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Robyn Hardman, Digital Consultant
Supercharging Your SEO Potential with HTTPS
If you don’t have HTTPS authentication on your website, it may be time to consider it in order to improve your SEO rankings.
If your website has an e-commerce aspect to it, you may already be using single socket layer (SSL) encryption to protect your customer data. If so, you’re in good company – as of June 2016, 43.1% of the internet’s 141,387 most popular websites implement SSL and HTTPS to ensure they provide a safe and secure experience for their visitors. Not only that, but those websites are likely benefiting from better Google rankings.
HTTPS has been considered to be a Google ranking factor for some time, but its importance is steadily growing. It has now been identified as a prerequisite for implementing HTTP2, a much faster web protocol that will allow your website to load even quicker. Fast load times are key for SEO, as Google seeks to deliver a ‘mobile-first’ approach in 2017 and beyond, enabling mobile-friendly sites to rise to the top of the rankings. The faster your site loads, the better the experience for both mobile and desktop users.
Of course, HTTPS also enables you to build trust with visitors, and the more trustworthy your website appears to be, the more likely people are to visit it. And guess what – traffic is also an important ranking factor for Google!
Whether your site collects sensitive data or not, utilising HTTPS authentication is a simple and inexpensive way of building trust and futureproofing your website. If you’re getting serious about your SEO efforts in 2017, HTTPS authentication will give you a quick win and help to bolster the rest of your hard work.
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