Moving to HTTPS Presents An Awesome SEO Opportunity

Find out why migrating your site from HTTP to HTTPS is about more than website security. It also presents an often overlooked SEO opportunity, too.

If you have forms, login fields, or other input sections on your HTTP site, Google will now mark these pages as “not secure” in Chrome. Yes, we warned of Google tightening the noose on HTTP back in August and the moment has finally arrived!

Now, moving to HTTPS is the only way to prevent being labeled as “not secure.” Apart from the security benefits, there’s a rarely recognized SEO benefit to making the move, too.

Here’s the thing. Googlebot crawls your website somewhat regularly for any changes. Does the site have new products? New content? New title tags? A crawl is how Google learns about updates to your website. It uses these learnings to better connect the right content with the right queries.

But you don’t necessarily know when a crawl will happen or how many URLs on your site will be crawled. Googlebot has its own logic for prioritizing which URLs to crawl and when.

With that said, when Googlebot detects a move to HTTPS it will temporarily increase the crawl rate in order to crawl as many URLs as possible within a short time span, says Search Engine Land.

That makes a move from HTTP to HTTPS a one-of-a-kind opportunity to boost your site’s signals in Google’s Index, especially if you have recently made significant SEO-related improvements to your site. It’s an SEO dream come true!

So what? You want your customers to feel confident about entering information on your site. A move to HTTPS is first and foremost about security, but it can also have a hidden benefit for your visibility in search results.

If you haven’t migrated your site to HTTPS, GPO can help with a step-by-step guide. If you have recently made the move, awesome! Let our SEO team check for common HTTPS migration problems, like duplicate content, and give you an action plan for solving them.