When SSL was originally developed, it was a security protocol that mostly only IT professionals cared about or understood. Today, SSL is much more than just a security protocol. Marketers and business developers alike are now widely familiar with SSL and use SSL as a key solution to help improve their customer’s trust, ensure secure transactions, increase their brand image and boost their website’s search rankings. In fact, SSL is now a powerful marketing tool, which should be included on every website!
With this in mind, it only makes sense for website builders, ecommerce platform providers and other cloud-based service providers to start offering SSL directly to their customers as a value-added service.
Let’s take a look at how building SSL into your service helps both you and your customers:
1. Enhance Your Business Model
As a service provider, your business model is most likely centered around helping your customers boost their conversions and sell more online.
Conversions are directly impacted by a webpage’s trust factor. Adding credibility and trust is a direct correlation for gaining more conversions. If a website visitor can’t decide whether or not to trust a webpage, site owners are losing visitors, conversions and overall business. Implementing SSL security into webpages reassure visitors that webpages and transactions are secure and helps build trust.
Integrating SSL into your offering makes it easy for your customers to enable HTTPs by default on their sites to boost visitor confidence and enhance conversion rates. GlobalSign recently did a study showing 84% of users would abandon a purchase if data was sent over an insecure connection. Customer mistrust is growing with the number of online threats and phishing attacks year after year. Security is no longer a nice to have. It's a necessity in today's digital economy. Online services must promote SSL and security indicators to gain customers trust - your business depends on it.
2. Boost Your Customer’s Search Rankings
Wouldn’t you love to offer your customers the ability to increase their search rankings? SSL plays a direct role in Google’s search ranking algorithm. It was over two years ago when Google first announced the use of HTTPS as a ranking signal encouraging all sites to secure visitor information with SSL Certificates. Even more so, Google promoted the “HTTPS Everywhere” initiative to reward sites with SSL Certificates regardless if the website collected personal information or not, a new concept for many marketers.
We can also assume that there is a positive correlation between SSL Certificates and user behavior data (click through rate, bounce rate, time on page etc.) that Google may use as ranking signals.
Because we know that SSL helps increase visitor trust on webpages and visitor trust directly impacts conversion rates, bounce rates and time spent on page, we can make the correlation that enabling SSL on websites helps increase SEO rankings based on the results of user behavior data.
Searchmetrics, a leading search and content performance platform, conducted an analysis of SSL and the impact on rankings. The study concluded that sites with SSL Certificates show positive effects and positive gains in SEO visibility. The analysis even went as far as looking at specific domains and putting together assumptions the domains might have gained in SEO visibility from SSL encryption.
3. Gain a Competitive Advantage
It’s clear that SSL Certificates provide positive user experiences and help increase conversions and that’s why many cloud-based service providers have already started offering them as an add-on option, or recommending third party vendors. However, you can gain a significant advantage by not just bundling SSL into your service, but by seamlessly integrating it.
Integrating SSL eliminates the need for your customers to understand how to order, install, configure servers and manage certificates themselves. You’re providing your customers all the benefits of SSL, but without the technical burdens, so they’re free to focus on growing their business.
Another benefit to integrating, rather than bundling, is that you get to keep your customers within your platform, so you retain complete control over their user experience. Your customers won’t need to leave the familiarity of your service or worry about setting up another account with an SSL vendor. You’re able to provide everything they need for their website or online store.
It’s no doubt your customers have already requested SSL Certificates from your company (just ask your customer service team or sales representatives). Or perhaps your customers are already using SSL Certificates from another vendor, leaving you to miss out on an opportunity to provide your customers with additional services directly from you. So, what are you waiting for... build SSL into your service today! Your customers will thank you!
GlobalSign has helped companies like Shopify, Unbounce, Volusion and more integrate SSL into their platforms. Our high volume certificate services support the high volume and velocity needs of service providers, enabling them to issue mass quantities of SSL to growing customer bases. Learn more here.
