4 Indirect Ways to Improve Your Search Rankings

I know you want it…

More organic search traffic.

Who doesn’t want free, high quality traffic, that comes in month after month?

That’s why SEO is such a big deal and one of the main topics I focus on—here, on Quick Sprout.

I believe that most marketers should be dedicating a significant portion of their time and resources towards SEO.

There are many things you can do that have a direct impact on your search traffic.

However, there is more to marketing than just SEO, and you probably know that.

The thing is, they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Just because some of your marketing isn’t specifically done to improve search traffic, that doesn’t mean that it can’t.

And this type of situation is more common than you might think.

In this post, I’ll go over four ways that can indirectly improve your search rankings.

This means that the primary benefit of these marketing techniques is not to improve search traffic, but there’s a good chance that, if done right, they might help you with your search traffic too. 

1. Following up with customers leads to extra benefits

This is a great place to start because there doesn’t seem to be an obvious connection to SEO.

But I assure you there is.

Getting feedback from your customers is always a great idea, but it can eat up a lot of time.

Some businesses figure they don’t have the resources to follow up continuously with customers and would rather dedicate them all to sales/marketing channels such as SEO.

However, if you get customer feedback and use it correctly, it can lead to some great backlinks in a few different ways.

Here’s the simple 2-step process you’ll need to follow:

Step #1 – Contact customers immediately after the sale: You have very few opportunities to open up communication with customers without annoying them.

After the sale is one of them.

Once someone purchases something from you, they’re usually excited to hear from you and possibly want reassurance that everything went well.

Send them an email that confirms their order and lets them know whom to contact if they need help.

Step #2 – Follow up after they’ve had time to use your product: The more important part, when it comes to potential SEO benefits, is to follow up with customers again.

Once they’ve used the product, they can tell you if they’ve had any problems or complaints. This is the main reason why you’d want to follow up—these issues are important to address if you want to retain happy customers.

In addition, ask for their feedback on their experience.

If someone says that they’re thrilled, that’s great. Then you should ask them to share their experience with others. Since they enjoyed your product or service so much, you’ll get a high percentage of these customers willing to help you out.

You have a few options that can help with SEO.

If you’d like to ask for a simple favor, ask them to leave a review on a big review site in your niche. For most niches, this will include sites such as Yelp and Yellow Pages.

Let’s look at an example of a search for a carpenter in New York:

The top result is a Yelp business page, while the second result is Yelp’s internal search results for carpenters (another search listings page).

The second is most interesting here:

This page orders businesses based on several factors, e.g., the number of reviews they have and how positive the reviews are (in addition to price).

As long as you fall into the default filters, the more good reviews you have, the higher your profile will appear.

Why does this matter for SEO?

Because the more prominent (higher) a link is on a page, the more weight it has.

This page has a lot of search engine authority (that’s why it can rank at #2), and it passes that authority mostly to the top profiles that it links to.

Those profiles all have links back to their corresponding websites, which, of course, improves those websites’ search authority.

Not only will reviews get you more direct business on these review sites, but that extra link power can help your rankings in search engines. Not by a ton, but by enough that you will notice it after a while.

The second option, which is best for high priced products, is to create a case study of the results your customer got.

Brian Dean at Backlinko does it all the time, both for his readers and actual customers:

Case studies are typically really easy to promote, and they can get a ton of traffic and links.

I’ve created an extensive guide to creating effective case studies that you should read if you take this approach.

2. Get out of your shell and go to events

Just about every industry has several conferences throughout the year. No doubt you can find a few local events to attend if you wanted to.

Now, conferences can be a huge waste of time, but they can also be incredibly valuable.

Obviously, you go primarily to learn, but a huge secondary result can be the relationships you come back with.

Events are a great way to meet other people in your industry and explore opportunities to work together.

But guess what else happens?

When you email them down the line, asking them to check out your latest piece of content, most will be happy to read it and give feedback.

What’s even better is that if they have a chance to link to it within their own content, they usually do. These links can have a big impact on your search rankings if you make several connections per event.

