No Weak Links: How does an SSL certificate and Web Security impact SEO and the User Experience?

Leveraging digital marketing platforms, like Google Ads, to attract users to your website is only one piece of the puzzle. Your website should validate a customer’s decision click on your ad and encourage them to convert into a customer. Adding an SSL certificate to your site is a significant boon to assuring website visitors of your legitimacy.

In the highly competitive field of digital promotion, there’s no room for a weak link in your strategy.

As the internet evolves, your website and strategy must adapt with it to continue providing a good user experience. We touch on two of the recent developments below from both a technical and user-centric perspective.

Google’s Chrome web browser had a recent update that included a feature that warns users before entering a non-secure website. Due to the majority market share Chrome has, without a simple SSL certificate you could see traffic take a huge dip.

Without an SSL certificate, users will be dissuaded from visiting your site, but your paid advertisement clicks will deliver less value. Pay-per-click advertising still functions, directing people to your site. It will charge you for this click, but the security warning will dissuade a large number of visitors from actually continuing to loading your site. In the highly competitive Google Ads environment, it is essential that you take every step possible to achieve success.

Furthermore, the metric known as bounce rate is a factor for SEO and is influenced by this new Chrome update. With more people leaving your website after only navigating your one page, search engines will identify your page as boring, off-putting or irrelevant, thereby diminishing its rankings.

The good news is that an SSL certificate is incredibly simple, and are a part of Net Branding’s website development services. We recommend getting in touch to discuss your site’s security, to avoid triggering SEO de-rankings or Chrome’s SSL certificate warning. If you’re not with Net Branding, feel free to give us a call for an evaluation.

Google’s ranking is determined through an algorithm. It “crawls” websites and makes evaluative judgements based on what it can see on a technical level. Factors include content and relevance, speed to load and whether or not the site is adaptive for multiple screen sizes. As habits change and the way we access and use the internet evolves, so does the algorithm to provide the most relevant results.

More than 60% of internet traffic came from mobile devices in the past year. Mobile indexing is Google choosing to base its rankings off the mobile version of the content, even for listings shown to desktop users.

Therefore, it’s. crucial to be mobile friendly, and it’s not all about user experience.

Your mobile site’s content has to be of a high-quality standard because that is now what Google evaluates rankings with. If your mobile site has less content, poor structure and lacks optimisation, it should be a cause for concern.

Another related topic is Google’s update to the algorithm that focuses on how fast your site is to load on mobile. Optimising your site’s assets for fast loading time was already essential – the longer your site takes to load, the more customers you will lose.

Now, a slow site speed can be of detriment before anyone has even visited your site! Search engines are taking into account loading speed, so your website design needs to be efficient to deliver the optimal experience.

At the end of the day, Google’s search algorithm is not the unknown, scary beast that many companies make it out to be. While nobody knows the exact weighting of a website’s qualities, the message it sends is simple: prioritise user-relevant content, for all devices. To make sure your site is up to spec, come and talk to the Net Branding team about your endeavours.