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We’ve worked with several clients to implement HTTPS on their sites, and in the process, have learned to resolve many of the issues an HTTPS migration can create. Our guide to a seamless HTTPS migration is below, but first, an overview:

What is HTTPS?

For anyone unfamiliar with HTTPS, here’s a basic overview of the process: When navigating the web, content is communicated via a “Hypertext Transfer Protocol”. This is the “HTTP” prefix that you see at the beginning of a URL (https://www.example.com), and it is what enables servers and clients to communicate and display internet content to you.

HTTPS is a more secure version of the HTTP protocol. It adds an SSL security certificate to the server/client communication, which ensures that sensitive information like passwords and credit card info can’t be stolen by malicious lurkers while traveling between the server and a user’s computer. Most importantly, it adds a clear indicator for users that your site is secure and safe:

In principle, migrating to HTTPS is as simple as adding an SSL certificate to your website. In practice, that can be a tedious and exhausting process. The Washington Post described their 10-month migration in 2015, explaining each of the various issues and obstacles they encountered.

In order to add an SSL certificate to a site, you need to first obtain a certificate, then apply it across the entire site, and then maintain it to make sure it doesn’t expire or lapse in the future. For larger sites, especially those with an ecommerce platform or login portal, this can be a very exhausting process. Furthermore, you run the risk of a temporary to permanent traffic and keyword ranking drop, like Moz’s 11% organic drop over 3+ months.

Why do I care about HTTPS?

Google has been one of the strongest advocates for websites to adopt HTTPS since as early as 2014, and for good reason. Having a more secure web makes everyday life infinitely easier for the vast majority of internet users. How many of you would hesitate to shop on Amazon if you knew someone could steal your credit card info? How many of you would use email if you knew someone could snoop on what you’re sending? Web security is crucial in this day and age, but don’t mislead yourself into thinking that makes it easy to implement.

Fortunately for internet users (though perhaps unfortunately for webmasters and SEOs), HTTPS is here to stay. John Mueller, from Google, is insistent that this is a move webmasters need to make:

More recently, Gary Ilyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, announced a major change to how Google measures PageRank for 301 redirects to help facilitate this transition:

30x redirects don’t lose PageRank anymore.

— Gary Illyes ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ (@methode) July 26, 2016

By allowing redirects to pass 100% of PageRank, instead of 80-90% like before, Google is hoping to incentivize more and more sites to adopt HTTPS without needing to worry as much about the organic loss that might come from that.
Finally, Google announced that as of January 2017, any sites that collect credit card information or passwords that are NOT using HTTPS will be marked as “Not Secure” on Google Chrome:

After working with several clients to implement HTTPS, we’ve compiled a list of what’s involved in the 3 main steps of an HTTPS migration:

1. Pre-migration
2. Migration
3. Post-migration

Pre-Migration

Backup, backup, backup. I cannot repeat this enough. Backup your site before initiating your HTTPS migration.

There are any thousands of things that can go wrong during an HTTPS migration, including things you didn’t even think were possible to go wrong. Download a backup of your media library. Save backups of your CSS and JS files. If you backup your whole site configuration, then you can easily disable your SSL certificate if you see things go wrong after enabling SSL.

Again, I can’t reiterate how many things can go wrong that you won’t anticipate in a million years. Backup your site.

Migration

The Holy Grail, the actual migration itself. This is where all the pain and suffering preparation pays off.

Fortunately for webmasters, there are several easier ways to migrate to HTTPS than a conventional SSL implementation. ClouldFlare and Let’s Encrypt are two services we’ve used with smaller sites that I highly recommend for an HTTPS migration.
**NOTE: Cloudflare recently had a major security vulnerability exposed, so be cautious to adopt Cloudflare SSL right away. Once the issue is fully resolved, however, this should be a viable service once again.

Each of these are completely free services. They provide the same level of SSL encryption and security without a lot of the hassle involved with a full SSL implementation. You can read more about each service on the links above, but the basic principle of Cloudflare is that they will provide an SSL certificate for free, then serve up a cached version of your site to searchers that is completely secure. The communication between your server and the client won’t be secure, but site visitors will still arrive at a secure site.

