When it comes to on-site experience, security is one of the essential aspects that marketers look to ace. There is a hacker attack every 39 seconds across the world, so data security is vital. In addition, the on-site experience is all about enhancing the usability of your website for higher engagement and UX.
Marketers optimize different aspects of on-site SEO to achieve better traffic and achieve better Search Engine Result Pages(SERP). However, security is crucial to an on-site experience as your website needs to be trustworthy for customers to share data.
For example, lead generation needs aggregation of user data, analysis, and personalizing the experience. If your website is not trustworthy, users may not share their data. But this is not the only impact website security can make on your business. Let’s know some of why you need robust protection for your website and how to achieve it.
Why You Need On-site Security?
When it comes to higher SERP rankings, marketers leverage technical SEO to optimize several key aspects of a website like,
- Crawalability
- Content optimizations
- Link structure
- Hierarchy of web pages
- Security
Even as per the Google Page Experience Update, website security is an essential ranking factor. These ranking factors include,
- Core Web Vitals
- Mobile-friendly
- HTTPS
- No intrusive interstitials
Here, HTTPS is a security protocol that allows the implementation of HTTP logic for your website. Thus, HTTPS helps in securing the communication between the browser and application. However, HTTPS alone does not make your website secure, and there are several other security measures. So, let’s discuss some of them.
Top Ways to Secure On-site Experience
For enhanced on-site experience, marketers need to leverage high-quality content and easier navigate the website. This can involve pagification of content, linking it internally, and enabling users to easily find it through the established hierarchy.
However, as several links and different features are exposed to hackers, you need additional security measures. So let’s first understand how to achieve HTTPS for your website.
#1. Enabling HTTPS
You can enable HTTPS for your website through SSL certificates. SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is the process of securing the communication between browser and user through an encryption algorithm. It scrambles the data and makes it hard to read for the hackers. However, several different types of SSL certificates are available in the market that you can leverage for website security.
Many marketers leverage multiple domain strategies to rank higher. Here, a business attempts to improve rankings by leveraging several domains and sub-domains. As we can see in this example, both the domains belong to the same company ranking for the same keyword-” real estate.”
Now, if you want to secure multiple domains, you will need a cheap wildcard SSL certificate. It allows you to secure the communication between browser and user for all the first-level subdomains under the chosen main domain.
Similarly, there are several other types of HTTPS-based technologies that you can leverage for website security. Another strategy marketers leverage is web forms, where users provide data prompting them to submit such information for a subscription or any other CTA. Securing the web forms is another important way to ensure a secure on-site experience.
#2. Securing Web Forms
Web forms are a source of aggregating user data which you can analyze and personalize the customer experience. Now, most of this data is PII or Personal Identifiable Information (PII), which needs a high level of security. According to a survey, about 80% of PII experienced data breaches.
So, you need reliable security measures to ensure that there are no data thefts. If there are such attacks, your website loses trustworthiness and negatively impacts the on-site SEO.
One way to ensure web form security is to authenticate and sanitize user input for validity. You can either use a sanitization code or a reliable user authentication for security. However, you don’t just need a good user authentication for web forms but also logins.
#3. Authenticating Users
Suppose you have an eCommerce website with users having saved financial data; authentication becomes quintessential. Here, you can leverage a multi-factor authentication approach. It protects user data from any breaches by adding an extra layer of user authentication which is more intimate for customers.
Take an example of the two-factor authentications or 2FA, which allows users to authenticate their login through a one-time password or an authenticator app. Such authentication and validation help your website avoid malicious injections through user input.
Negative SEO attacks are another significant security issue that marketers need to consider while planning to secure the on-site experience.
#4. Negative SEO Attacks
Negative SEO attacks or SEO spam attacks fill your website with spammy keywords and backlinks to undermine the rankings. One of the most common ways to execute negative SEO attacks is through website redirects that account for 8% of malware files blocked.
There are several ways to avoid negative SEO attacks like updating plugins, sanitizing input fields, and installing a WA(Web Application Firewall). However, the best way is to use a hybrid approach by leveraging a WAF and captcha to authenticate the traffic coming to your website.
WAF acts as a reverse proxy to block any malicious traffic entering your web application through a specific set of security policies. You can customize these policies based on your organization and business requirements.
Conclusion
With more people on the internet than ever before, you need a reliable security system to ensure a secure on-site experience. Marketers look to use technical SEO practices to improve the rankings. However, you can’t ignore the security of SEO-based optimizations.
The robust security system will help you achieve the trust of users and improve the SERP rankings. So, you can use some of the best practices that we discussed here and secure the on-site experience.
