How Does HTTPS Affect SEO?

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How Does HTTPS Affect SEO?

HTTPS is HTTP with a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certification. SSL certificates encrypt HTTP requests and responses. HTTPS is considerably more secure and is an important ranking factor on Google.

To put it in perspective, a website attack takes place every thirty nine seconds, affecting one in three users every year. If you are not protecting the information passing through your website, you are increasing your chances of a cyber attack, reducing your ranking and making it harder to reach your target audience.

The best way to avoid cyber attacks and protect the data being passed through your website is to embrace HTTPS. This website certification will impact how your website collects, stores, and uses visitor information. 

How Does HTTPS Affect SEO?
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What is HTTP?

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is what makes the internet work. It is needed to access any website on the internet. It sends a command to the server to fetch the web page corresponding to your URL.

What is HTTPS?

HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) works the same way, except all the data going through your website has a layer of security, also known as a Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. It protects third parties from gaining access to any data being sent through your website. Data sent through HTTPS websites cannot be corrupted or changed.

In addition to this, when your site is HTTPS secured, it shows up green on Google. Did you know that twenty eight percent of internet users look for the green address label?

Is SSL a Ranking Factor?

Studies have shown that a lot of the top websites do not load securely, but this does not mean HTTPS is irrelevant to SEO. Google has expressed over and over again how important HTTPS is. In fact, the search engine giant released an algorithm update on it, resulting in sites without HTTPS dropping in ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

How Does HTTPS Affect SEO?

These days, digital marketers, need to focus on numerous trends and techniques to put an effective SEO strategy in place. Simply changing from HTTP to HTTPS is not enough to push your brand onto the first page of SERPs. SEO requires an effective strategy that includes keyword research, competitor research, high quality and unique content, and acquiring backlinks, along with many other factors. 

Don't be mistaken, while changing to HTTPS will not boost your SEO efforts on its own, it does offer numerous benefits:

Improved User Experience

As you probably know user experience (UX) plays an important role in your SEO success. Google wants a good reputation as the leading search engine in the world, as a result, they want to direct their users to the best websites that not only offer them security, but also offer them the most relevant content.

HTTP websites are not seen as reliable or trustworthy by Google, which means you are less likely to see an improvement in your ranking. 

Reduce Bounce Rates

How long a visitor spends on your website is also very important to SEO. A high bounce rate, which is a user arriving on your site and then returning to the SERP, tells Google how accurate your result was to the users query. 

When your site is HTTPS, you encourage visitors to your site, while helping them stay for longer, contributing to their dwell time. Google crawlers view your site as low quality when you have a high bounce rate.

Faster Load Times

Websites that are HTTPS secure tend to load faster. Fifty five percent of users will wait five seconds for a page to load, while seven percent expect a page to load immediately. When you use HTTPS you are at an advantage, as HTTP websites are 824% slower than HTTPS websites. 

Conclusion

When you choose to change from HTTP to HTTPS you make your business or website safe from cyber attacks, encrypting data that comes through your site, and supporting your SEO strategy. It helps to improve your ranking in SERPs, while boosting user experience (UX).

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