Let’s Encrypt, on the other hand, offers a free SSL certificate that can be automatically configured through a web server like WPEngine. Once the certificate authority validates the domain, Let’s Encrypt provides the SSL certificate to the entire site.

If you opt to not go with this option, then the best recommendation is to test everything before pushing it live on your site. If you have a staging site, test the SSL implementation on every page there before migrating your live site. Review everything, including the links in your sitemaps and robots.txt files, links across your site, images, submission forms, everything.

Finally, make sure you have a global redirect in place to grab any links pointing to the HTTP version of your site. CloudFlare and Let’s Encrypt (and most other environments) will automatically set up this redirect, but make sure this is included in your transition. The last thing you want is to lose the equity from your backlinks.

At the same time, review the URL structure you use for on-site links. If your links use a full URL path (https://www.example.com/stuff/) instead of relative URL paths (/stuff/), those links may not be updated after your migration. Don’t give Google any more excuses than they need to deprecate your link profile: double-check both of these features.

Post Migration

Just because your migration is complete doesn’t mean your work is over yet. Sometimes, the aftermath can be just as difficult as the actual migration itself.

The first thing you’ll want to do is review 3rd party scripts on your site. We had one client who completed an HTTPS migration only to discover that their entire typeface across the site disappeared. Their custom fonts were replaced by the default block letters in WordPress, making the site look clunky and unwieldy. The problem, we discovered, was that their typeface was imported from a 3rd party service that did not provide the font library as an HTTPS file. Once we were able to update the file to an HTTPS protocol, the fonts returned to normal.

Another client working on a migration had a number of submission forms across the site imported from Pardot.com. Despite the fact that most other resources on the site migrated correctly, these submission forms did not, leaving a series of blank input boxes where there had previously been full subscription forms. Like before, it turned out that the subscription forms did not migrate to HTTPS by default. Once we updated the links, the forms were good to go.

The most common issues we’ve encountered are insecure images. One of the first warnings you’ll probably notice is an error message like the one below:

Often during a site migration, images that are included on the site have insecure URL addresses. Even after migrating your site over, images imported from external sites often still have an insecure URL, which prompts Google Chrome to warn users that the content on the site may be compromised.

Some of you right now are saying, “But how am I supposed to check every image on my site to know which are secure and which aren’t?” Lucky for you, we have a solution. Within Screaming Frog, while crawling a site, you can set a custom extraction to search for images with an HTTP address.

The custom extraction must be set to an XPath type and set to extract an HTML element. Then, use the following snippet as the extraction code:

//img[contains(@src,'https://')]

After your crawl is complete, the “Extraction” tab will have an entire list of pages with insecure images and the source code for those images. From there, you can update the URLs to HTTPS addresses.

The second thing you’ll want to do is add the HTTPS version of your site to Google Search Console. It will take Google some time to recognize that your site is now secure and to switch the ranking results it displays to users. The sooner you verify the HTTPS version of your site in Search Console, the faster Google can start indexing the secure site and serving that to users in search results.

Third, in addition to HTTPS, you want to ensure that your server is using HTTP/2.0, the latest version of the general Internet protocol. If you use CloudFlare or Let’s Encrypt from above, your server should be HTTP/2.0 compatible by default. Just in case though, it never hurts to run a quick check on https://tools.keycdn.com/http2-test.

The final step you’ll want to take after your migration is to constantly monitor your organic traffic over the following weeks and months. As Rand Fishkin noted in the link above, Moz lost 11% of the their search traffic over the 3 months following their migration, and many other sites have reported similar losses.

Though you may have few options for recovering that traffic immediately, you’ll want to pay attention to what search queries you’ve dropped in ranking for, or what pages see a drop in organic traffic. Assuming that these pages don’t recover quickly, that may be a sign that you have a deeper problem on the site. If it is a deeper problem, follow the steps for what to do when your organic traffic drops.

