Local SEO Video: Is Your Website Secured?

Is your Business’s Website Secure?

Here is a Local SEO video that I created a few months ago on why making your local business’s website secure online. If your website isn’t secured, then you are taking a risk of scaring away potential customers. This video explains why.

Google has put a higher focus on website’s being secured via the SSL Certificate (HTTPS) to protect their search engine users. Therefore, as a business, you need to ask yourself is your website secure. Here is the video and transcribed version, enjoy!

Local SEO Video Transcription

Video Transcript Start

What’s up everyone!

My name is Lamar. I am the founder of ‘Organic Clicks’; a local SEO company here in Charlotte North Carolina. This is the local SEO chat with me, and this is Episode Four. And we will discuss today – ‘Is your website secure?’

So recently, Google announced that in October, (so approximately two days ago) that they are going to start showing visitors a warning message.

If your website has a forum, or some kind of submission field, or if it’s a booking appointment, request a quote, or any kind of contact form, they’re going to show that visitor a warning sign to notify them that the site is not secure if you do not have an SSL Certificate.

This is very important to add to your website. It’s not too complex. If you have a developer, they can do it. But you definitely want to do this as soon as possible.

So how do I know?

So if you have Search Console, you would have gotten a warning message, and this is more specifically for Google Chrome. But I’m assuming that the other browsers; Firefox, Safari will follow suit. But you have most likely gotten this message that you see on my screen. It says, “Chrome will show security warnings on HTTP.”

So if you have some kind of form field on your site, and they’re trying… the visitor is trying to input their information, they will see a warning notification. And this could discourage some people from entering their information.

That’s why it’s important; you can lose a lot of customers that way. So you wanna make sure you add this feature. If you don’t have Search Console, you want to sync your website to this free tool. And some brief benefits of the Search Console is, it allows you to get messages from Google just like this.

If you have four or four pages, or you think some pages are working on your site and they’re not working, Google will notify you of that. If let’s say your site’s been hacked, Google will let you know that your site’s been hacked, and also you’ll see it in the search results if you search for your website in Google.

If Google is trying to crawl your website, and it can’t for whatever reason, you’ll be notified there as well. Let’s say if you wanna look at search analytics, and you wanna see your page like a specific pages’ performance in the search results. You can see that. If you wanna see how you perform with certain keywords for a specific page, and then the click through rate of that page. You can see that in the search console.

So there’s a lot of valuable information that the Search Console can provide to a webmaster. Adding the Search Console is not too complex. So if you have WordPress, you could download the SEO Yoast plugin. It’s a free plugin.

It provides some really good SEO value. Literally you’re just taking the HTML tag from Search Console, and putting it into the webmaster settings of the Yoast plugin, and it will sync the two.

If you do not have a WordPress website, you can click that HTML code from Search Console into your header tag, and that will sync the two together. So you can get these kind of messages, and analyze some data for your website from a performance standpoint.

So how do you know if your site is secure, or if it’s not secure?

So it’s pretty simple. If you look at the image here, HTTP says your site is not secure. HTTPS says your site is secure. So if you look at the two websites listed below here. So one is a client of ours, their site is secured.

So if I click on it here, you’ll see that this shows up… the HTTPS shows up green, and it shows that the site is secure. So if we go back, and we look at a competitor of theirs, their site is not secure. It doesn’t show that secure green HTTPS notification up there. So you definitely wanna make sure that you’re adding this feature to your website. And that’s how you can tell fully if the site is secure or not.

So what is a SSL Certificate?

It’s the HTTPS – Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. So don’t wanna get too technical on this, but it really just boils down to how the information that the user is submitting is communicated to a browser, or web site from a confidentiality standpoint.

And with the SSL Certificate, there’s layers of protection that you need to make sure that your information is not stolen, or used in a harmful way. So the encryption aspect of it is if you submit your information on the contact form, or you’re going to a dental practice, and you’re trying to book an appointment, and you submit your information there when it is submitted, a hacker or anybody that is trying to access that information they’re eavesdropping, or whatever the case may be.

They will only see strings of text. They won’t see your actual information. So that encryption will keep you safe.

Data integrity – so if the data or the information you submitted on the website is modified or deleted, there will be a notification of that. So you can take action from there.

Authentication – so as you’re entering your information, Google SSL certificate will definitely prove that the website, and what the user is communicating was intended for that website. So it’s very important to have an SSL Certificate.

Don’t look past this. If you’re a local business, and you have a website, and you’re trying to get new customers to enter their information. So what should you do?

First of all is just get a SSL Certificate. That’s the most simple answer, right. Here are some recommended hosting providers at where you can get an SSL Certificate.

That’s Host Gator, Go Daddy, Blue Host, and also have links to each one of those websites. I do know that Blue Host, they offer free SSL with a word press site.

We just did that for one of our clients. So yeah, that’s pretty cool that they’re doing that. Go Daddy and Host Gator doesn’t cost that much. But you definitely want to call each one of those, and try to figure out how to get your SSL.

Thirdly is just installing the SSL Certificate. So have your developer install it. It literally just changed your domain from HTTP to HTTPS which you can see here. If you have a word press site, and you’re on a Host Gator, Go Daddy, and you still want a free SSL and I have to pay for it, you can use Cloud Fare. Cloud Fare is another performance security based system. There are some costs associated to that, but you could get your SSL free with them.

So lastly, there’s two days left. You wanna execute this pretty quickly.

Why do you need to do this?

Again a lot of things I just mentioned, and the great words of Drake. You don’t wanna have trust issues with your customers.

You want your customers to feel like if they enter their information on your website, that it is secure. From a Google and SEO standpoint, you wanna make sure that Google trusts your website.

So if your website is in the search results, and a lot of visitors are bouncing off because they don’t trust your website because it’s not secure… if they’re trying to enter their information, and they’re getting these fat warning signs on your website, this could hurt your rankings.

Google wants to provide the best value to their users. And you just wanna make sure that you’re protecting them as a customer. But you’re also protecting your business to be visible in the search results.

I hope this was helpful. This was Episode Four again. And I do appreciate your time, and make sure you get those sites secure before October hits. Thank you for your time again, and I’ll see you next Friday.

Video Transcript End

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