You may work on many other parts of your website to raise its ranking, like adding keywords, creating backlinks, and doing competitive analysis. Nevertheless, you could have missed something important. At this point, do you have any idea what we are referring to? It speaks about how hosting for your website affects search engine optimization. Whether you realize it or not, the web host you choose may have a significant impact on whether or not your website receives a higher ranking or becomes almost unnoticed online, that is why we created this complete SEO web hosting guide.
When you give it any consideration, the cause is pretty obvious. Your website’s load speeds and availability will both be impacted by your choice of web host, among other factors. Here are seven things to keep in mind if you’re looking into website hosting in order to meet your search engine optimization “SEO” needs.
What Makes Web Hosting So Important For SEO?
You must select your web host carefully. It will have a significant impact on how visible your website becomes and remains over time. Before we continue, let’s check what Google has to say about how searches are conducted. It takes into account the following:
- Relevancy of content to other parts of the website
- Meaning of content
- Quality of content
- Usability
- Context cohesion
We will focus on usability since we are talking about search engine optimization and web hosting. For ranking, Google considers the followings:
- Mobile-friendly (Responsivity)
- Loading Times
- Location so Google may serve location-based material
Your content has a greater probability of ranking the easier it is to read and navigate. In addition, Google considers page experience indications. Like whether your website is HTTPS-secured. The influence your web host has on each of these elements necessitates careful thought when choosing one.
What Qualities Should Web Hosting Providers Have For SEO?
There are a few things you should expect as a standard from your provider when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) and website hosting.
These include speedy loading times and consistent uptime. But it would help if you also kept an eye out for the following qualities. We’ll explain in more detail in the next section:
Uptime Reliability
Even a brief period of downtime for a company might cost thousands of dollars in missed output. Users may have an extremely frustrating experience. If users are unable to access your website or if it often crashes.
However, downtime may be just as damaging to your standing with search engines.
Search engines like Google often crawl websites. If your website frequently has outages, this will give the impression that it is untrustworthy.
Although no web server can guarantee that your website will be accessible 24/7. The vast majority of web hosts presently guarantee an uptime of 99.9%.
Having 99 percent uptime equates to having 1.44 minutes of downtime per day, or 8.8 hours per year, according to Search Engine Journal. Not really that horrible, is it?
Speed
The idiom “time is of the essence” has been used before, right? This is true, and your visitors agree. Therefore you shouldn’t keep them waiting any longer than is absolutely necessary.
A slow website can cause visitors to leave. It will significantly raise your bounce rate, according to a figure collected from a Google study.
Despite the importance of having pages load rapidly, a large majority of websites fail to satisfy the requirements. According to research done by Littledata, it takes an average of 4.6 seconds for a mobile website to load fully.
Although it could seem to be relatively fast at first, doing so will not elevate your website to the list of the best-performing ones.
What area should you focus your efforts on? According to Littledata, the loading time of your website should be under 3.2 seconds if you want it to rank at the top.
The mobile version of the page should fully load in under three seconds for your website to be ranked in the top ten percent. Do you know what speed you are now loading? Here are various instruments that need to be examined:
Customer Service
The following customer service considerations should be taken into consideration when choosing a web hosting company for search engine optimization (SEO):
- Company Size: A larger company is more likely to have more staff members and resources accessible to help with customer care issues. Although it’s not always the case, this is often the case. Additionally, they are in a better financial position to spend more on the representatives’ education
- Company’s Overall Reputation: In the modern world, it is simple to find out other people’s opinions since information is widely accessible. By reading reviews of web hosting providers, you may learn what other people think of them and use that knowledge to narrow down your selections
- Availability: Is someone available to help clients every hour of every day, seven days a week? At any time, there might be a problem with the hosting. It is your duty to make sure that a live person or even a bot is available to take your call
- Ways for Contact: The easier it is to reach a company’s representatives, the better the company is. Although email and online contact forms are excellent resources, it could take some time before you hear back from individuals who use them. If you want responses more rapidly, look for businesses that provide customer service through phone numbers, social media accounts, and live chat
Security Matters
Would you buy anything from a website whose reputation you didn’t trust? We have our doubts. Although it is pretty unlikely that you would trade any critical information with a website that lacks an HTTPS certificate, this problem goes beyond fostering customer trust.
Google initially said that HTTPS would be taken into account as a ranking element in 2014.
According to John Mu, Google’s Search Advocate, on Twitter, it is just a minor ranking factor, and even if HTTPS hasn’t been installed, your site will still be indexed.
