You don’t need us to tell you that your company’s online presence can have a big impact on your overall success or failure.
Not only are your potential customers/employees/investors using the internet to research your brand, but what they find will have a lasting impact. If they like what they see within the first few minutes, they’ll proceed to the next stage. If they don’t, then they won’t. Most businesses know this and make sure that their website puts its best foot forward.
However, that doesn’t mean that the business is in the clear. The internet is far-reaching, and its arms are only getting longer. That often means that businesses have digital blind spots that can make them harder to find, provide incorrect information, or, worst of all, present negative information.
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at these often overlooked risks, which you can use as a checklist to ensure that all the information you’re pushing out into the world aligns with your operational goals.
Mismatched Contact Information
Your online contact information is a trust signal to potential and existing customers that they can get in touch with you when needed. While most businesses publish the correct NAP (Name, Address, Phone) information on their website, they’re often less diligent when it comes to the contact information published on other websites.
In some cases, AI summaries can provide this incorrect information to users during a routine search, which can lead to frustration if a customer calls a non-accurate phone number. It’s a small thing that unnecessarily damages the customer’s perception of your brand.
The solution? Cross-check your NAP information across all platform listings.
AI-Hallucinations
AI searches have increased dramatically over the past year, and that’s a trend that’ll continue in 2026 and beyond. Search for your business using an LLM such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Google Gemini, and you’ll receive a ton of information. The problem is that, due to AI hallucinations, the information that you read may be wildly incorrect.
You’ll know it’s incorrect, but your potential customers, employees, and investors probably won’t. They’ll likely simply take the information as truth. Working to correct this without specialized help can be tricky, since it’s not as simple a process as correcting a single website or drowning out negative content.
It requires the help of experts, such as Matthew Bertram, Digital Information Governance advisor, who can put together strategies that ensure your company is represented accurately on these new platforms. And that doesn’t just help you regain control; it can provide a significant competitive advantage over your competitors.
Broken Links
As mentioned above, most businesses take adequate precautions to ensure that their website reflects well on their brand. However, there are instances when a user may be sent to your website and not find what they were expecting.
That’s the case with 404 broken links, which commonly happen when users click on external sites that still link to pages that have since been removed. That not only impacts the user’s experience, but it also presents a missed opportunity. A visitor will be more likely to stick around — and maybe become a customer — if the link they clicked was functional. Setting up 301 redirects for removed pages can limit damage, while it’s also important to audit backlinks to your website to make sure they continue to be functional.
Brand Name Inconsistency
You’ve already got a lot of competitors. You don’t need another, and you especially don’t need that competitor to be yourself.
That sounds strange, but it happens more frequently than you might think, and it all comes to brand name inconsistency. While you’ll likely be using one single brand name on your website, your company will also exist on many other platforms around the web. Even small variations in your name (say, “Finance Corp” versus “Finance Corporation”) can have an impact on searchability. Even if a right-minded user may be able to tell that you’re the same business, algorithms may treat the two as separate entities. When that happens, you’ll be dividing your SEO benefits between two different names instead of sweeping up the benefits of a unified voice.
Negative Online Content
Negative online content can immediately stop a user in its tracks, greatly decreasing the chances that they’ll take the next step in their journey. A candidate searching at a thousand listings will breeze past yours if they see negative content in the first few results. A consumer would go to a competitor. An investor would raise eyebrows even before they’ve had a chance to learn about your business.
The problem with negative content is that they tend to stick around. A lawsuit from 2018 may still appear towards the top of the results page, and even if the ruling was in your favor, it can reflect badly. Actively developing content that will naturally outrank the less-than-good links is a smart way to regain control of the image you’re presenting to users.
A word, too, on employee review sites, which can be especially damaging to a company’s reputation. Repeated complaints should be actioned. Individual complaints should be responded to. People will see the reviews, so it’s best to show that you have too.
Abandoned Social Media Accounts
Businesses are quick to set up social media accounts because of the ease of doing so and the potential they offer for turning users into customers. However, they’re also often quick to abandon them if things move too slowly.
Not only does your business not need to be on every social media site, but it also shouldn’t be if you can’t commit to keeping things updated. A social media profile that was last updated years ago sends the wrong message to users, and it would be better if it weren’t there at all. You’ll likely have social media sites in which you’re invested. Focus on those, and remove the rest — ultimately, everything that’s online about your business should serve your interests, and there’s no value to be drawn from having a social media profile that offers nothing.
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