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Does hosting server location affect SEO? Well, your website's SEO success depends on multiple factors. The location of the hosting server is really one of the essential aspects to consider. Additionally, it plays a significant role in your website's SEO success or failure. In this guide, I'll try to shed some light on how hosting server location can affect your website's SEO. And why choosing the best hosting provider is important. So, let's dive in!
Of course, when you create a website, you try to choose the best options for building your website. But when it comes to choosing the best hosting provider, you need to be very careful. I'm sure you also need to try as some websites load so quickly and some take an infinite amount of time to load. Well this is because of the hosting server. However, no matter what content management system you are using, you will find a CMS-specific hosting provider out there. For example, there are several providers of WordPress hosting , provider of Joomla hosting , provider of Drupal hosting and so on.
You will find numerous useful and productive solutions out there. How competent a hosting provider is will decide how your website performs. The more effective the hosting provider, the better the site will perform. The time your site takes to load will determine your site's performance. Time is precious and only time will bring your money and help you generate traffic to your website. Therefore, paying attention to the hosting server is crucial. Let's dig a little deeper now.
Does hosting server location affect SEO?
Yes, it does! The straight answer is yes, the location of your hosting server has a major impact on your website's SEO. I'll show you how. I assume all of you are aware of the difference between domain and web hosting. Because you have to understand that every website has an IP address. And this address indicates the hosting server you are using.
Okay, let's take an example. Imagine you are in portugal and your server location is in the United States. Then, Google will evaluate that your website was created for US users. However, another factor is which extension you are using. There are several types of domains to choose from. If you know what a domain name is and how exactly they work, you are halfway there.
Well, if you aim to reach customers near your geographic location then it is a good practice to look for a web host provider whose server is near your location. Before taking any provider, it is essential to check where the server is located. If they don't have a server near you, you should look elsewhere.
What needs to be done is to think at the continental level and not at the level of a single country. In short, for an Italian site, it does not matter whether the datacenter is in Italy, Germany, France or the Netherlands, especially given the peering and depeering policies of Telecom Italia (it may happen that Italian traffic is diverted to a European level only to be able to be entered in Italy).
Certainly a site for Italian users should not have servers in Brazil, the United States, Russia, Africa and so on.
How hosting server location affects speed
The speed of the website can attract or annoy your users. There are a lot of things like images, videos, content, and links that you need to manage. You need to keep everything aligned so your website never slows down. However, you can ask for help from website speed testing tools like Google page speed to check if your website is loading at the expected speed or not. For example, imagine you have tons of images and videos on your website which could be a reason for your site's slow loading speed. Well, if so, you can enable lazy loading for your WordPress website and manage the image loading speed effortlessly.
Typically, your site visitors won't wait that long for a site to load properly. According to studies, if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, visitors are likely to leave your website. They won't wait to see what you have to offer them. No matter how good or useful the offers you are making are, it will fail if your website takes too long to load. And all of this is due to the location of the server you rely on.
However, if you know the geographic location of your potential customers, it makes sense to choose a server located in that particular area. It doesn't matter where you are, but your server should be within the customer's geographic location.
Using Content Delivery Network (CDN) to influence page loading speed
You can choose a server location depending on the customer base you have. But what about websites that have customers all over the world? Of course, you can't have different servers in different countries for your single website. Right? Actually, the best option is to choose a hosting server that offers you CDN. Well, CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. Basically, it is a network of servers located around the world. There are various CDN services you can choose from.
The main goal of a CDN is to load your website as fast as if it were right in your user's location. However, one of the main benefits of the CDN is to ensure that the website load time remains the same regardless of the user's location and server. Therefore, it reduces the waiting time to a very good level. However, to ensure your website delivers quick results for visitors, the key is to find a web host that doesn't overload their servers.
Of course, more websites on a server mean more resources used. Hence, a slower page load for your website. It is also important to make sure that you reduce the page load time on your part as well. This includes reducing HTTP requests, reducing image size with the help of image compression tools and removing unnecessary plug-ins.
How the search engine sees server locations
Search engines like Google have their own parameters set on the basis of which they analyze a website for multiple factors. They allow website owners to set a target country in their webmaster tools. If your website uses a country TLD (e.g. .uk), you will not be able to choose a destination country.
This is because Google associates TLDs like these with a geographic location (.uk for the UK). However, if your website uses a TLD such as .com or .org, you need to enter a target country in the webmaster tools. If you don't, Google or other search engines will make selections based on other criteria.
The criteria are as follows.
- Server IP address.
- Any or all of the location information available in the website content, such as contact information, structured data or content snippets, etc.
- Backlink to the page.
- Any other information relevant to local SEO
Therefore, if your website is hosted on a server located in the United Kingdom and the content of your website is intended for users in Spain, it is very important to set "Spain" in the Google webmaster tools or other tools for search engine webmaster. So all in all, there is no need to host your website on a server located in Spain.
However, you can set international targeting in the webmaster tools and that should be enough. Whereas, if your website is targeting users from all over the world, it doesn't matter where it's hosted. You just need to make sure your web host provides some form of CDN. That's all!
Does hosting server location affect SEO?
So, now you know that it is crucial to choose a server location depending on your website. The location of a hosting server can have a huge impact on your website's SEO and page ranking. If you are struggling with your site's poor ranking, it is advisable to check this with your hosting provider. However, in some cases, you can manage everything with the help of webmaster tools. You can manage and set your geographic targets using these tools. Well, in these cases, the hosting location shouldn't be an issue.
But at the same time, it's wise to host your website in a way that offers ease of use to your visitors. Also, it is noteworthy here to mention that an eye-catching web design completes your website's SEO success. So, now you know the answer to "Does hosting server location affect SEO?". But chances are you may still have some SEO related questions. So, feel free to leave me a message below by sharing your questions and experience.