But as Mu contends, HTTPS is great for consumers, and research by Google shows that there has been a noticeable rise in the proportion of internet users who rely on HTTPS. The following are a few of the most significant figures:
- Desktop users spend over two-thirds of their time on secure websites and load more than half of the pages they visit through HTTPS
- The HTTP protocol is used to load webpages by the vast majority of Chrome users (98%)
- Although mobile users are less likely to utilize HTTPS, the number of these visitors is also rising
Although you can install an SSL certificate yourself, it’s easiest to choose a web host that provides a certificate for free or at a very cheap cost.
Examples of websites that offer free SSL certificates include the following:
That resolves the HTTPS issues. What about the impact that your server’s location has on your website hosting and SEO? Read our complete Web Hosting Reviews which we reviewed the best providers one by one.
Server Location
Does the server’s location affect how long pages take to load? Absolutely. In a YouTube video, former Google Search Quality expert Matt Cutts said, “We aim to offer the most relevant results to each user in each location.
And one of those factors is the server’s location as indicated by its IP address.” The time it takes to deliver data may be significantly increased, for instance, if your server is in the United States, but the bulk of your customers is in the United Kingdom.
The website will probably load more quickly, and response times will likely be reduced if the server is moved to the UK.
What can be the reason for this? The amount of time it takes for data to flow from one point in a network to another is referred to as network latency or ping.
The time it takes to receive the first byte of data is another element at play here. The server’s location also affects your bounce rate and compliance with the law. When looking for the best server locations for your website, keep in mind the three tips below:
- Log in to your account at Google Analytics by going there. To determine where the bulk of your audience is situated, choose “audience,” then “geo,” and then “location.”
- Verify the timings for latency. Use a free tool like the one on devicetests.com, which is available here
- Check your Time For First Byte using an application like GeekFlare
KEEP IN MIND THAT the lower the number, the better.
Shared Hosting
Since shared hosting is a cheap way to start a website, it is a popular option for small businesses, but it has a few disadvantages as well.
The most significant barrier for users is often the way a website performs.
Due to the fact that many users often utilize the same server, shared hosts can perform worse than dedicated servers.
This might lead to longer loading times for pages and worse Site Speed Index scores.
Additionally, the customization options may be limited for you to pick from if you need to make any significant updates or alterations to your website, such as adding new features or rebuilding your whole site.
You can also see a decline in performance as your traffic volume grows. There are many benefits to shared hosting, including how easy it is to use and how well it grows.
CMS Quality
A content management system, or CMS for short, is a piece of software or a group of connected apps that makes it easy to create and manage digital content—enabling content optimization and offering SEO-related plugins aids in the search engine optimization of your website.
Although there are over 80 different content management system (CMS) options available, 64.9% of individuals select WordPress, according to Zippia.
Given the enormous variety of providers now available, it may be difficult to choose, therefore look for the following three qualities to narrow down your options:
- A content management system (CMS) should be easy to use, particularly for novice users; it should have a clear user interface and straightforward command choices
- Look for a content management system (CMS) that can be modified to match your website’s needs. It should be simple to use and allow you to change layouts, add or remove content, and do other similar operations
- Verify that the content management system works with the most popular web browsers and mobile devices. Additionally, it must work well with any other plugins and programs that you want to use
FAQ
Does SEO come with web hosting?
According to the host you’re using, it varies. You may often apply plugins to your CMS to optimize it if SEO isn’t already a part of it.
Are Free Hosting Services Beneficial for SEO?
It is subject to the host. Despite the fact that some are better than others, it’s important to remember that you get what you pay for and that web hosting costs shouldn’t be your only priority.
Free web hosting services can occasionally be of lower quality, offer fewer advanced features, and lack built-in search engine optimization.
Does the Server’s Location Affect SEO?
Yes. The closer the server location is to the site’s visitors, the faster your website will load.
Is Wix an effective SEO platform?
A single template that can be used for SEO on multiple pages is one of Wix’s great SEO features. Wix also integrates with Google Search and Google Analytics.
Wix has an SEO Wizard built-in. This is a checklist that can be found on your website’s dashboard under the heading “marketing home,” set up in a step-by-step format.
This checklist will help you connect and verify your website with Google, will speed up site indexing, and will give you advice on how to increase your website’s visibility through SEO.
What are some instances of web hosting plans that include powerful tools for SEO?
Reviews for SEO web hosting give high marks to Hostinger, Bluehost, and SiteGround, but the best choice for you will depend on the features you require.
Last But Not Least
It is essential that you make the best decision possible since you will probably have a relationship with the hosting company you have chosen for a long time.
With so many web servers to choose from, finding the best host may need a lot of work, and even then, you may not always succeed on your first attempt.
To make things simpler to comprehend, be sure to prioritize selecting a firm that values uptime dependability, speed, and security while searching for a provider for your SEO web hosting.
Remember that the location of your server may have an impact on your SEO, and test your customer support by first posing a few inquiries.