Finally, even if your connections don’t manage their content, they can introduce you to the content manager for their business. You can explore collaboration opportunities or offer to create guest posts for them (which will give you more links to your site).

All of these potential benefits are important if you have to convince your boss that it’s worth sending you to conferences.

Finding conferences is easy: I won’t spend much time on this, but I’ll show you quickly how to find conferences.

Start by Googling:

(industry) conferences (year)

You could also try “events” instead of conferences:

Typically, you’ll find a roundup of all the best events, often multiple.

Each of these results will give you a listing of events, separated by date, location, and audience:

I recommend going through more than one list so that you don’t miss any good ones.

Remember that conferences can be either worthless or extremely valuable. The difference depends on how you spend your time at them.

That’s why I wrote the Beginner’s Guide to Conferences in the past. Give it a quick read.

3. Hire the best help you can get

If you’re truly creating “epic” content, chances are that you’re not doing everything on your own.

In most cases, you’re hiring freelance writers and designers to help fill in any gaps in your skillset.

Obviously, if you’re hiring the best freelancers you can afford, it’s because you primarily want to create great content.

That kind of content is the easiest to get to rank.

However, the very act of hiring freelancers will make it easier.

Let me explain…

Type #1 – Writers: Whether you hire a freelancer or offer them an attractive opportunity to collaborate, these relationships will often get you some extra high-quality backlinks.

A good set of examples are my ultimate guides (sidebar of Quick Sprout). For these guides, I teamed up with experts in each of the subjects.

I had some help from Kathryn Aragon writing The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing, for example:

When someone helps create a piece of content of that quality, they, of course, want to show it off.

How?

By talking about it and linking to it.

It makes them look great to say they wrote or co-wrote an amazing piece of content.

Because of this, I didn’t have to ask Kathryn to link to the guide; she’s mentioned it dozens of times in her posts on other sites and social media (linking to it most of the time):

Essentially, your writer will help you with the content promotion.

Type #2 – Designers: More commonly, marketers hire freelance designers to help create images for content.

The exact same principle applies here:

If you hire a freelancer to create something great, they will want to show it off in their portfolio, leading to great backlinks for your content.

Continuing with the example of my guides, I needed professional help to design them.

My designer had accounts on sites such as Behance and Dribbble, both of which are authoritative sites in the design niche.

Of course, they shared the images with links to those guides:

Those links are the indirect benefit of working with great freelancers.

4. User experience optimization is a great use of your time

Creating a great user experience on your site and with your products is valuable for many reasons.

Typically, the main motivation for working on improving your users’ experience has to do with the conversion rate. It’s a good reason.

What most don’t consider is that this often inadvertently plays a big role in improving search rankings.

There are a few reasons why, but most applicable here is the concept of pogo sticking.

Basically, if a Google user clicks on your page but then goes right back to the search results for another, it indicates to Google that your content didn’t satisfy the user.

Conversely, if most users stop on your page, you did a good job and are rewarded with better search rankings.

If you improve the user experience of your website, you’ll usually end up increasing the number of visitors that you fully satisfy, decreasing pogo sticking. This can indirectly improve your rankings.

User experience is extremely complicated, but there are three common factors we can focus on and look at the ways they affect pogo sticking.

Factor #1 – page load speed: Studies have shown that people will not wait for pages to load.

Even a fraction of a second can affect 5-10% of people who will leave before they even see your content.

Ideally, you want your pages to load in less than 2 seconds.

You can test page load speed by using the Quick Sprout tool or a tool such as GTmetrix.

Improving page load speed will have a huge effect on pogo sticking, but it’s also a direct ranking factor confirmed by Google.

It’s not a huge one, but factoring both of these aspects together, speed can make a big difference in rankings.

Searchmetrics found a huge correlation between a quick load time and the top Google positions:

Factor #2 – clutter: One thing that makes a big difference in user experience is the amount of clutter on the page.

Most people are looking for one specific thing, so everything that’s unrelated on the page only serves as a distraction.

Compare that to a site like Medium, where the content is essentially the only thing on the page:

It’s no surprise that Medium posts rank well in Google. When a user clicks through, they easily find exactly what they’re looking for, leading to less pogo sticking.

