So many websites get launched every day, and yours has to battle with them all to get and keep users’ attention. Only the sites that are seen as safe, valuable, and authoritative will make it to the top of search result pages. How can you achieve that? By combining SEO and cybersecurity. To be fair, it is not for the weak, but it is an absolute must to make users feel your sites can be trusted.
Here is the deal – on the one hand, you have to try to rank high on search engines (you have a lot of competitors to outrank, after all). At the same time, you want to avoid any data breaches and cyber attacks. That’s a lot, even for a pro webmaster or developer. So, in this article, we’ll show you some of the most effective ways to achieve both.
SEO and Cybersecurity: How Are They Connected?
It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that there is a strong link between SEO and cybersecurity. After all, SEO is about making sure your website is not only appealing to search engines but also trusted by people.
In a world where a single attack on a site can result in serious financial losses for individuals and businesses, it’s no wonder cybersecurity has become a necessity for those who want to attract more organic traffic to their site. Have you ever tried clicking on a website and got a warning like this:
Source: Hostinger
What would be your reaction after seeing this? Exactly. Users need to feel safe when they are on your page. Also, if your site is not secure or looks suspicious, it will be blacklisted by search engines. This will trigger a warning message when anyone clicks on your link. This will affect the credibility of your site and result in fewer conversions for you.
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Still, let’s say you don’t get blacklisted, and people can still find you online. How comfortable do you think visitors will be if there is a Chrome warning alert that says your website is insecure? If you are a business, you can be sure that very few people will be willing to enter their credit card details to pay for your products or services.
Source: Godaddy
Even when you do something for search engine optimization, be careful and don’t get into the trap of cyber attackers. When you want to install any plugin or software program, whether it’s for dofollow links or your website audit, make sure you use only secure products.
You need to take cybersecurity and SEO seriously if you want your visitors to feel safe and search engines to rank you higher in result pages. More importantly, you will have peace of mind knowing that your site is less vulnerable to cyberattacks.
How to Assess Your Website Vulnerabilities
Many times, webmasters focus on high-value content (which is awesome), but your website security is also just as important for your online presence. Try to take a look under the hood once in a while and see if there are any loose screws you need to tighten or holes to plug up. How do you do this? You can try to use scanners, plugins, and specialized tools to check your website for vulnerabilities.
For this task, it’s best to focus on:
- Technical SEO audit. Your site speed, crawlability, and mobile-friendliness are all important. You need to catch SEO issues that can also affect your site security and search rankings. Why? It’s not just humans who can struggle with sites. You want to make it easier for search engines to navigate your website and detect vulnerabilities quicker. The same goes for any plugin you install for website optimization.
- Assess your security. At this stage, you want to look at how secure your server is and how vulnerable your site is to malware attacks. Is your data encrypted, or is it just there for anyone to get? Who has access to what and to what degree? Catching these issues early on can help you mitigate the risk of a cyber attack and any negative SEO experience.
- Create a strategy. You need a plan that helps you fix any issues you have found during the assessment. Don’t try to eliminate them all at once. Usually, it’s best to start by picking out which ones need urgent attention and which ones can be put off for later. By categorizing issues based on their potential impact, you will come up with a strategy that works for both SEO and cybersecurity.
5 Strategies to Balance SEO and Website Security
Whether you’re managing a personal website or the one for business, it takes a lot of time and sweat. Your ability to balance the SEO and website security aspects at the same time will determine how far you go and how much traffic you attract. Want to get it right? Then, try these strategies:
#1 Use HTTPS
Search engines will always assess your site security and use that to determine how to rank you in SERPs. So, you stand a better chance if your URL starts with HTTPS. You get it when your site has the SSL/TLS certificate. This means that every request and response happening on your web page is encrypted, so data is secure. Naturally, your web hosting solution must also be protected.
Even better if you have domain, organizational, and extended validation certificates (DV, OV, and EV). If you’re a small business, the first one might be enough for you. Why do you need any of these anyway? For your users’ security and no “not secure” sign next to your website.
#2 Watch Out for Negative SEO and Build Links
A negative SEO is a type of sneak attack where competitors try to trash your search rankings by using malicious links —- links from bad sources. If you don’t understand how important this is, consider the fact that the pages that rank #1 in Google results have 3.8x more backlinks than the rest.
So you see that Google takes links seriously and will blacklist sites with too many spammy backlinks. As for your customers, too many suspicious links can affect your brand credibility. You can identify these because most tend to use random letters and numbers as anchor texts, or they can simply come from some shady pages. So, how do you tackle this?
- Use an SEO tool (like Ahrefs or Semrush) to check your links and remove any suspicious ones.
- Always conduct regular audits of your backlink profile. You don’t want people sending random links your way.
- Want to protect your backlink profile? Only use ethical link-building services or build your links yourself. This is your best bet for getting white-hat backlinks.
Pro tip: When doing link building, Martal.ca recommends using “tried-and-proven” tactics like guest blogging. The more guest posts you publish on reputable and relevant high-traffic sites, the more you position your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
#3 Use Schema Markup to Help Search Bots Understand Your Site
Even Google needs help understanding what a website is talking about. That’s why it’s important to add schema markup – a special code that helps them understand your page content.
But schema also does something important for your website in terms of SEO for cybersecurity purposes. It influences how search engines display your data in search results and how scanners understand the content of your page. This might make it easy to spot any issues. Ever looked up something online and got back results like this?
Source: Google
That’s what schema markup does. The rich results show the highlights of your business and can lead to more clicks and traffic to your site.
#4 Reduce the Entry Points
Minimizing entry points has a great impact on your cybersecurity and SEO. Most people use several devices to connect to their internet. We get it. It’s convenient and makes more sense than just using one. Besides, if something were to happen to one computer, it’s good to know you can also pick up right where you left off on another system. The only problem is the more devices are able to access your website account, the higher the number of entry points you have made for bad actors.
It’s even higher if your employees can also access the website on their personal devices. Anyone who can get their hands on any of the machines might just be able to hack into your system/network. If anyone gets in and it leads to a data breach, it could tank your SEO. Besides, it will definitely affect the trust your clients have for you.
As a solution, you want to limit the number of devices that are logged on to your website admin account. Restrict employees’ access based on their job responsibilities. This way, you will protect your site and lower the risks of being hacked.
#5 Stay a Step Ahead and Have a Recovery Plan
You need to monitor your website all the time. Why? So that you can catch any unusual activity (like too much traffic from a site riddled with bots). Also, back up your data – all of it. This is very important if you are someone who takes search engine optimization and cybersecurity seriously.
The idea is to be able to restore everything “as is” in the event of an attack. Some people back up their data in the cloud and on several storage devices. You should consider doing the same. But don’t stop there, consider the following as well:
- Make sure you do regular audits. This way, you will be able to catch anything that can affect your SEO (like dead links, problems with mobile responsiveness, and more).
- Update your CMS and every plugin or software you use. Most updates fix bugs and address weaknesses that hackers can exploit.
- Uninstall any plugins you haven’t used in ages.
Doing all these will protect your site and users from malicious attacks.
Conclusion
SEO and cybersecurity are not set-it-and-forget-it things. The digital world will keep changing, and the threats we know about will only evolve with time. The SEO tips we use now might also not be as useful tomorrow. Still, one thing will never change – you can’t go wrong when you put your customer happiness and threat protection at the heart of your goals. This will help you improve all your tactics. As a result, you will be able to catch negative SEO, build quality links, create great content, secure your site, and more.
