How can businesses create a safer online experience that’s easier to find in search results
Every business owner knows that a company’s website does much more than simply introduce the business to potential customers.
Through it, people explore services, find information and decide whether the company can earn their trust. Behind this online shop window, the team must be protected from online risks, whilst at the same time the website’s pages must be discoverable by search engines. These two requirements are difficult to reconcile, but a few practical steps can help.
It all starts with a secure digital environment
The team uses the internet for day-to-day tasks, research and communicating with clients, but not every website is secure, and fake login pages and suspicious links can put the firm’s information at risk. The good news is that these risks can be significantly reduced.
The first step is to establish clear rules. Staff must be trained to recognise online threats, whilst network settings and regular software updates deserve equal attention.
How the firm helps its team make the right online decisions
Technology covers only part of online security. Employees need to understand what to look out for when visiting websites or downloading files, and a short training session can help them recognise warning signs, such as unusual website addresses. It is equally important that the rules established for handling sensitive data are followed.
What the research says about employee training
Recent data confirms that the human factor is at the heart of the problem. The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found that human error – ranging from clicking on a fake link to sending data to the wrong person – was involved in approximately 60 per cent of the security breaches analysed, with phishing being the point of entry in 16 per cent of them. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, published in April 2026, recorded 191,561 complaints relating to phishing and identity theft – the largest category – with total reported losses amounting to nearly 20.9 billion dollars.
However, the way in which training is delivered matters just as much as its existence. In 1999, Anne Adams and Angela Sasse published the article ‘Users Are Not the Enemy’ in Communications of the ACM, in which they showed that employees circumvent security rules particularly when these conflict with the way they do their work and when no one explains to them why they exist. Cormac Herley took the argument further in 2009 at the New Security Paradigms Workshop, arguing that the rejection of many security recommendations is a rational choice: the time required daily to comply with them, multiplied by the number of employees, often exceeds the loss that the advice prevents.
A large-scale experiment put the most widespread practice to the test. Daniele Lain, Kari Kostiainen and Srdjan Čapkun tracked 14,733 employees of a large company for 15 months in a study presented in 2022 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Employees who, after clicking on a simulated phishing message, were automatically redirected to a training page fell for the trap more often in subsequent simulations than those who had not received this training, and some of them stated that the page had made them feel safe. The same study found, however, that a simple button for reporting suspicious messages was used consistently, without any signs of fatigue, and flagged hundreds of real phishing campaigns before they could cause any damage.
For a small firm, these results suggest a short training programme, based on real-life scenarios from the team’s work, and an easy-to-use reporting mechanism, rather than lengthy rules and tests that penalise mistakes. An employee who reports a suspicious message within the first few minutes protects the whole team, and a system that makes reporting simple turns every person into a network sensor.
The framework has limitations that need to be acknowledged. Herley’s estimates are rough calculations, designed to illustrate a point, and do not take into account rare but catastrophic losses, such as a ransomware attack that brings a company’s operations to a standstill for weeks. The study by Lain and his colleagues was carried out within a single organisation, using a specific form of training, whilst other formats – such as brief team discussions or examples tailored to each department – may yield different results. The research therefore shows which type of training tends to fail, without proving that all training is useless.
Secure internet access through content filtering
Managing internet access becomes easier when a company has the right tools. A content filtering tool (content filtering tool) can be very useful, as it allows you to control access to specific websites. Depending on the features available, it can block dangerous pages, restrict inappropriate content and limit access to websites that distract employees from their work.
The tool’s settings require careful attention. They must be tailored to the company’s needs so that filtering does not prevent employees from accessing the resources they need for their work.
Content filtering relies on a classification process. Providers of these tools assign each domain a category, such as news, games, shopping or malicious websites, and the company’s rules are then applied to these categories, without checking each page individually. Misclassification leads to two types of errors: a dangerous website, newly registered and not yet categorised, may slip through the filter, whilst a legitimate website, incorrectly categorised, may be blocked. The second error directly affects website owners, as their company’s website may be blocked on clients’ networks without the company ever finding out. Many filtering providers offer public pages for checking a domain’s category and recategorisation forms, and a periodic check of how your own website is classified across two or three major providers takes just a few minutes.
A website that search engines can understand
Protecting your company’s network is very important, but equally important is ensuring that customers can find your company online.
