How SSL Certificates can impact SEO and search engine results

Although most of SEO experts spend years in learning this field, Google comes out with surprising updates can make all the information that these experts gained irrelevant and useless. yes, it’s hard but it’s the truth.

Thousands of companies and websites spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get higher results in search engines, some can make it, but most can’t and that’s totally normal when you look at Search engine updates on ranking algorithms.

Maybe that’s a good reason to make you take any advice to increase your website ranking, one of those advices is SSL Certificates!

What are SSL Certificates?

SSL Certificates stands for Secure Sockets Layer which is the standard security technology to build encrypted connection between the web server and the browser, this connection encrypts all the data and information that pass between the server and users’ browsers. SSL certificates considered one of the most authentic and well-known security standards that million of websites use to secure their visitors and clients data on the internet.

SSL certificate and Google

It’s not a surprise for you if we said that google prefers secure websites, it’s normal and logical to make the website visitors and users comfortable with giving their data to these websites, that’s the simple reason that makes google give these websites an advantage in their ranking.

Currently, Google uses https protocol as a standard in ranking the websites in search results. Research shows that websites that use SSL certificates get better ranking. in addition to that more than 40% of websites in first search page are using https protocol.

Google illustrated before that websites using https protocol will get an advantage in their ranking because of their care about user security, but it also ensured that using https with low quality content will be useless.

SSL certificates impact on search results ranking

It’s supposed that “security” is a top priority at Google, as it spends lots of money, time and other resources to ensure that it’s services are the most secured one for users. Therefore, google services have secured connection using https. That means that all users of Gmail, google drive, google search, etc. will get a secure connection when they use any service.

Google seeks to make the internet more secure, a large part of this goal is in the insurance of websites visitors’ information security. That made google send an alert to most of the website owners through “google webmasters service” that their websites have registration cells to make sure they use SSL certificates. Also “Chrome browser” started showing “not secured” message besides any website’s URL that doesn’t use SSL certificates and https protocol.

For all of these reasons, Google made a test and took into consideration SSL certificates as an influential factor in ranking the search results and results were very positive. It has been used effectively as a ranking factor but it’s not a main factor yet, as it impacts 1% of the search results. High quality content is still the most influential factor in search results and all research say that its impact will even increase in the near future.

So, using SSL Certificates will give you an additional advantage either from securing your visitors and having their trust or improving the search results if you are producing high quality content. However, don’t worry about the cost as it’s very cheap till now. Lots of companies provide cheap SSL certificates including Mhgoz, which have verified SSL certificates from Globalsign starting from 15$ only. You also can get it for free when you buy any web hosting plan.