In our recent post (Read part 1 of HTTPS As A Ranking Signal For Hotel SEO) we discussed the benefits of serving secure web-pages and now some interesting stats emerged from SMX East regarding secure web-pages.
Google’s Gary Illyes mentioned that while only 10% of the web pages on the internet are served over HTTPS, 30% of the first page searches results contain one or more HTTPS results. This shows that there is a link between higher ranked web pages and HTTPS URLs. So this seems to indicate that Google tends to rank HTTPS URLs on the first page more often than the number of pages served using HTTPS.
Here are some of the tips and points to bear in mind that we have noticed as we make our clients websites more secure.
- Test your new HTTPS site: Once you make the switch to serving the HTTPS version of your site, test the results on all the popular browsers on both your desktop and mobile device, Mac and PC, Android, Windows, OS X and Linux. Check the browser for confirmation that you are seeing the secure version of your site. You should see a nice green padlock indicating everything is just fine and nicely encrypted and secure.
- Add to Google Webmasters: You will have to add your HTTPS version of your site to Google Webmasters as a different domain. You should see a sharp drop in information reported for the HTTP version and the HTTPS domain will now contain your Google Webmasters website data.
Further testing is needed to conclusively determine if implementing HTTPS will give your hotel website a significant SEO boost but for now it is looking to be the right thing to do.
