Have You Heard The News? Page 1 Rankings on Google may soon Require SSL

HL News • October 6, 2017

Google recently sent out a notification announcing that “Beginning in October 2017, Chrome will show the ‘Not secure’ warning in two additional situations: when users enter data on an HTTP page, and on all HTTP pages visited in Incognito mode.” This means that when customers using Chrome fill out the contact form on your website, the address field at the top of the browser will change to say ‘Not Secure’.

This year 43% of the visits to the websites have been in a Chrome browser.

In late April a study was done for ONLY pages where people entered in credit card info or passwords and there was a 23% drop in people filling out the form. In the change coming in October, this will be displayed on ALL pages when a form is being filled out if it is not on a SSL secured website.

Below is how the top address field will look:

Google is reporting that as of October of 2017 all sites that are not using HTTPS will have a ‘NOT SECURE’ notice pop up on the URL bar as soon as users start filling out any form for users using Chrome. This may have a drastic impact on any potential clients filling out the contact form on your website. This is even more important when considering that almost 45% of the people going to your website are using Chrome as their primary browser.

What does that mean for the rankings of my site?

Based on a recent study from Moz (a respected site devoted to SEO) HALF of all sites that are on page 1 of a Google search are using HTTPS, up from 30% about 9 months ago. If this trend continues about 65%-70% of sites listed on page 1 will be sites with a SSL certificate using HTTPS by the end of the year. Not having a SSL certificate may significantly impact your ability to rank on the first page of Google.

[us_btn text=”Contact us today to get your site up and running with a SSL certificate!” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fheartlandlogic.com%2Fssl-request-form%2F|||”]

References:
https://blog.chromium.org/2017/04/next-steps-toward-more-connection.html
https://moz.com/blog/half-page-one-google-results-https
https://yoast.com/web-https/