Hosting and SEO – How Hosting Provider Can Influence Your SERPs

Hosting and SEO are two must-have elements of any website on the web, we all know that for sure. But have you ever wondered if a hosting provider can have an impact on your SEO? Well, the answer is yes, they can. Finding a good hosting provider is paramount to the success of your SEO campaign, try to think of this element as web hosting SEO and there are several ways in which this can happen which we will state below.

Hosting Features

When thinking of hosting and SEO the features that come with your website can have many indirect effects on your SEO. Think firstly to what kind of content management system that you wish to use, many hosting providers will offer services that will install your content management system, this can save a lot of time than having to manually install CMS. If the hosting provider offers a service for SSL certificate this can be a huge advantage, as SSL certificate ads a degree of trustworthiness to a website and is now considered a ranking factor.

If your hosting provider is also your domain provider it’s important to use a second-level domain appropriate to who you are targeting for example if you are in the UK a .co.uk address is preferable whilst if you are in Canada its .ca, this will impact your conversion rate and it will also help Google understand where best to rank your website.

Web Hosting SEO can also create problems. many poor service hosting providers come with a lot of technical issues. There have been some technical issues that I’ve experienced personally with a previous hosting provider that related to social media sharing issues. Meaning that the hosting provider will not allow sharing cards to be amended so that you can have your own specified title, description, and image if you have similar problems ask your hosting provider to fix the problems or switch providers. The features provided should be one of the first elements an individual should consider when looking at a hosting and SEO website builder.

Speed

Page speed, hosting and SEO go hand-in-hand, a slow website will turn users away from visiting your website, it will increase your bounce rate thus impacting your rankings and it has also been confirmed by Google as a ranking factor.

There are two ways in which your speed, hosting and SEO can impact your rankings, firstly if you’ve not got a hosting package suitable to the size of your website then your page speed will suffer, secondly if you use a hosting provider through a site builder that writes code for you, it can take in the form of more long-winded code which will negatively affect the site speed, there are workarounds for most of these issues and quite often plugins to minify scripts however if they are embedded in to your browser you will unlikely be able to fix them. To find out more about page speed and issues reflecting your page speed check out Google’s page speed device.

Uptime/Downtime

Uptime and downtime factor is also really important for SEO. If your site frequently goes offline you’ll need to think about getting a different hosting provider. There are several reasons why this will negatively affect your hosting SEO firstly search bots will be crawling your website frequently several times a day if it finds no content there then it will rank your site as if it is ranking low.

Secondly it will weaken your user experience meaning that when anyone goes onto your website they’ll face issues which will increase your bounce rate, which is a ranking factor furthermore it also means that people are less likely to find content on your website for which they will then link to, in turn, this will mean that you will mean you have a weaker backlink network thus affecting your rankings. Therefore, when deciding your hosting SEO provider, it is paramount that you do not pick a hosting provider that ever makes your website go offline.

Security

Security can have many indirect consequences for your hosting and SEO. You’ll need to think about whether the security on your website is any good, if people can hack into your website then you have absolutely no control over your website, in the worst cases they can hack your entire website and take absolutely everything down, naturally this will mean that you won’t be able to rank for anything as your website won’t have any content. They could also perform negative SEO on your website altering any SEO effort that you’ve made on your website to something that they see as more relevant.

Hosting and SEO – What Doesn’t Affect your SEO?

Before I finish this post I’d like to quickly clarify a myth that many bloggers and individuals seem to be under the impression of that is that the location of the servers is the most important aspect of hosting and SEO, this is completely untrue. There are several ways to make clear to google the location of your website, one is through Google My Business, and another is through schema as well as placing the address on your website.

Some SEO experts will argue that the impact is small but a hosting server’s location will impact your SEO even slightly, but it’s important to note that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest this claim. Just pick a hosting provider that is the best value for money and meets all the requirements as stated above. Another myth is that shared hosting will have a massive effect on your SEO this again is not true, Google understands that the vast majority of websites are on shared hosting providers and do not use dedicated servers so it does not discriminate.

Matt Cutts, for example, said that if your website is the only non-spammy website on a server with tons of spammy websites then you should worry but if it’s a normal mix then don’t worry about it.

Final Words

We hope that you like the post and will take some useful tips concerning SEO use and hosting into consideration. As a cherry of the pie, we have also prepared a pleasant surprise for the readers who have not yet chosen their hosting provider.

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