Opportunity Offered by HTTPS Move

At this point in time, most search engine optimization specialists know that moving web pages with forms to HTTPS format is necessary so as to avoid a “not secure” showing in Chrome 62. There are also other reasons to move to HTTPS. In addition, there’s an SEO opportunity present when you’re making this switch. This is often an overlooked opportunity, but one that can show a major boost to SEO rankings if done correctly.

Moving to HTTPS encourages Googlebot to recrawl most of your URLs. Googlebot tends to temporarily increase the crawl rate for these switches to try and crawl as many URLs as possible in a short span of time. This is a unique chance to improve overall signals in the Google Index.

Crawl Budget

Most sites have a crawl rate that’s based on a few factors: Page speed, internal linking, external linking and popularity. For bigger sites, it often takes a while for Googlebot to pick up on new SEO signals.

Check server log files for the last few years, looking for how many unique URLs Googlebot has attempted to crawl. Due to the way it prioritizes things, making improvements can be tough – but for this opportunity.

Great Opportunity

You’d always love to ask Googlebot to recrawl the entire site after SEO improvements, but this is where moving to HTTPS is valuable. A large website that hasn’t yet moved to HTTPS will need to be recrawled entirely, and this presents a chance for you to implement some major SEO improvements just beforehand. Take the following steps:

• Perform an SEO audit as soon as possible – this may take a few weeks
• Have a deployment team ready to implement the recommendations of the audit right away
• Test your infrastructure for HTTPS and HTTP/2
• Once the audit has been complete and the recommendations have been implemented, move your website to HTTPS

Once you move, Googlebot will recrawl most of your URLs, and at this stage your signals will improve.

Post-October Warning

Even after you take these steps to move to HTTPS, your website still may show “not secure” warnings in Chrome pages for a while – especially if your audit or recommended change implementation took a long time. Lots of sites will deal with this, so don’t worry too much about it. Rather, look to complete the steps above within a few months to see some serious benefits.

To learn more about HTTPS or to find out about any of our other professional SEO services, speak to the experts at SEO Werkz today.