blatner mentioned on Honest Ecommerce, a classic example is a homepage slider that was built when the store launched. The products featured in it might have been discontinued months ago, but the links remain, leading new visitors to a dead end. You have to check everything, from old blog posts and navigation menus to marketing landing pages, to ensure the customer journey is smooth.
After you have a list of broken links, the next step is fixing them. The primary tool for this is the 301 redirect. In an SEO teardown on The EcomCrew Ecommerce Podcast, Jeff Oxford stressed the importance of 301 redirecting old pages to their new equivalent, especially after a site migration. Ismail reinforces this, noting that you should redirect the broken URL to the next most relevant live page. This tells both users and search engines where to find the content they were looking for, and it passes along any SEO authority the old link had. For pages where a direct replacement doesn't exist, he suggests creating a helpful custom 404 page that guides the user back to your site's main categories.
The place where Jeff Oxford's four-bucket framework can break down is if you treat the buckets as totally separate silos. A broken link isn't just a technical problem to be checked off a list. That broken link could be in a cornerstone blog post (the Content bucket) that was earning valuable backlinks (the Link Building bucket). By letting the technical issue fester, you neutralize the power of your other work. Fixing the 404 isn't just about cleaning up an error report; it’s about restoring the value of your content and ensuring your hard-won authority isn't leaking away through dead ends.