If you care about your site’s ranking, you’ve surely heard about the importance and impact of SSL on your site’s SEO, in addition to Google’s algorithms. A topic that Google has discussed is the importance of and confirmed that an SSL certificate would have a huge advantage in ranking search results pages.
SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer, a certificate that protects the information in your browser. Users who are worried about hacking and violation of their privacy, with this certificate, make sure that the website in question takes the necessary measures to protect their information. An SSL certificate creates a foundation of trust by establishing a secure connection.
But what is SSL, and what effect does it have on SEO? It is a question that has occupied the minds of most SEO workers. Learning more about the certificate that plays an important role in ranking website pages will make you care a little more about the impact of SSL on SEO. Don’t worry. We will talk about the importance of how to choose and use this certificate:
A brief overview of SSL certificates
Since 2017, Google has been strongly insisting that you use HTTPS on your websites, and to make this even more serious, it decided to make the SSL certificate a ranking signal.
Have you ever noticed that some website addresses start with //:http and some start with //:https?
If we want a simple explanation about this topic, we should say that this extra “s” indicates that your connection to that website is secure and encrypted. This extra “s” indicates that the website has an SSL certificate.
An SSL certificate is a small data file that creates an encrypted link between a browser and a web server. This link ensures that all data sent between the web server and the browser remains private and secure. A user’s confidence in the information he shares with the site is important in ranking that site. This is the effect of SSL on SEO.
Hacking and leakage of information, such as details of bank transactions, emails, and personal information, is a problem that can be prevented by using an SSL certificate.
The effect of SSL on-site SEO and page ranking
When most things, from shopping to education, are done online, it is impossible to ignore the importance of appearing in the higher ranks of search results pages. Implementing SEO strategies allows us to share our services, products, and brand with more users, and by winning their trust, we become more successful in our field daily.
Users are always concerned about their data, and because of this concern, they tend to interact with sites that try to better protect their data and personal information.
Certainly, Google has not ignored this issue, and in 2014, by presenting a new update, it showed that it cares about the security and comfort of users. In fact, emphasizing the impact of SSL on SEO, Google decided to give more points to HTTPS websites.
We examine the impact of SSL on SEO in terms of ranking:
For example, suppose your website and your competitors are equal in speed, title tags, content, and other signals, but your competitor’s website is HTTPS, and yours is HTTP. This is the same signal that will make your competitor’s site rank higher than yours.
Although other SEO factors cannot be ignored, the importance and impact of SSL in SEO cannot be underestimated.
Also, we examine this impact in terms of user experience:
Google uses special signs to separate secure (green lock and green address bar) and insecure (red NOT secure message next to the address bar) websites and this increases awareness about internet connection security among users. . Most users avoid visiting unsecured and unencrypted sites because they are hesitant about its credibility.
Given that user experience is a very important ranking factor, behaviors such as the duration of being on the website, immediate clicks, etc., are signals that Google uses. So the impact of SSL in SEO is also very important because users who face security risks will immediately leave that site, decreasing the site’s rank.
An SSL certificate is only a small ranking factor in a large and complex set of SEO strategies. In this way, you cannot rely only on the SSL certificate to improve your ranking performance and ignore other ranking factors due to the effect of SSL on the site’s SEO. Besides this certificate, you should also pay attention to technical SEO, content marketing, and other tactics and take the necessary measures to improve the performance of your internet business.
One important note!
If you plan to start your internet business or win the competition with your competitors, you can start the first step by preparing a virtual server. Implementing SEO strategies and using a powerful virtual server is the best thing you can do for the success of your business.
What should you do regarding the impact of SSL on your site’s SEO?
To get the most out of SSL and increase your ranking potential, you should enable SSL encryption on every website page.
Websites often include this certificate for some important pages but do not do it at all. Google provides results on a page-by-page basis, not on a site-wide basis. In this way, the sorting and ranking are done based on the content of the pages, not the site’s overall content.
So if you want to consider the impact of SSL on SEO, you should include HTTPS for all pages on your site. Just look at it from the point of view that you have a great blog post that is very good in terms of content and other factors, but because its URL is not HTTPS, it is not SSL-enhanced, and the amount of traffic that this post can get for If you do not provide, you will be deprived.
Also, don’t forget that you don’t need a separate SSL certificate for each page of your website, but one certificate can secure entire website pages. It all depends on how you configure your server and security solutions. As long as you are smart with the right solutions and choose the right certificate for your application, all your pages will be secure and can rank better because of the benefits of an SSL certificate.
conclusion
In today’s world, where awareness and sensitivity about private information have increased, the effect of SSL on SEO is undeniable. A site that can provide an acceptable level of security to its visitors and provide them with a good user experience will surely become one of the top sites on the first pages of search results. It is important to choose the right certificate according to the information and data you receive from the user and, by activating it for all the pages of your website, gain the trust and confidence of the users.
Thank you for staying with us until the end of the article. We hope that reading this article was useful for you. If you have any questions, or requests and need guidance, you can contact us by registering your opinion so that we can answer you as soon as possible.