Try to declutter your layouts as much as possible, taking out anything that your visitors don’t need to see.

Factor #3 – site architecture: Site architecture refers to the way all the different pages of your website are organized in relation to each other.

For our purposes, good site architecture essentially means you have organized internal linking.

Here’s what a good structure looks like:

Everything is organized into topical silos.

When search engines crawl the site, it will be easier for them to determine the relevancy of your pages, which often leads to better rankings.

Conclusion

By all means, you should spend a lot of time and resources directly on SEO.

However, you can still focus on other areas of your business while also getting SEO benefits.

I’ve shown you four great business practices that accomplish valuable things plus give you indirect improvements to your search rankings.

I encourage you to incorporate as many of these as you can, without fearing that you’re neglecting your SEO work.

If you have any questions about the subject of this post, let me know in a comment below.

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The Blueprint: The Exact Links Your Blog Needs to Have to Rank Like Quick Sprout

Serious question:

Would you be happy if your blog ranked in search engines as well as Quick Sprout does?

I am sure 99% of bloggers would be ecstatic.

But you’d have to travel down a long road if you want to achieve that.

However, I can show you what you need to do if you’re willing to put in the work.

Obviously, I aim to produce top notch content, but the biggest ranking factor, as you might know, is the number and quality of backlinks a blog has. 

And Quick Sprout has a ton of links:

By taking a closer look at the links, you can develop a strategy so that one day, your blog can have similar types, quantities, and quality of links.

We’re going to look at actual links here: I want to get as specific as possible so that you leave this post with a specific link building strategy in mind.

In order to make it as actionable as possible, I picked one of my posts to break down in great detail. We’ll examine The Advanced Guide to SEO.

It has 842 referring domains and 2,690 links overall.

Not surprisingly, it ranks #1 for searches like “advanced guide to SEO”:

And it ranks highly for even vaguely related searches like “SEO guide”:

That post alone gets more traffic than most blogs get in total, so it’s a good one to conduct our analysis on.

Here’s what I did for the analysis:

1. downloaded all the backlink data that Ahrefs had on each of the URLs
2. removed the bottom 80% of links (according to the Pareto principle, the top 20% of links will produce 80% of the results)
3. removed any leftover spam or nonsensical links (about 10% of the remaining links)
4. categorized each link by type

After doing all that, which took a while, I ended up with the following results:

This by itself is very useful.

The vast majority of quality links to the page are from blog posts, resource pages, and, to a lesser extent, forum posts.

Clearly, those types of links are most abundant, so basing your link strategy on them would be a great idea.

What I want to do for the rest of this post is to break down each type of link, explain what they are (if it’s not obvious), and show you how you can get them yourself.

Some are easy, some are hard.

You don’t necessarily have to get all the types of links in the same proportions to rank well, but the more you get, the better.

Type #1 – Links in blog posts

Again, 61.4% of the links to my guide were from blog posts.

Now, I kept the definition of a blog post pretty broad, including both short—500-word—articles and massive guides.

Here’s an example of a guide on Smart Passive Income that links to my guide.

And here’s a link in a short Search Engine Watch article.

Both were counted equally here.

These links are as good as you can get:

• they have diverse and natural anchor text
• they are typically on fairly authoritative domains/pages
• they are contextual (appear naturally within the content)
• they are highly relevant

It makes sense that a post of mine with hundreds of great blog post links would rank so well.

How to get blog links for your posts: Sometimes, getting links from blog posts is a chicken and egg problem.

If you dive into the links to my SEO guide, it’s quite clear that some writers just Googled something like “advanced SEO guide” and linked to the top result.

This is why I’ll continue to get more links to that page even though I’ve stopped promoting it long ago.

However, there are ways to get the rest of those links (which make up the majority).

The most straightforward is cold outreach.

Compile a list of bloggers in your niche (Google variations of “(niche) bloggers”, and use tools such as Buzzsumo:

Then, send them an email telling them about your content and why it’s special.

From here, it’s just a numbers game.

You can typically get about a 5% email-to-link ratio.

