How hosting affects a website’s SEO?
How many of you know that hosting affects a website’s SEO? Many of you didn’t know that hosting does affect SEO of a website. The very base of your websites SEO is based on which hosting company and plans you choose.
The world right now is all about SEO and if the website does not rank on the first page, it is probably not going to be noticed at all.
Although Google is not going to put you on top of search results based on good host but it is indeed going to affect your SEO if you choose a bad host. Therefore, don’t just take decisions of choosing your host based on price alone.
Let us look into some factors that can affect your website’s rankings.
• Accessibility
Your website might be running at a great speed, but this doesn’t matter if your site is down or crashed temporarily. It affects your website’s performance immensely. It is one of the issues that you face when you opt for a cheap hosting service provider. If this happens too often, your website can be flagged as unreliable and penalised in SEO, if it is not solved.
Even 1% downtime means you loose on 7 hours’ worth traffic a month.
Therefore, it is important that you choose a salient and decent hosting service that has good maintained servers and tech support.
• Speed- search engines love
Speed is an essential and important factor and plays a major role. Google has clearly stated that speed does effect rankings and it is liked by other search engines too. Even if a website takes more than 2 seconds to open, it turns people off and are likely to go back and check other options. This affects their user experience and in turn will affect your rankings.
Hence, it is important that you have a well-optimized website that loads faster. Making sure that you are using the right hosting service for their speed will ensure the speed of your website because each time someone accesses a page on your website, many hosting features like processing and memory are used.
Inadequate hosting will leave your site slow and will also negatively influence you ranking. Choose your host wisely so that it doesn’t harm your SEO.
• Location/ Geo targeting
Server location is an important factor and also plays a vital role in your website’s ranking. The search engines access the location of the websites to decide where to place them in search rankings. It determines your location based on your websites IP address since it is assigned with an IP address that directly relates to the geographical location of your website. For e.g. A site hosted in India will have an advantage in the ranking for users in India because the server is geographically closer to the audience. Though Google has stated that location factor has less importance in rankings, it does have little influence on SEO. E-commerce businesses target local audience as they are more likely to sell to local the market. Inhabitant server location means gaining relevant website traffic.
For this, there is an excellent feature called as Geo-Targeting which can be set-up in Search Console Tool. It helps to target valued customers globally irrespective of your server location. Making use of this excellent tool helps a global domain target a specific country
• Safety
It is important to invest in security of your website. Usually it is the responsibility of the hosting company to monitor and manage its servers in order to avoid hackers or malware that are infected. It is also the responsibility of the site owner to check maintenance routine. If your site is invaded by hackers or infected by malware, it can slow down your site’s speed and sometimes even make it unavailable which in turn affects the SEO of your website.
• Neighbours influence
If you have opted Shared hosting for your website and are using Shared IP address, then this is the most common problem that there are chances you might have a bad neighbor. There are many security and SEO threats in this type of hosting. When other websites on your shared server have been spammed, then all the other websites on that server get affected.
Hence, these are factors that affect the ranking of your website. Make sure you wisely choose a reputed hosting company as this has great impact on your website’s SEO and this not only affects SEO but your entire marketing strategy.
