It goes like this: Google regularly tweaks their algorithm, but once every few months, Google announces a major change. The SEO world starts to talk, articles get passed around, and everyone gets excited about how to adjust their strategy to account for the new ranking signal. But sometimes the chatter gets going a little too quickly, and well-meaning SEOs devote far too much effort in things that don’t really make much of an impact.
Just last month, Google announced that it now officially includes HTTPS as a ranking signal in its algorithm. This isn’t a big surprise, given Google’s emphasis on making search more private and secure. Let me be the first to say that this is a great step toward a safer Internet, and I applaud Google for bringing attention to the importance of secure sites. But from an SEO perspective, it’s essentially a drop in a very large bucket. All things considered, SEOs should understand and act on what will make the biggest impact for their clients and visitors.
When HTTPS matters
HTTPS is valuable, especially for high-traffic sites, and especially for sites handling sensitive information. Ecommerce companies, for example, are a no-brainer to secure their website experience, as well as basically any website that requires customer login and sharing of personal information.
When it doesn’t
If you’re thinking about HTTPS for the sake of SEO, it’s time to take a step back. According to Google’s announcement, it plays a role in fewer than 1% of queries. Recent data shows that HTTPS isn't doing anything SEO-wise. Switching to HTTPS is not a complicated process, but it does come at an expense and requires regular renewal of security certification. For the small potential lift in organic visibility, it’s likely not worth the time and expense, if there are other more important fixes to tackle.
Now, let’s say you have all your ducks in a row. Your website is solidly built and up-to-date. Maybe your team has some extra time due to a slow season, or maybe there’s an intern who’s looking for a project. Then HTTPS might be a good thing to implement. But while it’s true that there might be additional benefits tied to HTTPS in the future, for now it’s just speculation. Unless you’re neck-and-neck with a close competitor for positions 1-2 in organic search results for top queries, you can probably de-prioritize this update.
What you should focus on instead
If HTTPS isn’t your SEO savior, what is?
Quality content
Is your content well-structured? Grammatically accurate? Valuable to your reader? Brand owners should be primarily concerned with putting out helpful content that addresses your visitors needs. It’s valuable to take a step back and do a careful audit of your content to make sure you have on-page material that addresses questions or information needs. You can’t be found for things you’re not talking about.
Similar to content quality, consider the quality of the craftsmanship of your website. Do you have broken links, 302-redirects (temporary), and duplicate content? These are a few of the issues that can impact your ability to rank well.
Meta Data
A core tool and ranking factor is page meta data. Here’s a reminder rundown of meta data you should carefully create and edit:
- Title tags in particular are one of the most important ranking factors, helping search engines understand the content of the page.
- Meta descriptions are not a direct ranking factor, but heavily influence the click-through-rate from search results.
- H1 tags are essentially a chapter headline for the page in search engines’ minds.
- Image alt tags are primarily used for vision impaired visitors by enabling browsers to “read” what the image is, but is also used by search engines for image search results.
High-Quality Inbound Links
The days of “the more the better” in terms of inbound links to your website went the way of the dodo when Google Penguin came about in April, 2012. Now, websites that focus on building link relationships with relevant, high-authority websites provides the most search impact. Focus on reaching out to websites in your industry, community you search, and .edu, .gov and .org websites.
Brand Strength
Mentions and the strength of your brand on other websites and social channels also play into how highly you are curated in search results for relevant queries. Do what you can to facilitate conversation in social media, in the press and other channels. Make sure you are noteworthy for all of the right reasons.
Content Crawlability
There are a number of tools used by webmasters that are often misunderstood and can impact the ability of your website to be crawled by search engines.
- XML sitemaps are an easy tool to generate that gives a clear layout of the website for search engines.
- Robots.txt files tell search engines what not to crawl. Be careful that you’re not blocking important pages.
- Meta robots mark-up is used to allow individual pages to be crawled or blocked. Make sure you aren’t “no index, no follow” on your important pages.
Not sure if your site is optimized for its highest performance? Contact info@laneterralever.com for more information on SEO auditing.