If you want 140 links, you’d need to send out emails to 2,800 bloggers.

That’s a lot but possible.

However, like I said, many of those 140 links came after my page was already ranking—let’s say half (or 70).

Considering that you won’t need as many to rank for most terms, you can aim to get about 35 blog links with an initial push.

That brings the number of emails you need to send to 700.

That’s still a lot and will require some digging, but if you want to achieve great rankings, you have to be willing to put in more work than others.

The good news is that this changes over time.

As you build relationships with bloggers in your niche, they will start linking to you naturally in their posts. Or you can just shoot them a quick, friendly email, asking them to include a specific link whenever they can.

Type #2 – Resource collections

The results of the analysis of this SEO guide will differ a bit from an analysis of any other post on Quick Sprout.

That’s because the SEO guide is truly an educational resource.

Even though my other posts are also educational, they wouldn’t be considered “resources,” which is a special distinction given to the most thorough pieces of content.

But because it is, about 20.6% of the links to my guide came from resource pages.

These pages have large collections of the best resources on different topics (usually marketing and business in this case).

Here’s an example:

They’re not as good as blog post links, but they still have a few things going for them:

• the pages often have a lot of authority
• the pages are highly relevant because the links are grouped with similar resources

The downside is that you’re sharing that link authority with often 50+ other pages.

Getting resource page links: Some you will get naturally if you start to rank well or get discussed a lot on social media.

However, you can almost always email the person who created the list and ask to be included.

A short email like this will get a good conversion rate:

Subject: Your resource page for (topic)

Hi (name),

I came across your resource page on (site) and learned about many new great tools. In particular, I’ve already started using (resource #1) and (resource #2) from your list.

So, thank you for that.

On top of that, I wanted to let you know about one more resource. Full disclosure: I created it.

It’s called (name and link to the resource).

The reason it’s so special, and deserves to be alongside those other great resources, is because (give 1-2 sentence description of the best feature).

I just wanted you to be aware of it.

Thanks for your time!

(your name)

I encourage you to spend 10-15 minutes actually going through some resources on their list instead of faking interest. Authenticity will get you a much higher success rate at getting links.

Type #3 – Forum posts

Third on the list were forum posts, which made up about 8% of the links.

These links were mainly found on forums like the Warrior Forum and Reddit, like this one:

These types of links are:

• contextual
• highly relevant
• have good anchor diversity

But typically, they aren’t on high authority pages.

It doesn’t mean they’re not useful, but I wouldn’t spend too much time trying to get them.

How to get forum links: If you create something great and promote it well, it will get talked about in forums without you having to ever target them specifically.

However, if you want to ensure that you get links from forums, or you just want more, you can post on them yourself.

The key part of doing this is actually becoming a part of the forum. You should regularly post and become a part of the community; otherwise, members will think you’re just a spammer.

When the time comes and you release a post, you can make a few postings in different but appropriate sections of the forum, saying something along the lines of:

“I noticed that a lot of people struggle with (topic). I spent about 20 hours putting together a step-by-step guide to (doing something).”

Then, you post most of the body text in your opening and include a link back to your actual post before or after it.

That’s the safe way to do it.

Type #4 – Social media

It’s clear that while Ahrefs is one of the best backlink collectors, they have some work to do with social media.

My analysis showed about 2% of links came from social media, or just 5 links.

Considering it’s been shared hundreds of times on various social media platforms, it’s clear that Ahrefs missed some.

Regardless, these are fairly low quality links (in terms of SEO, not traffic) and likely didn’t affect rankings much.

I still think it’s a great idea to promote content on social media (which can lead to other types of links as well). I’ve written about this topic many times in the past. Here are a few of my best resources to follow if you want more social media links:

• Stop Guessing: Here’s a Social Media Strategy That Works
• Social Media Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
• Launch Your Social Strategy

Type #5 – Guest posts

There are a select few sites that I regularly guest-post on.

When I do, I look for opportunities to link to my best content (when it’s appropriate and of course no-follow these links).

For example, I linked to the post in question in a post I wrote for Entrepreneur.com.

