As a business owner one of your priorities is to rank highly in local searches.
What you may not realise is that it all comes down to one small letter: ‘S’.
If you and a competitor are battling for a keyword adding S to HTTP will get you ahead of the race.
This is because when search engine crawlers find 2 web pages that are otherwise equal they will rank HTTPS higher than they would HTTP.
HTTPS, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is a more secure domain, and search engines like secure domains.
In addition to higher ranking there are several other reasons why you should switch all your websites to HTTPS instead of HTTP:
- It helps to secure your website. Many people think that HTTPS should be used on websites that handle sensitive information. This is not true; all websites should have HTTPS because it helps keep them from intruders who may tamper with information and lead to a loss of leads and miscommunication with users. You will also prevent malicious ads and spyware that would affect the information on your website.
- If you want your website to render faster on mobile devices you need to move it to a HTTPS domain. More and more people are shopping on their mobile phones and you can be sure that if your rival’s website loads faster than yours users will go there. In other words, with the move to mobile search you are losing a great deal of leads if you haven’t yet migrated your website to HTTPS.
- Another reason why you should switch to HTTPS is that increasingly, browsers are now showing HTTP websites as not secure. When users see this, especially if they are looking to buy from you, they are less likely to trust you. Online sales are based on trust so if you lose that you can be sure that your bottom line will be negatively affected.
How do you switch from HTTP to HTTPS? It is simple – all you need to do is contact your hosting provider and ask them to provide you with an SSL certificate.
An SSL certificate contains the key that communicates to browsers that your website is secure.
All communications between your site and client browsers will be encrypted which makes it safe from intruders and users will feel safe buying from you.
Moreover, as is described in this article : http://webpolicy.org/2015/08/25/att-hotspots-now-with-advertising-injection/
In some cases like demonstrated in the above article the service providers of services such as paid for internet access in for example an airport or hotel lobby can changed the websites they serve up by tinjecting i.e. adverts. It will look to the end user as if these were adverts approved by your company were they never were. HTTPS will stop this from ever been happening to your web presences.
Google’s security blog also mention the importance of switching to HTTPS and why.
Read more here:https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-secure-web.html
Why not get in touch us Total SEO Services?
We are experts at implementing effective SEO strategies and marketing.
You can go https://www.totalseoservices.co.uk/ to find out more.
We offer webhosting for HTTPS websites or we can upgrade your website to use HTTPS.
We will make sure the switch offers does not affect your current rankings or authority. We can assist you if you own your own webserver with the installation and configuration of your webserver with the newly purchased SSL certificate or provide HTTPS hosting on one of our secure web servers.
Just give us a call on 01142 667 996 get started.
