How Your Webhosting Affects Your SEO

A web host can be a crucial piece of your SEO strategy. In this post, we will look into all the different factors that go into informing your SEO strategy online.

Downtime and Uptime

A critical ranking factor is determining for how long your site would be down. Put simply, this means the time your users won’t be able to access your site. If your site is down, then it isn’t the best user experience you can exhibit. To make sure that the website is down for the least amount of time, the best thing you could do is to get a host that gives you 99.99% uptime.

Downtime negatively affects SEO, and it also affects your conversion rates. It can affect the organic traffic you generate. There are loads of companies who for the sake of writing on the feature list say that the cloud web hosting they provide has 99.9% uptime. And they get away with it because most people don’t realize there’s a big difference between 0.9% and 0.09%. The bigger the difference, the more is the time the site is down for. Good providers have additional servers and memory caps to ensure your site remains active most of the time.

IP Address Location

Your IP address tells your site visitors where your site is from. Generally, a good host will have a local IP address that provides info on which country you’re from. If the IP address is from outside the country, it could hurt local ranking as search engines tend to favor local IP addresses.

If you ever wondered why a site you created in India ranks better in India, this is the reason-the local IP.

Security

Security is an important SEO factor. Certain hosts tend to provide free SSL certificates for your site. It improves trust and is additionally considered to be a ranking signal. The whole World Wide Web is moving to a secured protocol. You don’t want to lag behind.

Hackers can hack into sites with flimsy security and no SSL. A good host is protective of your business. Good hosting will have multiple ways to ensure your site is protected.

Speed

Page load speed is a core component of the on-page signals Google uses to rank a page. A site needs to load fast. Otherwise you’re leaving a lot of conversions on the table. People will start leaving your site. Back in 2010, Matt Cutts, the then head of Google’s web-spam team publicly announced that site speed will now be a ranking factor. Ever since, the sites that load faster are moving up the ladder on SERPs.

Hosting services may provide free CDN and/or caching software to boost your site speed.

But, the foremost criterion is the quality of infrastructure. Old rusty servers and hardware are going to cost you your site’s speed.

24/7 Tech Support

You rarely encounter technical issues when hosting your site. But, when you do, you want a set of people who know what they’re talking about. If your site goes down, you want enough technical support to get it back on track. And when stuff like this happens, there’s no saying as to when it would get fixed. That’s why you need a support system that’s around 24*7.

Without good support, hosting is pointless. There should be experts ready to handle your queries any time of the day.

Never use SEO Hosting

SEO hosting is a type of hosting mainly used to host PBN sites for low cost. They use class-c IPs. SEO hosting is a sure shot sign to Google that your site is spam and probably a PBN. Whole networks have been deindexed this way. It’s like wearing a red T-shirt to get kicked by a bull. With multiple C-class IPs such as this being obvious signs of spam, all websites sharing a set of IPs can get black listed.

What’s the alternative?

Do you need a dedicated host?

Dedicated hosts are the best choice for fostering your site’s growth in a stable environment.

Whether it be hosting your podcasts or anything else, dedicated server hosting can help. It provides best security, complete control and options to scale. The fact that you own and host your site on a single IP makes all the difference in terms of ranking well.

Shared hosting can also handle traffic but over time as the number of scripts and plugins begin to mushroom, the quality of hosting goes down. The load’s high and site speed among other factors suffer.

If you see a noticeable shift in quality, consider upgrading from shared to VPS hosting, consider something that is known for its support, has great SEO features and has around 99.99% uptime. It will make a world of difference to your SEO strategy. At the same time, it will improve conversions for your website.

What do you think of the tips we shared above? Let us know in the comments.

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