Search engines discover a website’s pages by reading the information on each one. If the website is poorly organised, useful content can be hard to find, and this is where the need to make the site easy for indexing bots to crawl comes in (making your business website easy to crawl). The website needs a clear menu and internal links connecting related content.
Where security and visibility meet
Security and visibility in search results may seem like separate concerns, but they converge at a precise point: a compromised website quickly loses both qualities.
When a site is hacked and used to host phishing pages, malware or spam content, Google may display security warnings in search results and in the browser, and its policies on compromised content allow for the demotion or removal of affected pages. The Security Issues report in Google Search Console notifies the site owner, provided the site is verified there, and once the site has been cleaned up, the owner can request a re-evaluation. For a business that does not monitor its website, the first sign of a breach may be a sudden drop in traffic or a phone call from a customer who has seen a warning.
Prevention depends largely on the choice of hosting provider and routine maintenance: updating the platform and installed modules, backups tested via restoration, valid encryption certificates, and administrative access protected by two-factor authentication. Since 2014, Google has used an encrypted connection as a ranking signal, albeit a low-weight one, so encryption matters primarily for visitor trust and to avoid browser warnings. The web hosting category in the Jasmine Directory outlines the criteria against which providers should be compared, ranging from account isolation and malware scanning to the frequency of backups and the speed of restoration. The limitations of such a listing must be made clear: it confirms that the provider exists and operates in the stated field, but does not guarantee the actual level of server security or the promised uptime, which must be verified in the contract and the incident history.
It is also worth preparing a brief contingency plan in advance in case the website is compromised. The plan should specify who has access to the hosting account and Search Console, where the latest clean backup is located, who should contact the hosting provider, and what message customers will receive if their data may have been exposed. In the European Union, a personal data breach must be reported to the supervisory authority within 72 hours of discovery, in accordance with Article 33 of the General Data Protection Regulation, where it is likely to result in a risk to the data subjects. A company that has practised these steps even once, even on paper, wastes far less time on the day the incident actually occurs.
The official address for customer protection
Phishing targeting a company’s customers exploits the same vulnerability as that targeting employees: the difficulty of distinguishing the genuine address from a similar one.
A domain that differs by a single letter or a changed suffix may host a convincing copy of the company’s website, complete with a payment or login form. Customers wishing to verify the correct address usually look for it in search results, where an imposter’s paid adverts may sometimes appear above the genuine site.
A company can protect its customers by publishing the same official address, the same contact details and the same name across all public sources it controls, from its profile on online maps to listings in editorial directories and on invoices. Consistency provides a point of comparison: a customer who sees an address different from that in their usual sources has a concrete reason to be wary. The indicators that make a listing trustworthy, such as consistent contact details and information verified by an editor, are described in the analysis on what makes a credible business listing. No listing can, in itself, prevent the registration of a fake domain, so affected companies would do well to monitor newly registered domains that resemble their own and to explicitly inform customers that they never ask for passwords or card details via email.
The same logic applies to email, which remains the preferred channel for impostors. The SPF, DKIM and DMARC standards allow a domain to publicly declare which servers are authorised to send messages on its behalf and what recipients’ servers should do with messages that fail verification. From February 2024, Google and Yahoo will require senders who send large volumes of messages to their accounts to publish a DMARC policy; for a small business, configuring these records is a task that takes a few hours for the hosting provider or system administrator. A strict DMARC policy does not stop similar domains, but it does prevent imposters from sending messages that appear to come directly from the company’s real address.
A simple website structure
A company website does not need complicated features to provide a good user experience. Visitors want quick answers, clear descriptions of services and an easy way to contact the company, and the website’s structure can be kept simple by taking a few steps:
- descriptive page titles;
- link text that clearly states where the link leads;
- short paragraphs.
Above all, the website must be checked regularly, as simple checks ensure it remains useful.
Conclusions
A safer online experience that is easier to find in search results requires attention to both the website’s structure and its security. Companies must protect their teams through training (protect their teams through training), whilst reasonable tools and rules complement this protection.
Thus, the two concerns addressed in the article – team safety and website visibility – prove, upon closer examination, to be two sides of the same issue of trust, in which people must be able to distinguish the genuine source from its imitation. It can be concluded that a company benefits most when it treats security as a prerequisite for visibility, with brief and realistic training, a simple reporting mechanism, a well-maintained website and an official address consistently published in verifiable sources, as each of these measures reduces, for employees and customers alike, the gap between what they see and what is true.