Again, migrating to HTTPS is a step that you have to take. Google is only becoming more and more insistent about this, and it’s also an integral part of delivering a positive user experience to your site visitors. Unfortunately, just because this is important doesn’t mean it’s quick or easy. Follow our guide above, and you can avoid the most common traps and pitfalls of an HTTPS migration. The benefits are worth it.

The 3 Most Important Steps in a Website HTTPS Migration is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Web Designers like to experiment with new graphics, new features, and new capabilities, many of which are not consistent with the guidelines Google puts in place for websites to rank. In turn, SEOs try to keep websites built within Google’s guidelines, which often leads to less exciting and eye-catching sites.

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One of the clearest examples of this is in Single Page Applications, particularly of the AngularJS sort. Single Page Apps are one of the coolest new technologies for web developers to play with, and they have some very dynamic and exciting uses. However, they are an SEO’s worst nightmare because they make it almost impossible for Google to index the pages on the site. Though SEO for Single Page Apps and AngularJS is a difficult and complicated process, we have developed our own solution approach that’s produced strong SEO wins for our clients.

What is a Single Page Application?

According to Microsoft, a Single Page Application (SPA) is a web app that loads a single HTML page and dynamically updates that page as the user interacts with the app. This means all pictures, files, javascript, and external resources on the site are loaded when the user navigates to the first page on the site. These sites are most often built using applications like AngularJS or ReactJS, which use advanced javascript templates to render the entire site.

As with most frameworks, there are distinct benefits and drawbacks to this type of site design. One of the clearest benefits is the ease of navigation. Once a user enters the site, the user has a seamless experience navigating between pages and throughout the site. Since an SPA doesn’t require constant calls to the server, pages load quickly and efficiently for users, leading to a much better user experience.

However, there are definite drawbacks to SPAs as well. One noticeable drawback is the initial page-load time. Since the site loads all resources at once, the very first pageview for a user can take a long time to load, possibly driving people away from the site. However, the other major drawback is the one I’d like to focus on here: an inability for search engines to index site content for SEO.

Problems with SEO for Single Page Apps

SEO for Angular sites is quickly becoming a major issue. Many people are surfacing the issue; for example, here is a slide from Pat Reinhart’s Conductor 30|30 Webinar:

One of the first problems you’ll encounter when crawling an Angular site is getting all your pages crawled and indexed. For one of our clients, when we first crawled their site, this is the result we got from ScreamingFrog:

All the crawlers were able to detect were the javascript templates. No HTML, no images, nothing. Without any actual web pages to be indexed, it was impossible for this site to generate any organic traffic or keyword rankings.

After experimenting with many different configurations, we thought we were making progress, when all of a sudden we hit a spider trap:

where crawling the site crashed ScreamingFrog. That crawl looked something like this:

It was a recursive crawling issue that was leading the same content being crawled over and over and over again.

What’s remarkable about all this is that as recently as last year, Google claimed (and Search Engine Land “confirmed”) that they can execute Javascript applications. This includes following Javascript redirects, indexing and crawling Javascript links and technical elements, and rendering all elements on the page. However, as we can see from this real-world experience, these capabilities are still flawed.

The issues we encountered with our client are just the tip of the iceberg for SEO problems with Angular SPAs. People have reported numerous other issues with SPAs, from improper Analytics data to only parts of a page being crawled and indexed. Luckily, through several months of work with our clients, we have seen some very positive SEO gains for sites like this. Here’s our step-by-step solution to SEO for Angular SPAs.

The Solution

1) Create a list of all content you want indexed on the site.

This may sound somewhat tedious, and for larger sites, probably quite time-consuming as well. However, I cannot emphasize how helpful this has been for us. Having full lists of pages, or at least URL patterns and templates, of  content that we want indexed has been invaluable as we perform tests and iterations for our clients.

2) Install Prerender.io.

We didn’t start to see notable SEO gains until installing Prerender. Prerender will serve up a cached version of the website to crawlers complete with all the standard HTML elements, while still allowing the website to function normally for end-users. It also offers you the ability to customize what pages are served to crawlers, through either blacklisting pages you don’t want to appear, or whitelisting the pages you do. This is an SEO lifesaver, as it allows Google and other crawlers to serve the website in search results like a traditional website while still allowing users to experience the Angular SPA setup.

