Does Server Location affect SEO activities?
Today’s web hosting provider companies have become ultra-active to facilitate the endless demands of websites to rank top on the search engines. With excess demand, an excess supply of web hosting providers has also made their way which has created a great differentiation between the quality of services and the prices offered. Therefore, picking the most probable and right web host among the herd is the skill your website and your company need.
While choosing the best host, one question might arise, does server location play a major role in any web hosting provider’s activities and performance? Do server locations also have their effects on any website’s page ranking?
Today, in the below discussion we will breakdown how a server’s physical location is important and how can it have major impacts on your SEO performance.
What is Server Location?
A server location refers to the data center where the server that hosts your website is located. This location can be in any part of the world regardless of wherever you are located.
For Example – You reside in India and your host Ideastack also resides in India. Now it is not necessary that the server that is hosted for your website is based in India itself. It can be located and preserved in any of the US or UK server data centers of Ideastack. Also, the distance between you and your server location might or might not be a basis for any website speed determination.
How do Search Engines see Server location?
It seems that Google is making a lot of changes to its algorithms for taking into consideration a more global kind of setting. The Google webmaster tools allow the website owners to set a country as their target. Whenever your website uses TLDs like .com or .org, then you get a chance to choose a target country. If you do not select your country targets, then search engines use their own selection based on other criteria. These criteria are –
• Backlinks are attached to the page.
• Other information related to local SEO.
• The IP address of the server.
• Location-related content available on the website like the content information, data, or other snippets.
Well, when it comes to server locations, it doesn’t really matter much as it is not mandatory to host your server only where your target audience is high. You can set your international targeting properly with the webmaster tools and there you go. Also, if your website targets an audience spread all over the world, then it doesn’t really matter to check the hosting location.
Even Google quotes that server locations are usually near to their users. Though some websites make use of distributed content delivery networks (CDN) to host their servers in the locations fulfilled with the highest quality of server infrastructure. So they don’t rely much on their server location finder nowadays as a factor to rank any website higher.
Is the server location important for Geotargeting?
If you are well versed with how to set and manage geo targeting IP with webmaster tools for IP geolocation SEO, you don’t really need to think much about the server location. Though it is always recommended to check and make sure that your website is hosted at the best server location that offers fast access to your users.
Does Hosting Location affect SEO?
Well honestly Yes! Hosting server location affects SEO. The domain name with which your server is associated is linked with a certain server IP address that identifies your FTP hosting server’s location.
For example, your server is located in a different country, say Austria. Your server hosting different countries might lead Google to think that you hosted your server in Austria because your website complements and caters to the audience in Austria. But the Google website rankings also judge the language you use on your website. This can have an impact on how Google ranks online search results based on the locations as well.
Also, Google ranking factor assumes that websites ending with a co.uk are more focused on the audience in the United Kingdom, and for websites .com focused on the audience in the United States. So, to get under the lights of Google search quality experts and to make sure your website load speed is at the top, your website hosting matters should be carried on at a server location that is closest to your business area or your targeted geographical area.
Impact of localized web hosting on SEO
The server location of your website hosting server might have direct effects on the speed and uptime of your website. The closer your audience is to your server’s data center; the higher will be the speed of your SEO website.
But Google quotes that when it comes to geo-targeting, the server’s data center location hardly makes any difference. If you make effective use of the webmaster tools with ccTLD and gTLD, then your website will experience geotargeting regardless of wherever your server is based.
Google can place geotargeting, so you don’t have to set your server’s location in any particular or specified location only. Websites can use the best hosting country or location as per their suitability. The only thing that Google needs is information in the form of ccTLD or webmaster tools.
Does Shared Hosting affect SEO?
Shared hosting services allow thousands of domain names to be hosted under one IP address which also includes shared services of the same storage and bandwidth. Under shared hosting, multiple websites are hosted under one server and a few spammer websites can have massive effects on your own website hosted on a shared server.
The Search engine and the ethics of SEO will not even consider you in the competition if you have even a few spammer websites traits in your website.
Always do away from the cheap hosting providers offering shared services as they will surely harm your website’s ranking. Instead, look for a web host that offers quality web hosting server services that will help you to avoid all the shared storage, bandwidth, and spammer traits as your dedicated server will be dedicated to only you and your website. Dedicated servers bring massive improvements in webpage loading speeds, uptime, and security.
How does the location of your web server affect your website speed?
Whenever a browser browses through your website, the browsing request is passed through from the data center of its host and then to the user in a passage of interconnected networks which we call as the internet. The data is transferred to the browser at the most efficient and fastest route.
As in today’s generation, a lot of networks make the use of fiber-optic cables, the website speed has significantly improved. So even if the server location is far away, the webserver internet speed will be lively with a massive speed and minimal delays.
Impact of Localized Web Hosting on speed
The location of your website data center might have some impacts on your website speed. It is believed that the closer your website is to your audience, the faster will be the page load time along with minimal latency.
If the location of your website datacenter is far, then there are chances of servers taking and processing a request which might lead to increased latency and page load times.
Some facts about website speed you must know:
• As per Amazon’s calculations, a page slowdown of just 1 second can cost up to $1.6 billion each year in sales.
• If your website delays by 3 seconds, 40% of your visitors will leave your website.
• The Firefox research showed that a 2.2 second improvement in page load speed can lead to a 15% uptick in conversions and can improve website ranking by a mile.
• A 1 second delay in page load time can cause up to a 7% decrease in conversions for eCommerce websites. Being the reason why everyone is concerned about the importance of page load time.
