Do visitors see the dreaded “Not Secure” warning when visiting your website? This is warning that is now being shown on many sites across the web, even those where it may not have appeared before.
If you run a dental practice and you are facing this issue, it is important that you address it for multiple reasons. First and foremost, proper SEO considers whether or not your website is secure. It was announced not too long ago that Google will begin to penalize any website that is listed as “Not Secure” because it puts any data entered on the website at risk of a data breach.
If you don’t collect any information through your site (not even an email), that may not seem like an issue to you. However, Google is still going to consider your website’s security when determining your ranking.
And, the second reason why you should pay attention to this issue and get it resolved is that the visitors who are looking at your website are going to care whether it’s secure. Being that your practice potentially collects personal medical information about clients, that “Not Secure” warning will reflect negatively on how safe your practice is.
Even though you know that your website’s lack of an SSL certificate probably has no link to how you handle patient information, many patients don’t. They would much rather know that they are browsing a secure website, especially when considering a site in the medical/health field than begin to question the security of your dental practice.
It should absolutely be considered a necessity that you resolve any “Not Secure” warning that happens to be appearing on your site. To avoid it, you will need to purchase and install an SSL certificate from your hosting provider. At DIGI Search, all of our clients receive a free SSL certificate at no additional charge. All of our dental clients enjoy this benefit.
An SSL certificate tells browsers that you are using Secure Socket Layer encryption for all of the information that is passing through the servers. In other words, any data that happens to be collected through your website about users (whether that’s information they enter or information about the web browser they are using) is going to be passed securely to your servers.
An SSL certificate is an absolute essential for any site collecting information, whether it’s an email to send a message or information to book an appointment. It’s also essential for your dental practice to rank well locally–so get it taken care of sooner rather than later.