3) Confirm that Google is indexing the Prerendered content.

As we quickly discovered, not all crawlers respond to Prerender in the same way. Go into Google Search Console, or even perform a manual site search in Google, to confirm that your website is being crawled and indexed correctly. Double check that the list you created in step 1 is all being displayed in Google. You may encounter some inconsistencies between ScreamingFrog and Google, or between DeepCrawl and Google, that can alert you to other issues on the site.

4) Constantly monitor and track performance.

Though this should be a staple for any SEO operation, it is doubly important for an Angular client. In our time working with this client, we have had pages suddenly stop being crawled, we’ve had all traffic from Safari disappear overnight, we’ve had infinite recursive loops, and more. Always, always, always track the organic traffic to the site, the keyword rankings, and any other relevant metrics that would alert you to a problem. These problems will come up suddenly and unexpectedly, and not addressing them quickly can lead to a major loss of traffic.

Results

Over the course of our engagement with this client, we have seen some tremendous SEO gains. The chart below shows Organic Traffic growth from last year until this year:

We’ve also seen some strong keyword ranking gains over the course of our engagement as well:

SEO for Angular is not impossible. Don’t believe Google when they tell you they know what they’re doing, and be prepared to employ some non-traditional SEO techniques. However, if you follow our guide from above, you have every reason to believe you can be successful here too.

SEO How-To for AngularJS Websites and Apps is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

The Difference Between Traditional SEO and Local SEO

One problem that I have noticed in the SEO world is people confusing the strategies of Traditional SEO and Local SEO. Both forms of SEO have the same ultimate end goal: trying to a get a search result to rank higher on search engines. However, just because the end goals for each are the same does not mean the strategies for each are the same.

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Traditional SEO, particularly for Google, is structured heavily around link-building. You want to attract as many links as possible from other sites back to your own website. Industry-leading sites like Moz and ahrefs have developed their own tools specifically to track the backlink profiles of websites. Here, elements such as anchor text and linking domain authority are crucial to having a successful SEO operation.

Local SEO is a very different story. With Local SEO, you are focusing much less on link-building and much more on citations and NAP distribution (more on this below). This is not to say that Traditional SEO strategies have no place in Local SEO. Having a well-optimized site is still important for appearing in organic search results at all, whether that result is an organic search result or an entry in a local pack.

The fundamental differences between Traditional and Local SEO practices can be boiled down to four basic principles that I call the Local SEO CQNS (pronounced “sequence”): Consistency, Quality & Quantity, Notation, and Social Signals.

Consistency

The first key to success for local SEO is understanding NAP. NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone Number and is the core information used in citations. Citations are any instances on the web of your NAP information. You can find these citations in any number of places, ranging from the obvious directories like YellowPages and the Chamber of Commerce, to Yelp and smaller local directories.

One of the clear signs to Google that a business has a trustworthy local presence is having a consistent NAP across the web. As Bill Slawski, Director of Search at Go Fish Digital explains, “Having this geographical information consistent from site to site can help give certainty to the Search Engines that the business locations they might include in their Maps pages is correct.”

Though the full effectiveness of NAP consistency is debatable and constantly subject to revision, some estimates suggest that NAP consistency can affect as much as 50% or more of ranking performance for Local SEO. That’s huge! Imagine just how much traffic you can lose simply by having the wrong phone number or street address listed for your business – both from decreased rankings and customer confusion.

In addition to being one of the most important factors for ranking performance, NAP consistency is also one of the most frequent sources of ranking issues among local businesses. If this is the case, you’re in luck: not only is this an easy issue to identify, but it’s also relatively simple to update and fix. Various tools (like the ones outlined at the end of the article) can help you find and identify where your business is listed on the web, as well as help you push accurate information to business directories.

Quality & Quantity

While having consistent NAP is important, it’s also important to have this NAP citation spread around the web. Unfortunately, as is the case with much of the SEO world, there is no unanimous consensus on the best way to achieve this. A survey conducted by Brightlocal in 2015 of Local SEO experts found that a majority believed the quality of citations to be more important than the quantity. However, this can be a slightly misleading finding to those familiar with Traditional SEO.

