Cybersecurity is vital for all businesses, not only to keep websites safe and secure but also to protect and improve their search engine optimisation (SEO) performance. Ensuring your website is secure is critical for maintaining strong SEO rankings. This blog explores how cybersecurity and SEO influence each other and why implementing robust cybersecurity measures is essential for optimising your online presence.
Search engine optimisation is essential to any business as it increases your organic search engine traffic, therefore increasing the number of visitors and potential customers or clients to your site each day. SEO offers your business the chance to introduce itself to a new audience. While many businesses understand the benefits of SEO, fewer are aware of how cybersecurity directly impacts their online rankings.
A secure website encourages trust and provides a positive user experience. When customers feel safe viewing a website, they are more likely to spend longer browsing therefore increasing session times and reducing bounce rates, two factors that search engines favour. Sites that fall victim to breaches or phishing attacks on the other hand, can face penalties from search engines and therefore harm their visibility and reputation. In short, cybersecurity is a major competitive advantage as it establishes customers trust and the more secure a website is, the higher it will rank.
Here are some key ways that cybersecurity and SEO and interconnected:
- SSL Certificates and HTTPS
SSL certificates encrypt data and create secure connections between websites and visitors. A site that has HTTPS, rather than just HTTP, at the start of their web address tells search engines that the connection to the site is encrypted and therefore the user is safe to browse it, increasing click through rates.
2. SEO Spamming
SEO spamming is an SEO technique which fills a targeted site with unwanted content and malicious links. These links are often implemented with the intention of backlinking to a fraudulent website.
Every SEO expert knows that backlinks are an essential practice that takes time and effort, so having fraudulent links put in place is detrimental as search engines like Google can pick up on these and flag them as spammy or toxic content, therefore dropping your website’s search engine position.
3. Blacklisting
When search engines flag platforms that engage in malicious activities or spammy tactics they can ban them from search engine results. Ensuring you avoid being blacklisted is crucial for maintaining a sites SEO performance.
4. User Experience
Search engines place a large importance on the user experience of a site. If a cyber-attack occurs this can have a major negative effect on SEO rankings as a website can be defaced and their service interrupted, which therefore leads to visitor distrust.
Additionally, page load speed, a core element of user experience, is affected by cybersecurity strategies. Technologies like content delivery networks (CDNs) and load balancers, often part of cybersecurity measures, can significantly enhance page load times.
5. Downtime
If a business falls victim to a major cyber-attack, this can lead to hours or even days of a website being unavailable. This can have a significant impact on your search ranking, even once your site is back up and running.
To ensure your website is safeguarded and you maintain optimal SEO performance, you should consider the following practices:
- Install an SSL certificate.
- Regularly scan for threats.
- Enforce strong password policies.
- Keep software updated.
- Perform penetration testing (pentesting)
- Develop a recovery plan.
- Use secure hosting from a reputable provider.
By adopting these measures, you can ensure your website remains protected from cyber-attacks while maintaining high SEO standards.
If you would like to look into keeping your website safe and secure, here at fatBuzz, our web maintenance team can help. If you would like to have a chat about our web maintenance and support services or our SEO services, we would be more than happy to discuss this with you so give us a call at 0141 227 0727 or email martin@fatbuzz.com for web services or maria@fatbuzz.com for SEO services and we can arrange a meeting.