SSL is an important signal to your SEO ranking
2018.02.05
Using a search engine in a web browser has become a common user pattern for purchasing of products and services on the internet and the mobile. From a service provider’s point of view it is therefore essential to know which keywords drive traffic to the web site, and equally important, what traffic turns into money.
Why SSL matters for better ranking
Ranking on organic searches and conversion rate efficiency has become almost a subject of its own. Commonly referred to as search engine optimisation (SEO), it is really all about being relevant and attractive to users and getting attention from the community. Factors contributing to high SEO performance is termed ranking signals. Even though it is difficult to isolate the importance of each ranking factor, Google as early as in 2014 announced that “SSL everywhere” is a priority for the company. Securing sites with SSL thus became a ranking signal and the amount it affects your ranking is likely to increase over time.
As some service-providers may not be experiencing any positive short-term effects after applying SSL to their website, the longer perspective might prove to be more promising. In September 2016, a Chromium Blog post appropriately named “Moving towards a More Secure Web”, made it clear that Google seeks to punish sites that transmit passwords unencrypted by marking such pages as “Not secure“. Further updates to this plan are likely to be announced regularly in the future. If your site handles any sensitive information be it financial or personal, (i.e. checkout or login pages), it is advised to take action to secure your site with SSL and thereby gain your customers’ trust.
HTTP vs HTTPS
The approach of securing the whole site with SSL, stressed by initiatives such as Always-On SSL (AOSSL), is a way of enhancing the whole web experience, and at the same time, providing more protection against attacks potentially exploiting unsecured parts of the website (i.e. session hijacking or sidejacking). Since many user access the Internet on public shared WIFI hotspots, it has become even more important to secure the whole web site.
Making your website more SEO-friendly introduces some important issues to keep in mind. It is important that files used by the crawler (i.e.robots.txt) are not blocked and that all URLs point to accessible elements. Moreover, make sure that everything is accessed via SSL/TLS. This is easily handled by referring to internal elements with relative linking, whereas external items ought to be accessed with secured connection (links should be prefixed with https instead of http). If you have both a secured and an unsecured version of your website, make sure that the secured version is the one that is being indexed.
Buypass SSL for better SEO
As the world wide web moves altogether towards secured connections based on SSL/TLS technology, keep in mind that Buypass provide a selection of SSL certificates including Extended Validation Certificates (EV) to most European countries, issued by our certified CA located in Norway. For more about Buypass SSL EV Certificates and the rest of our SSL product range please consult our resources. You may also read more about Buypass.