As the chart below (from that Brightlocal survey) illustrates, “quality” is not synonymous with “domain authority”. When gauging the quality of a citation directory, the most important factors to consider are its relevance to the industry and its relevance to the location. Listing your California florist’s business in https://new-york.eat24hours.com/, even though it has a domain authority of 68, will probably not help your local SEO efforts.

Once you have identified those “high quality” directories, the next important element is quantity. You want to disseminate your NAP citation to as many of those directories as possible. The more times search engines find your citation information on those high-quality directories, the more signals that send to those search engines that your business is a reliable and trustworthy listing.

Notation

I will freely admit that this is probably the weakest name to fit into my “CQNS” acronym, but it does provide an umbrella category for this third Local SEO element: Notation. As this survey by Moz discovered, industry professionals believe one of the other most important factors for Local SEO aside from NAP consistency and dissemination is on-page signals. Search engines want it to be very clear what your business does, what services or products it offers, and what search categories it should fall under.

There are a number of ways to accomplish this. One way is to include important keywords in your business title (for example, “Ms. Love’s Florist Boutique” is much better optimized than simply “Ms. Love’s”). Another way is to incorporate schema markup into your website. Schema markup are code snippets that communicate clear and distinct aspects of your business to crawlers.

Schema.org has a range of different schema you can use for this purpose. Organization schema, for example, allows you to include that all-important NAP information on your site and even indicate what geographic areas your business serves. Beyond the Organization schema, LocalBusiness schema can take that even further and allow you to include accepting payments and operating hours.

It’s important to note that you should not rely purely on one form of notation. Bill Slawski noted in his analysis of the original Google Local patent that Google collects and merges data in structured, unstructured, and semi-structured form. While including schema markup on your site will help provide structured data, it’s important to also include other notation signals like a Business Title and Business Categories for the unstructured and semi-structured data.

Social Signals

Although social signals are viewed as carrying the least weight as a Local SEO ranking signal currently, there is substantial debate about their overall impact on Local SEO. Clearly, having a large social following plays an indirect role in SEO efforts in terms of driving traffic, repromoting content, etc. The main area of dispute is about whether social sites have a direct role on Local SEO. Matt Cutts indicated back in 2014 that Facebook and Twitter signals are NOT part of the ranking algorithm for search results. However, Google+ is indisputably an important indicator of citation consistency, and recent trends suggest that Facebook and Twitter might serve important value as high-quality directories.

In addition to that, Moz’s survey suggests that Review Signals (quantity of reviews, diversity of reviews, etc.) can also have an impact on Local SEO. As the image below shows, Facebook provides the ability to leave reviews for local businesses, which gives it another possible advantage as a Local SEO ranking factor. It would seem that having a presence on social media sites and review sites is like owning a car: you may not enjoy the upkeep and maintenance, but it makes it a lot easier to get around when you do have it.

Tools

I use a number of tools to help organize and build strategies for Local SEO campaigns. These are the four that have helped me the most:

• Moz Local and Yext are the two benchmarks for pushing citations to directories. Moz Local has access to 10 of the highest quality directories, while Yext has access to over 60 directories that cover a range of different business categories. Between these two tools, it is easy to cover your bases with the “Quality & Quantity” aspect of citations.
• Brightlocal and Whitespark are two other tools that, in contrast to Moz and Yext, are excellent for tracking down the citations you already have. Though Brightlocal and Whitespark offer citation-pushing features as well, Moz and Yext have much better success with this. If you want to know everywhere your business is being listed, however, Brightlocal and Whitespark are excellent tools for tracking down directory listings.

Hopefully Local SEO does not sound daunting or intimidating at this point. Though Local SEO requires a slightly different strategy, it employs a similar key principle to that of Traditional SEO. In Traditional SEO, you want to publish content relevant to your business that customers are searching for. In Local SEO, you want to make your business findable for the services your customers are searching for. The CQNS process is just a means to that ultimate end.

A Beginner’s Guide to Local SEO is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.