Having a secure commercial mortgage website not only gives online loan shoppers a sense of security as they browse your content, it can also help in search results since Google has taken a strict stance to ensure that it protects the privacy of their consumers. Security, they say, has always been “a top priority” for them.
Back in 2014 Google announced that having a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site will give you a ranking boost. Here we are almost in the last quarter of 2017, so what does this mean for mortgage website SEO now, and is making the switch to HTTPS worth it? To answer that, let’s look at the following:
HTTP vs HTTPS
In a layman’s terms, Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol which lets visitors view a site and send information back to the Web server. The ‘S’ at the end of HTTPS stands for ‘Secure’. It means all communications between your browser and the website are encrypted and secured.
The most important difference between the two protocols is the SSL and now a days TLS certificate.
The SSL certificate encrypts the information that users supply to the site, which basically translates the data into a code. Even if someone manages to steal the data being communicated between the sender and the recipient, they would not be able to understand it due to this encryption.
TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol helps provide data integrity, which helps prevent the transfer of data from being modified or corrupted, and authentication, which proves to your users that they are communicating with the intended commercial mortgage website.
SEO Advantages Of Switching To Secure Mortgage Website
Following Google’s recommendations to change to a secure website is a simple, safe and smart decision for mortgage loan officers. Doing so will benefit the security of your mortgage and real estate website (and your customers), but there can also be additional SEO benefits such as:
Better Ranking on SERPs: Google has mentioned it is a ranking factor – and even if it is only a small factor, it may just be enough to give you an edge over a competitor.
The Process of Changing from HTTP to HTTPS
Here are the simple steps to migrating your commercial mortgage website from HTTP to HTTPS:
- Get a dedicated IP Address: It’s not mandatory but having a dedicated IP address will give you far better results.
- Purchase an SSL certificate SSL certificate costs and payment links are on the following page:https://www.namecheap.com/security/ssl-certificates.aspx
- Install your SSL certificate on your website’s hosting account, in most cases your hosting provider will do his for you.
- Make sure that all the website links are changed from http to https so they are not broken after the https switch,
- Set up 301 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS so that search engines are notified that your site’s addresses have changed and so that anyone who has bookmarked a page on your site is automatically redirected to the https address.
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