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With the explosive growth of ecommerce and apps, the necessity of a secure Internet experience is growing by the day. An SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate will protect any business and it’s customers from prying eyes, hackers, malicious virus and malware, making it an indispensable asset to any serious business owner that has an app or a website. However, marketing teams, and Digital marketing companies offering SEO services should not ignore SSL as some geeky thing not within their turf.
What does SSL do?
SSL brings essential strength to your website in terms of security. First of all, it protects the data sent between the user and the site, ensuring no prying eyes can read, copy or manipulate it. This is especially helpful when using payment gateways to protect your credit card details. Secondly, through an SSL certificate, a website can ensure that you are exactly who you claim to be and not someone else pretending to be you – a concept also known as authentication.
Why is SSL important? Because Google says so
Google’s move to incentivize SSL adoption is a reaction to the documents leaked by Edward Snowden describing government surveillance on a large scale. Google wants to make a point that your data does not get shared with anyone. Hence, they made an important change to the rankings algorithm: any website having an SSL certificate will appear higher in the search results of Google, as compared to a website which does not. As a digital marketing company, this information is critical to measure the effect of their SEO services.
SSL will give you a competitive edge
Adding SSL to your site won’t make you suddenly rank #1 for each and every keyword, but if your website and another website tie on every other ranking signal then having SSL will make you rank higher. When drafting a strategy for your SEO services, it is important to plan for those highly competitive keywords for which, you surely don’t want to get burned by something as trivial as not having an SSL Certificate. Though SSL is only one of the two hundred ranking signals used by Google, digital marketing companies cannot ignore its importance.
Do not be careless with SSL
Careful setup of SSL is a challenge and if you are not careful, unnecessary duplication is a common mishap with two versions of the same page getting indexed – one for HTTP and the other for HTTPS. This will drive your SEO company crazy when duplicate versions show up in search results to confuse your visitors
Don’t worry, most websites have it tough
Besides the cost and some compromise on speed – thanks to does cost bandwidth and CPU cycles – the advantages of an SSL certificate do outweigh all its shortcomings. Having said that, whether in the form of engineering hours, installation and implementation of SSL certificates, or additional hardware, encrypting the transmissions between your browser and the server costs money. For large websites, small bandwidth and CPU compromises add up to a substantial amount. That is why even though SSL does have a direct correlation with higher search rankings, but even the big websites don’t get it right.
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