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Businesses put time and money into your online presence only to find out one day that it's been hacked or broken or down for hours resulting in lost conversions and bad reputation.
The Internet world can be cruel to online businesses: You can lose rankings or suffer a huge data loss overnight. It can be heartbreaking and leave you with a sense of defeat and despair when it happens, but you don't have to leave yourself open to these kinds of risks.
Here are 5 tools that will help you monitor, prevent, and quickly react to the dangers associated with online business:
Online storage options range significantly in price and features depending on needs. Dropbox, for example, offers 2 GB of space for free, and you can buy more space as needed and host your files online where you can reach them easily.
Once you have a secure backup plan in place, back up your files regularly. Weekly or bi-weekly is generally ideal when you use the computer on a daily basis. Your data backup plan should be unique to fit your needs, as each computer user is going to have distinct needs based on what matters most to them. If security, data protection, and consistent backups are your priorities, then the aforementioned backup plan options are sure to benefit you.
According to Curatti, an estimated 37,000 websites are hacked every day. It might be something so minor as links placed on your web pages that direct to malicious sites or so huge as deleting your entire site and everything that you've put into it.
There are so many dangers associated with your business online presence: From downtimes to sudden competitor attacks, there are a lot of risks to lose your sleep over.
Google Search Console is the fastest way to be notified of any type of a hack. They will send you an instant email when they suspect any, even minor, attack for you to be able to react instantly.
Let's say a piece of content you have posted ends up on Reddit, or an influencer's Facebook page. That could boost your traffic so high that your bandwidth can't handle it. Your server will crash, and you will end up with a dead site until you can 1) handle the extra traffic (which costs a pretty penny), and 2) reinstates the content.
Surely, the first step to a solid online performance is choosing a reliable hosting service. Here's a site monitoring Uptime of the major hosting providers. Your choice will depend on your budget. You can actually pick a reliable hosting account for your business website as low as $3.5 per month. Here are a few good cheap options to choose from.
Pingdom is the best tool to monitor your site performance alerting you of any downtimes instantly.
Monitoring your competitors' search rankings is a must. From negative SEO campaigns to timely spotting a fast-rising competitor, your search rankings can actually change overnight affecting your business income.
SE Ranking is a robust online platform monitoring your and your competitors' search ranking and alerting you of any drastic changes. They monitor location-specific rankings, mobile search rankings and cover lots of languages.
Social media accounts get hacked too! While it might not result in major data loss, it could start a major reputation crisis which will be hard and expensive to overcome.
LogDog is a mobile app (Android and iOS) that monitors your online accounts by constantly scanning for various unauthorized-access indicators. If anyone tries to gain access to any of your accounts, you'll receive a push notification allowing you to quickly handle the matter.
LogDog currently supports Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Yahoo, and Dropbox.
Furthermore, make sure you take care of all individual social media security settings:
@NakedSecurity gives a good overview of Twitter security settings
@SMExaminer explains how to make your Linkedin account secure.
Keeping your business site protected isn't necessarily the easiest thing to do, but it is surely one of the most important. You'll never understand just how crucial unless you end up facing a major online security crisis. Protect yourself now, so you don't have to regret not doing it later.
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Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of MyBlogU.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for 7 years, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Connect with Ann on Twitter: seosmarty
