I talk to business owners everyday and I am frequently asked for tips on how to improve a website’s search ranking. It can be hard to say because every website is different, but one that I will normally mention is Https or commonly known as securing your website. I usually pick Https for three main reasons: it improves security and user privacy, you avoid penalties for not having a secure site, and it is one of the best ways to gain a boost in your websites search ranking.
Without getting too technical, Https secures the information that is transmitted between your website and the people that visit it. If your website is not secure, it is much easier for people with bad intentions to “listen in” and capture what is entered on your website. Things a hacker can capture if your site is not secure include: credit card numbers, customer information, passwords, and more. Securing your website also guards against attackers replacing your website with their own (called a Man In The Middle (MITM) Attack) which can cause all kinds of problems for you and your customers. Security and privacy should be enough of a reason to secure your website, but there are even more benefits.
As you can see, not having a secure website can leave the end user very vulnerable. Because of this fact, many companies like Google are concerned with keeping people secure on the web and are taking steps to educate users. One thing that Google has recently done is bring up a very strong warning on its Chrome browser when a user is attempting to access an unsecured site. This warning requires the potential customer to acknowledge the security and privacy risks before it will show them the website. As you can imagine, not many visitors that are hit with this warning even continue to the website.
So enough with the things we want to avoid and let’s talk about what you can gain from Https and that is a huge leg up on the competition when it comes to search rankings! While Https is becoming more and more important, many websites have not adopted it. In fact, only 1% of all of the websites that are on the web use Https. If that wasn’t enough to set you apart, 40% of the websites that Google shows on the front page results are secured with Https. It is clear that Google is giving secure websites a boost in the rankings. There are not many other SEO strategies that will give you that kind of boost so quickly.
If your website is not secure, I would say it is the most important thing you could do to improve the performance of your website. If you are not sure if your website is secure, I want to help you out. Here at PBM World, we pride ourselves on helping businesses and giving back to the business owner community so for a limited I will be doing free website reviews for interested business owners. The review includes a free report reviewing many key factors for your website as well as my personal top three things you can do to improve the performance of your website. Simply fill out our contact form and include “Free Website Review” and your website address and I will email you personally with your free website review.
