Why Your Organization Needs an Online Vulnerability Assessment, NOW

Where does your website rank within the search engines? If a crisis were to break tomorrow and dozens to hundreds of blogs and news sites were to publish about your organization in a negative tone, how quickly would these articles overpower your organization’s online reputation and search engine rankings? Exactly how vulnerable is your online reputation and how can you strengthen it?

These are important questions that many organizations (and crisis professionals) forget to ask prior to a crisis striking. As I’ve said before and will continue to say, your organization’s online reputation is your reputation. That said, not only is it important for you to have a crisis plan, but you also need to make sure that your organization’s online presence is crisis-ready and crisis-strong.

There’s a difference between having high search engine rankings when the waters are calm, and keeping those high search engine rankings while dozens to hundreds of blogs and news sites are publishing negativity about your organization.

What is an online vulnerability assessment?

Also known as an online vulnerability audit, this type of audit focuses on evaluating and assessing your corporate online presence in its entirety. This includes your:

• Search engine rankings for targeted keywords
• Corporate website structure
• Inbound links
• Social media platforms
• Monitoring tools your organization uses, how you use them and vulnerabilities you may not be aware of
• Executives’ online presence / online reputation
• Online sentiment analysis
• And much more

The focus is to find all of your online strengths and weaknesses in order to then strengthen your corporate online presence so that it stands a good, strong, fighting chance in a crisis.

It takes years to build your organization’s reputation, credibility and high search engine rankings, and it can take mere days, hours and even minutes to have it all come crashing down. An online vulnerability audit is one of the most important pre-crisis analyses that your organization needs to undergo. Working with the right team will allow you to sleep easy at night knowing that, come a negative storm, your organization’s online presence will stand strong, allowing you to focus on managing the crisis from a platform that won’t be instantly buried by all the negativity.

Contact Agnes + Day to  discuss how an online vulnerability audit will benefit your organization’s online presence.