While I didn’t purposely try to link to my SEO guide beforehand, I’ve linked to it 5 times by chance over time.

If you need help getting guest-post opportunities, start with these posts I’ve written:

• Guest-Posting on Steroids: A 4-Step Blueprint That the Top Guest Posters Use
• 7 Lessons Learned from Publishing 300 Guest Posts
• Advanced Guest Posting

When you link out from guest posts (and no-follow the links) other people see them and naturally find your pages, share your content on the social web and even link to it from their site.

Type #6 – Podcast/Interview

Another solid type of link is a link from a podcast notes page or an interview (which may not always be on a podcast).

I’ve spoken on a few different podcasts and often mention my SEO guide.

When you mention something, the host will put a link on the podcast notes page:

It’s easy to get the links you want once you’re on a podcast. The tough part is getting people to want to talk to you.

Below are a couple of resources that can help you get interviewed.

First, “How to Become the Person Everyone Wants to Interview”, which I wrote a few years ago.

Secondly, refer to tactic #4 of this post, which just about anyone can put into action right away.

Type #7 – Roundup

I also got a few links from expert roundups for this post.

In a typical expert roundup, someone will put the same question to a bunch of “experts” and post all the answers.

I don’t think anyone has ever had a problem with an answer that includes a few links.

Even mid-level bloggers get contacted to do these often, but if you’re not there yet, or want more, you can easily get included.

All you need to do is search for “(niche) expert roundup,” and make a list of all the ones you find.

Then, contact the creators with a message along the lines of:

Subject: Expert roundup on (site)

Hi (name),

I saw your expert roundup on (topic) today, and I think it turned out really well (shared on Twitter!).

If you’re planning to do any in the future, I’d love to be included.

I’m a (quick explanation why you’re an expert – include impressive metrics if possible).

Also, let me know if you need a bit of help promoting anything. I’m happy to share a great piece of content.

Cheers,

(your name)

No hard pitch required. The main thing most roundup creators are looking for are social shares and traffic, and you’re offering to help with that.

Type #8 – Image site

This is an extremely simple link to get, and you don’t even have to create it yourself.

When you create “epic” content, I hope you’re considering design.

And if you are, you’re probably not hiring a cheap designer off Fiverr.

When you hire a talented designer who wants to do great work, they also tend to want to show it off.

Most graphic designers have accounts on sites such as Behance and Dribbble, which are both authoritative sites.

For example, many images from my advanced guides have been shown off on these sites. Here’s a page with a link to my advanced guide to SEO.

If you specifically want these kinds of links, you could always encourage your designer to post them around even though they will likely do it on their own.

Conclusion

The great thing about this analysis is that you don’t have to take my word for it. If you have an Ahrefs or Majestic account, you can do this analysis on your own.

And not just for Quick Sprout, but for competitors in your specific niche.

From this analysis, you know the types of links you need to have to rank well, really well, for even competitive searches.

You also know how to get them.

The only thing left to do is go get them and reap the rewards.

Do you have any questions about the analysis or ways of getting each type of link? Leave them below in the comments section.

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Should You Switch Your Site to HTTPS? Here’s Why You Should or Shouldn’t

There are two types of SEOs:

Those who love the technical stuff…

…and those who hate it.

If you fall into the first category, you’re probably already experienced with HTTPS.

If you’re in the second category of SEOs, you might be a little intimidated by it.

If you are intimidated, it’s for a good reason, and I completely understand it.

There are some parts of HTTPS that are complex, but most of it is simple.

Furthermore, you don’t need to understand the exact behind-the-scenes work going on in order to implement HTTPS on a website. 

What’s the deal? Is HTTPS important or not?

The idea of HTTPS has always been a good one, and most leading businesses implemented it a long time ago.

However, somewhat recently, Google announced that HTTPS is a ranking factor.

Obviously, that got SEOs talking about and debating the subject.

At the time, it was a very small ranking factor, affecting less than 1% of global searches. Even now, it’s not a big factor.

However, security is something that Google takes very seriously, and it’s likely to become more important in the future.

Some SEOs jumped right on it and made the switch.