• As per Google, when they tested by slowing their search results by just four-tenths, they lost close to 8 million searches per day. This also means there would be minimal ads shown that would have directly affected Google’s ad revenue.
How website speed affects your website SEO?
• The speed at which your website pages load also plays a major role in your website ranking. Being the reason, it is always reckoned to go for the best website hosting company that avails you all the resources to optimize your page load speed and SEO goals.
• Even Google quotes that they take website speed as one of the biggest factors in determining any website’s rankings. By speed, it means how a website responds quickly to the requests received.
• Search engines are always on the look, crawling through your sites. If a slow website comes their way on accessing any website pages, they then degrade your keyword rankings to a major extent.
• There can also be other factors that can lead you to slow website loading speed like for instance – Your website’s coding, unoptimized images, and animations, excessive and fancy flashes, spam, shared server downtimes, etc.
So yes, hosting location might have some impacts. But it is really important to have the backing of a certified website IP SEO hosting service that will work with quality and performance to attain your SEO goals.
Using Content Delivery Network to influence Page Load.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) service helps your visitors to be availed with multiple substitute server points to access resources from your website. These CDN points can be deployed worldwide in different locations. CDN services offer a great speed and fast response time for your website.
If you understand that your website audience is spread across different parts and locations, your CDN will help your server to have none of its effects. This turns out to be more beneficial in place of a quality web hosting server as well. CDN will make sure that your website is fulfilled with great website page loading speed regardless from wherever your audience visits your website.
To make sure that you achieve your SEO success, it is important to find a web host who does not overburden their servers. You yourself can also work on improving your page load time by reducing HTTPS requests, removing useless plugins, reducing image size and animations, etc.
Consideration of downtime for SEO
Wanna know how you can degrade your website’s speed, choose a website hosting service that runs multiple businesses on a server and loves offering downtime!
Well, web server downtime is the worst thing you would ever wish for your SERP and SEO goals. If your server remains on downtime for repeated and regular intervals, it could lead to major negative impacts on your online search engine ranks right away. The Google bots and other search engine bots will never keep you in their good books.
This would ultimately lead you to go down immensely on search engines and ultimately lose a lot of conversion opportunities. Sometimes, there can also be instances that the search engine displays your website’s meta description as unavailable.
How do you overcome the effect of server location on SEO?
To overcome the effect of server location on SEO, you can either choose a web hosting provider offering CDN (Content Delivery Network) or a server location that is closest to your audience and user base.
• Choosing a web hosting provider with CDN – As discussed before, CDN will offer multiple substitute server points at different locations that will facilitate the requests and responses well and would ensure that the website loading speed creates a decent SEO impact.
• Choosing a server location closer to your audience – As discussed before, a server location based at the same location where a huge amount of traffic also resides creates a huge impact on the website’s uptime and response.
Set up Geo-Targeting in Search Console Tool
The Google search console tool offers some great features of geo-targeting. This tool helps websites to target a specific set of the audience regardless of wherever your server location is.
If your website surrounds a local domain like for instance .in, .au, .uk, then your targets are already set to those local country bases. But if your domain is global like .com, you can make the best use of a search console tool to target a specific set of audience or country.
Even if you don’t set your targets, Google will itself track your IP address and set your website’s country as your target country.
Conclusion:
A website data center’s physical location might play a major role in your website’s speed directly. A website’s speed deterioration seen in web page load time can have major impacts on SEO rankings. The closer your hosting server location to your audience base, the better responses your websites will offer to them.
Therefore, it becomes very essential to host your server nearby your customer base or use the efficient tools of geo-targeting offered by Google. Also, it is of utmost importance to choose the best hosting service that is reliable and offers the utmost quality for promoting SEO friendly websites.
Ideastack is one of those top-of-the-line web hosting and SEO services companies that will ensure that your website receives utmost power and speed to rank highest on the SEO rankings.
FAQ
1. Why should one choose a Local Host To Target Local Audience?
Server location plays a very essential part in offering the web audience a smooth browsing experience. More relevant and good SEO rankings can be fetched through local hosting. The reason behind this is your IP address is directly connected to your geographical location. Choosing a local host will help you target your audience easily as well as increase your search engine optimization rankings.
2. How HTTPS benefits in improving your SEO?
HTTPS is one of the best options when it comes to the rules and regulations for the use of data between the site you are connected to and your web browser. It simply offers a secure website than that of HTTP. It encrypts URLs for each and every communication between your website and the browser. HTTPS will improve SEO rankings as it enables secure visitors and avoids destructive third-party tampering.
3. Why is Ideastack different from other Providers?
Ideastack provides extremely reliable connectivity along with 24/7 active support with one of the best teams of technical experts. The datacenters of Ideastack have located in the cities with tier 1 bandwidths. To provide you with the best infrastructure Ideastack uses a tier 4 datacenter. Besides that, they also provide instant scalability where you can easily upgrade or downgrade your plans.
4. What are the various Web Hosting Features offered by Ideastack?
Ideastack offers one of the best hosting solution features concerning your business stability, performance, flexibility, and various other aspects. Your hosting service will be powered by the latest generation Intel Xeon processors for swift hosting experiences. They provide an affordable service along with comprehensive technical support.
5. What are some of the best online tools to measure page load time?
Its fact that if your page load time is more than two seconds most likely the visitors will choose the next options. Decreased web time enables more views. Google page speed tool, GTmetrix, and Pingdom are some of the best online tools to measure page load time.
