SEO Insights: SSL Secure Hosting and Impact on Your Website Rankings

For our SEO insights this month, we’d like to discuss SSL hosting and its impacts on your SEO.   Over the last few years, Google measures a website by the overall user experience to determine several ranking factors.  Translation, the better your website is according to Google, the better chance you will have to be higher up the search results. 

Several factors contribute to that ranking including:

• page load speed
• mobile friendly design
• secure hosting (SSL)
• user experience

Most of these factors are highly technical, and pose many problems for your SEO campaigns if not dealt with properly.   But if you don't pay attention to these issues they can impact how visible your website will be to your audience vs a competitor.

Secure (SSL) Hosting
In October 2017, Google announced they would be giving preference to secure SSL website vs non-SSL websites.  We strongly encourage business owners to move to secure SSL hosting.  Also we have be contacted by many businesses have not moved their websites to secure SSL hosting and their customers and prospects are seeing warnings to individuals are visiting non-secure websites. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari have begun to show more their warnings.  Nothing reflects more poorly on your business to see your website is threat to people visiting it. We recommend that you suggest you contact web host or web design company to implement SSL hosting as quickly as possible.

​If your web host or designer is unable or unwilling to comply, there are a few options to consider:

1) Banyan Creative can help.  We can take over hosting and implement SSL. However, we can only support hosting for WordPress websites or static sites like HMTL and PHP.  Banyan Creative SSL hosting solution starts at $35/mo and it also  includes the cost of the security certificate,which must be renewed annually.

2) Website Redesign:  If the website is too difficult to move, and if it is a low quality website, we recommend your redesign your website website.   We can deliver you a fresh new, mobile responsive design and moving to SSL, which could lead to a significant increase in search engine rankings and sales conversions if your business is now more visible.   Banyan Creative specializes in well designed websites that are built to convert.  Not just be a beautiful online brochure.

3) Word of Warning:   If you aren't able to remedy your website hosting situation, search-based rankings will be more difficult for you to capture in the future.    There can still be some SEO success, but it will not be a as great as if the website was securely hosted.

4)  Be Realistic:  Moving to HTTPS secure hosting doesn't automatically improve your ranking.  It also may not make economic sense for your business.  But over time Google has repeatedly told web hosting and SEO's that secure hosting and information security will also be a ranking factor for websites moving forward.

But the Stats Don't Lie for our Clients:  See Chart here

Other Ranking Factors
Website user friendliness, mobile friendliness, aesthetics are also extremely important.  The fact of the matter is that all these issues cannot be corrected unless the website is redesigned.   If your website is old and clunky and you expect to get more customers from the web this year, it might be time to redesign.

Redesigning an a poorly performing or outdated website has been shown to boost search engine ranking capability, while improving overall sales conversion rates. Depending services provided most businesses, generally recoups their expense through a better designed, more efficient and productive website.   If you have questions about anything mentioned above we can help.  Contact Banyan Creative today.

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Author

Sam Casey is the Managing Partner at Banyan Creative.  We help businesses find their place on the web.     When not behind a computer screen,  you can find him up on the Blue Ridge Parkways cycling with Yellow Bike Tours or making pancakes on Saturday morning with his kids.