Most saw little to no improvement, but there was certainly anecdotal evidence of ranking improvements:

There is a potential benefit of making the switch.

On top of search rankings, you also get a pretty lock symbol in Chrome and Firefox.

If your site isn’t HTTPS, you don’t get this symbol, and sometimes visitors may get warnings about the security of your site on certain types of pages.

HTTPS: Explain it to me as if I’m five

I’m not going to pretend to know all the technical details behind HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), but I can certainly tell you the basics.

The main benefit of HTTPS is that it makes your site more secure for your users. More specifically, it’s more secure when a user is giving you any sort of information.

It’s essential on pages where users are required to give their credit card information and/or other personal details. However, it’s a good thing to have on all pages.

The real change happens when a user submits their data. HTTPS is able to provide multiple layers of protection to that data:

• encryption – the data is worthless to anyone who somehow manages to intercept it because they don’t have the key to decrypt it (you do).
• data integrity - data can’t be corrupted, which is a good thing.
• authentication - it prevents “man in the middle” attacks, which means that it’s not possible for anyone to trick your customers into thinking they’re providing you data when they’re really giving it to a scammer. This is what your SSL certificate (more on that soon) is for.

Do you need HTTPS?

As an SEO or business owner, you understand that using HTTPS is a good thing.

But is it really necessary?

Well, there are two benefits to having it:

• a small boost in rankings (possibly larger in the future)
• a more secure site for your users

If you run a big site such as Quick Sprout, even a small boost in SEO results in tens of thousands of visitors per month. That’s one reason why HTTPS definitely made sense for Quick Sprout.

However, if you’re starting out, you’re not going to see a real difference in your search traffic.

In the future, it could make a bigger impact, but for now it won’t.

All in all, if you’re expecting to get a significant amount of search traffic in the next few years, you should plan on switching to HTTPS.

What about security?

If you just have a blog and all you require from your users is to enter their email addresses to opt in to your email lists, you probably don’t need HTTPS for security reasons.

However, if you accept payments or important personal information for any reason, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

Between those two factors, you should know whether you need to implement HTTPS on your site at all. A large portion of sites should have it, but not all do.

If you do need to implement HTTPS, I’m going to show you the steps you need to follow. I’ll provide as many specifics as I can, but there are many parts that will vary based on your site choices (I’ll lay it out for you).

Step 1: Pick a type of SSL certificate

SSL? What’s that?

SSL is the protocol that HTTPS uses. Basically, you need to install an SSL certificate on your site in order for it to use HTTPS.

There are three different types of certificates you can get:

• Domain validation – the cheapest and most basic; it only really covers encryption (from the three things we went over earlier).
• Organization validation – the middle choice in terms of price, which also includes authentication. If you’re collecting personal information, you probably want at least this option.
• Extended validation – the top of the line option, which provides the best security you can get with HTTPS. This is mainly for big e-commerce sites and sites that collect really important private information.

Here’s a nice little summary:

Google recommends that you use 2048-bit encryption certificates, so keep that in mind if you go with an organization validation certificate (which offers different levels of encryption).

Where to buy an SSL certificate: You can buy a certificate from a ton of different websites. They will offer different types at different prices, so you can shop around if you’d like.

However, I recommend buying one from your hosting company.

Why?

Because most hosting companies offer them in the first place, and many of them will also help you install them. So for convenience sake, start by looking at them.

For example, Hostgator sells a few different types of certificates:

You can see that the prices aren’t too steep.

Once you’ve bought one, you can then get them to install it for you on your hosting server (provided you have a dedicated IP):

If that’s not possible…Not all hosting providers will install the certificate for you.

At this point, see if they have an installation guide by Googling:

(hosting company) + SSL certificate installation

If that doesn’t bring up anything useful, contact their support.

The process of installing a certificate differs from host to host, which is why I can’t give you specific steps here.

Step 2: Create a URL map of your site and redirect

Take an example URL of:

http://www.example.com

Then compare it to:

https://www.example.com

The only difference is one “s” in the URL, and it’s before the actual domain name.

But it makes a difference. These are two entirely separate URLs.

