Your website is the first interaction many potential customers, partners, and vendors will have with your brand. Your website is your chance to make a phenomenal first impression, to show visitors your brand’s personality, your offerings, and the level of quality they can expect from your company. Even for people who interact with you first on social media or in person, your website is likely to be their second step as they try to learn more about you and your organization and consider whether they want to work with you or buy from you.
You invest time and money into great copy, a beautiful site design, engaging images and videos, and interactive content to give yourself the best odds of making a good impression. However, sometimes you fall short. Broken links, misspellings, malicious links, and properly spelled words used in the wrong context can all damage your online reputation. Despite your best intentions, especially if you have more than one person contributing content, these missteps are often beyond your control.
Spelling & Grammar Errors
Article (Harvard Business Review) after article (The BBC) cites how much money spelling and grammar errors can cost organizations due to damaged credibility. It turns out that poor grammar can even impact your love life! Even the most educated people make mistakes when writing and rewriting, and they frequently overlook errors when reviewing other people’s work. If you have an extensive web presence, like a university or a government entity, it’s nearly impossible to ensure that your site is spelling and grammar error-free if you rely solely on human quality checks.
Broken Links
While spelling and grammar mistakes almost always originate with people, most broken links aren’t anyone’s fault. When links are first published, they usually go to the correct page. However, over time, other web properties change. They are redesigned, and the information architecture is overhauled. Often, these makeovers aren’t accompanied by the necessary 301 redirects to make sure people still go to the intended page. Sometimes, pages and entire sites are taken offline altogether. In these cases, links you may not have looked at for months or years suddenly become broken.
Hack Attacks
Lastly, just about any site can be the target of malicious hackers, even if you take the strongest precautions to protect your site. If the big players like Sony, USPS, and Staples can get hacked, how can anyone be sure they’re safe? Now major data breaches are one thing, but on a smaller scale, many websites get hacked purely for blackhat SEO reasons, with hackers injecting unwanted links into pages on their sites. Imagine the damage to your reputation if someone finds your site on a search engine, but after clicking over to it, they get redirected to a distasteful NSFW site instead. Hackers can be very clever in redirecting only organic traffic since most people visit their own site by directly typing in the URL.
Your brand's reputation is too important to rely solely on humans performing regular checks for these reputation-damaging offenses. DubBot can help! Sign up for a demo to learn how!
