The SSL certificate became an important trigger in our SEO work around 2014. Over time we started installing SSL on all of our sites. Back around 2005 the https:// protocol was a tangle, and it threw different problems in different browsers. As Chrome took a more definite share of the market it took hold of some of the reins and made the internet a safer place. Today something like 99% of websites are served over https.
On our SSL certificate pages we have started an entirely new kind of web experience. We had been working on it with Celal Dinç for a long time, and it is finally live.
In 2014 Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Google’s webmaster trends analysts at the time, published a piece titled “HTTPS as a ranking signal” on the Google Webmaster Central Blog (now the Google Search Central Blog).
From that day on, SSL certificates became about as important as anything in SEO. So: is your SSL certificate working properly on your site, and more importantly, did you get the right certificate in the first place?
At Türk SEM we had been planning a piece on SSL certificates for a long time. Because it is such an important and well known trigger in search engine optimization, we did not want to pass it off with a single blog post. So we built a comprehensive SSL certificate tool and a system that works as a site in its own right. We published it at Turksem.com/SSL.
A New Web Experience in Our SSL Analysis Tool
What we built here is something we have not come across on any other site, and as far as we can tell we are among the first portals in the world using it. In the bottom right there is a URL box for getting to know the visitor, and people can enter their own site there. The moment a URL goes in, we start the analysis in the background. Even if the person moves to another page the analysis carries on, and when it finishes we record the data about their site into their own cookies. So whenever they come back, we know which site is theirs.
We assigned a variable to every result the analysis returns, and worked from there. Say a user is about to read what an SSL certificate is: what they meet is not generic content. The content on that page is now about their site, with concrete figures in it. Which is to say, we made the content conditional and personalized it. Instead of showing readers material that has nothing to do with them, we put them straight onto the parts that concern their own site.
That gave us a genuinely capable user experience. Another example: on the SSL certificate types page, while reading about the types the user can see which type their own site is on. Reading the piece, they work out which type they ought to be using. Now is that not something?
A Personalized Web Experience
Whichever page they move to, the card in the bottom right, which we launched as the “recognition card”, keeps the person recognized. Everything on the site now arrives shaped for them. At Türk SEM we think a personalized web experience will be far more widely used in the web of the future, and we are making our moves accordingly.
Let the user give us their website, or their company name, whichever they prefer, and we will research it in the background and reach conclusions. With those conclusions they will get a genuine web experience. Reading what TTFB is, for instance, they will find content on that page specific to their own site. We will do this through integrations with pages like Türk SEM Pagespeed and Sitelab. We assign a variable to every response and write conditional content that changes with the value that comes back.
So in 2026, reading this article on Turksem.com, in the bottom right, and I hope we will have shipped it by then: if you have given us your company website address in the bottom right, you will read some critical information about your own SSL certificate right here, as though it were part of the article.
We Tried It on the SSL Tool and It Worked
Before trying the dynamic content work on our main site, Turksem.com, we tried it on Turksem.com/SSL and finished it successfully. You could call it the art of the cookie, or something else entirely. Very soon we will bring this to the main site and recoordinate all of our content by making it conditional. Rewriting that content conditionally will take a considerable amount of time, of course. But; we are certain this is the future of the web, and we are among the first firms in the world using it. We will go on building a personal web experience with interactive buttons inside the site, and go on offering a far better experience.
For instance: while a user reads the dynamic version of our e-commerce SEO page, if a set of options about their own site comes up, the answers they pick will bring them newer and more specific figures. Say your site takes 6 seconds to open, which is a very long time for e-commerce, and three images on your store are very heavy. While we share that, we also ask the user, “is your target 10 million TL a year in e-commerce revenue?” If they say yes and the platform is WooCommerce, the message becomes “you could move to something stronger”. The reason; WooCommerce may be better suited to smaller businesses.
At Türk SEM we want to bring this in as standard in our web design work as well.