What that means is that you need to create copies of all your site’s pages and then redirect all of your old “http” pages to your new “https” pages.

Although a pain, it’s pretty simple.

A URL map can just be a simple spreadsheet, containing a list of old URLs with a list of the corresponding new URLs beside it.

If you wanted to make changes to your site structure or URL format, now would be a good time to do it.

If you’re using WordPress, you can add all the 301 (permanent) redirects to your .htaccess file.

Each line should look something like this:

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://ift.tt/1VNr3Mv

You just need to fix the bolded parts.

If you’re planning to move to a brand new domain while you’re doing this, refer to my guide to moving a WordPress site for step-by-step instructions.

3. Update your internal links

You’re not quite done with linking yet.

You likely have many internal links throughout your site. These may point to your old “http” pages.

Ideally, you want these to point directly to your HTTPS pages.

Introducing relative URLs: If you’re lucky, you’ve been using relative URLs all along.

These don’t specify an absolute (entire) URL; instead, they tell your browser to add something to the end of the domain.

For example, if this link:

<a href=“/page2”>Link</a>

was placed somewhere on our domain example.com, clicking it would take you to:

http://ift.tt/TfmP3j

When you switch to “HTTPS,” the same link would take you to:

https://www.example.com/page2

which is perfect.

If your site wasn’t built like that and instead uses absolute links:

<a href=“http://ift.tt/1XSAqZR;

then you’ll need to find each link and add the correct new URL to it.

4. Update image and other links

It’s not just links to pages on your site that you need to worry about.

It’s also any other link to resources such as images, stylesheets, and scripts.

If you right-click any of your site’s pages and click “view source,” you’ll see all kinds of tags like this:

<script src=”http://ift.tt/1B6842P” />

The problem is that you need to ensure that all files used and served on your site also use HTTPS.

If those sources and image locations exist on your domain, you need to point them to the correct HTTPS locations.

If you have both HTTP and HTTPS URLs, you can use protocol relative URLs, which look like this:

<script src=”//www.domain.com/js/file.js” />

The double slash in front tells your browser to use HTTPS in front of that URL when the file is being requested from an HTTPS page.

Don’t forget about your CDN: If you use a CDN, you need to make sure that your CDN supports HTTPS.

Most CDNs do support HTTPS by now, but not all of them.

For example, Cloudflare does.

If they don’t have detailed instructions on how to implement HTTPS, so you’ll again have to contact their support.

Then, you’ll have to go back to your new HTTPS site and make sure that the source for all images is pointing to the HTTPS image location on your CDN.

To ensure that you don’t miss any links or images, I recommend using a site crawling tool like Screaming Frog SEO.

You put your domain in the spider text box at the top, and it will extract a ton of information from your site.

Then, click the “internal”, “external”, and “images” filters along the top to see what’s on your site.

If they’re all HTTPS, you’re good to go.

5. Add your site again in WMT

Now that your site is basically whole again, you want to get Google crawling it as soon as possible to limit the chances of your traffic being negatively affected.

You need to re-add your site to Google webmaster tools (Search Console) because the HTTPS site is considered a completely different site.

Then, you should submit your new sitemap in your new listing.

On top of that, re-submit your old sitemap (in your old WMT property) because then Google will see the 301 redirects and update its listings.

6. Do some quick testing to make sure everything went well

If all goes smoothly, you should see no change or a small positive bump in search rankings.

If traffic drops off significantly for more than a day or two, you likely have a problem and should go through this guide again (and ask your host or an SEO consultant for help).

First you should make sure that your SSL certificate is installed correctly.

To do that, use this free SSL server test:

Just put in your new homepage URL, and it’ll do a thorough test:

Other than this, you want to watch your rankings to make sure you spot issues.

Finally, you should click around various pages on your site and make sure that the HTTPS lock shows up correctly (green) in Chrome.

Conclusion

I know that you might not love technical SEO, but it’s important.

By now you should know whether or not HTTPS is needed for your site and how to implement it.

Although questions about the actual migration can be difficult to answer, if you leave me questions with as much detail as possible in a comment below, I’ll try to answer them.

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