Importance of Web Hosting Companies in SEO
There are many factors on which a company or an individual selects his web host provider. Some factors which we generally analyses are hosting providers uptime , their technical support efficiency , server capabilities [ pros/cons ] , software features , hardware features, Control panel usability , online reviews about that host provider and cost comparison. Today I will give you one more important factor to consider while considering a web hosting provider, the Target Audience’s geographic location. Say you have a website with 90% visitors coming from Indian region, and then it’s suggestible to go for an Indian web host provider.
Some of the reasons for considering local host providers are: –
- By having host provider near to our audience data transfer will be faster, which results in improved website load time at our visitors end and help us give an improved User experience to them.
- We can cut down the time involved in data being transferred from multiple ISP’s globally.
- Same time zone tech support helps us to coordinate more effectively, especially for clients with multiple servers.
- Google is a very robust and intelligent search engine; it loves faster websites and also ranks them higher on search rankings.
Why search engines rank website superior if you host locally?
Google search and other search engines are trying to give more localized search results to help its users get what they are looking for locally, like a shoe store in the city or a restaurant, Movie Theater or schools around his location. For example, if you have a web host provider within India with data centers located in either Mumbai or Bangalore, search engines will map your IP as you have a local IP they tend to rank you higher over your competitors who have hosted in the US based data centers.
The geographic location of web server will affect the SEO and Google ranking? What will be the impact of server location on search ranking?
The myth about Indian data centers!
There is an old myth about Indian data centers that they go down frequently and technical support quality is not good. I don’t deny that earlier say 5 -6 years back if you ask me, where will I host my website/blog I would say on Hostgator or network solutions. Back then the situations were not favorable for Indian web host providers, due to infrastructure and maintenance related problems, servers used to go down frequently and tech support was below average. But now we can get some really good host providers in India like Netmagic , Directi , CtrlS etc. who are in fact providing hosting with multiple data centers , some outside India as well, From a pricing point of view also they very competitive.
Conclusion: I would suggest if you have most of your target audience in India then you need to seriously consider Indian web hosting companies for SEO and Google ranking reasons. If you have a target audience in other countries, then it’s advisable to have host servers locally in that particular country. For global audience having multiple servers with country specific sub domains hosted on the respective country, servers are advisable. While considering a hosting provider, we need to consider all important factors mentioned above plus this host server location vs target audience location factor. It helps both SEO point of view and User experience point of view.
February - 28, 2018 | Edited by: Madhukar SV (Digital Consultant)
