Have you ever heard the famous SEO joke? Here it is: “Where’s the best place to hide a dead body?”
“Page two of Google…”
Being on page two is no laughing matter though. It’s even worse if you’re on an even lower page for your chosen keywords. The fact is, if your business isn’t on page one for these terms, it’s virtually invisible. There is of course search engine optimization. Whether a business has an in-house SEO team, or uses an external provider, most have an idea of some of the SEO basics that can contribute to a site getting higher in the rankings. These include:
- Create awesome content that your visitors will want to read and share
- Build high quality backlinks from relevant sites in your niche
- Optimize the titles, structure and content of your website’s pages to ensure that Google understands what they are about and should rank for
- Ensure your sites has https, informing Google that it’s trustworthy and takes security seriously
One major factor however that most businesses underestimate is their hosting. Web hosting can significantly affect your search engine rankings. Want to know how? There are three main ways:
3 ways your web hosting affects your SEO efforts
Uptime/downtime
Downtime is the amount of time that your website is not accessible thanks to problems with its server. Search engine spiders will often visit your site several times a day. If they happen to visit your site when it’s experiencing downtime and it’s not accessible, then it’s recorded by the search engine and they simply move on to the next site.
If your site often has periods of downtime than your site will eventually get flagged as unreliable and your search engine rankings could be downgraded. Google, as well the other major search engines such as Bing want to give their users the very best set of results for their search. Why would they rank a site that experiences significant amounts of downtime? Even if your site has 99% uptime, it means that over the course of a month it’s inaccessible for about seven hours a month. Ideally, you should insist on 99.9% uptime and accept nothing less.
Server location
When looking to display the most relevant search results, not only does Google look at factors such as a site’s content and backlinks, it looks at the location of a website. For example, if a person is searching for recruitment agencies in the USA, Google’s algorithm will naturally display sites that are based in the US higher than websites that are based in Canada or the UK. To determine where your website is located, Google (and other search engines) look at a number of factors including the IP address of your website. This is assigned to your site based on the location of the server. So, for example, hosting your company with servers that are located in the USA will result in higher rankings for your site when people in the USA search for your chosen keywords.
Speed
It’s long been known that the speed of a website is a ranking factor for Google desktop searches. But now they’re placing even more focus on it and in January 2018 they announced that they will be using page speed in mobile search ranking.
“People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page. Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches. Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.”
That’s bad news if you’ve got a slow loading website. Mobile phones have been gaining website traffic year on year – in 2009 only 0.7% of web traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones. IN 2017 however, mobile now accounts for over 50% of all web traffic generated in the world and this figure will only increase in the next few years.
KnownHost.com: Helping deliver speedy, SEO friendly websites
When was the last time you looked into your web hosting? It could be significantly hurting your SEO efforts. Contact us today and talk to one of our VPS hosting experts who will help you find the hosting solution that best suits your needs and ensures your site is search engine friendly.
