Is your SSL Certificate important to rank on Google search engine

by Devendra Kumar Digital Marketer

There are many right protection laws including the DGPR which came into existence recently. However, for 68% of internet users, the current laws are not enough to completely protect their privacy and personal information.

With the growing concern of users for privacy, Google has taken many measures to protect their privacy. For the search engine giant, security has always been a top priority.

So to provide its users with a secure and hassle-free connection, back in 2014, Google has announced HTTPS as a ranking signal. This means sites secured with SSL will have a ranking benefit over those without SSL.

Does incorporating SSL on a website really help with ranking improvement?

With Google announcing HTTPS as a ranking single, the marketers around the world have gone into a frenzy. There is a lot of chatters among webmasters who want to know, is SSL good for SEO? If so, which type of SSL certificate will help them boost their search engine optimization?

However, for most of the webmasters, it is a puzzle to solve whether implementing an encrypted certificate is a good idea. Do you want to get the answer?

Let have a look at some important stats …

Studies show that only 1.9% of the top 1 million websites redirect users to a default HTTPS/SSL version. According to Quantcast, out of ten thousand websites, merely 4.2% have used SSL, and only 1% of all websites on the internet are secured with HTTPS.

Moreover, Moz’s 2014 survey shows 17.24% are already using, 24.90% planning to move and surprisingly 57.85% have no plans to move at this point of time.

With that, it is pretty obvious still most of them are not using SSL to secure their website. Only 1 % of global searches take HTTPS into account as a ranking signal. So this will have a huge impact on the current structure of SEO agencies providing SEO services for websites with no SSL certificates.

But the question here is: Is switching to HTTPS good for best SEO? Will this help you better your website search rankings?

Advantages of Using SSL Certificates

Yes, moving to HTTPS will certainly help to improve your website rankings. Google the largest search engine giant also encourages all websites to secure users information with SSL certificates.

Google has also confirmed the ranking benefits of HTTPS over HTTP URLs. The search engine giant wants to provide its users with secure internet experience and the protection of their privacy. HTTPS helps ensure privacy and protect users’ data. To raise online security awareness, the search engine gives some ranking advantages to those sites using this encryption technology.

Google encourages website owners to use SSL certificates to transfer data securely from a user’s browser to the webserver with robust 256-bit SSL encryption. SSL secured website prevents tampering by third parties.

These are some prominent SEO advantages of using SSL:

-Switching to HTTPS provides three layers of protection: encryption, data integrity, and authentication. This will help you gain customers’ trust.

- Page speed will improve if you enable HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) on your browser; it eliminates a server-side check and makes your website load faster.

- Sites that load faster are more likely to rank better.

- Getting an SSL certificate increase referral traffic because it increases users’ trust for your business in search engines.

- SSL certificates help an online business to provide a secure and safe experience to users. The more secure your site is, the more trust users will have on your business.

Google to Give a Ranking Boost to SSL Secure Sites

Google has confirmed the SEO benefits of using SSL. According to the search engine giant, adding an SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site will give you some ranking boost.

Note that this will provide you with a minor benefit. Google says that using SSL into a website will have a small benefit within the overall ranking algorithm. This will have “less weight than other signals such as high-quality content.” So the sites not using this encryption technology can still rank better in the search results if they have good quality content that carries great value for users and works on other ranking factors.

Based on the test, Google says this has an impact on less than 1% of global queries. But the search engine giant may plan to increase the weight of this signal because it wants that all website owners should use SSL to ensure a safe and secure connection for users.

This has less impact on global queries, and SSL has less weight in terms of ranking. Yet converting to HTTPS sites may bring you some great positive results” in terms of relevancy and ranking in Google’s search results.

What are the SEO Concerns With Going HTTPS?

Are you planning to switch to HTTPS? But you are concerned when it is the right to move.

Google has long been encouraging website owners to switch to HTTPS. And it is safe to do so. However, it is important to take the proper steps so your traffic does not suffer.

Once you have moved to HTTPS versions, you should let Google known this. You need to verify this in Google search console so the search engine can crawl and index the HTTPS version.

These are some other crucial things you should do as you go from HTTP to HTTPS.

- Use 2048-bit key certificates

- Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain

- Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains

- Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt

- Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible.

- Avoid the non-index robots meta tag.

But what is most important is to know which certificate you need – single, multi-domain, or wildcard certificate.

Choosing an SSL Certificate

There are different types of SSL certificates. Choose the right certificate as you move to HTTPS.

Though all SSL certificates have the same goal –to secure information – but they are quite different.

Let us have a breakdown on all types and what they are best used for.

For Small businesses, blogs, and personal sites, the single SSL certificate is the right choice. It secures one domain and ensures that any information a user accesses on that site is private and secure from third parties.

Larger websites or online service providers, they will need a multi-domain SSL which provides flexibility to mix and match domain names which will be secured by quickly removing or adding names as needed.

For businesses having many sub-domains for areas like forums, logins, portals, etc, wildcard SSL certificates seem the perfect option. It allows you to identify the domain to be secured and so you can use a single certificate on the entire website even if you have a hundred servers.

With all said above, moving to HTTPS using SSL seems a good idea for SEO. And this will also benefit your website to rank well. But as Google has said, this has less weight than factors like quality content. So you don’t need to worry if you have not yet implemented this. However, as the search engine might strengthen its weight as a ranking factor, shifting to HTTPS is a good idea. Choose the right SSL certificate, and a good SEO company proving quality SEO services for a long time can help you