3 Overlooked Ways Your Web Hosting Affects Your Site’s SEO
In order for any London company to grow and thrive in the way they’d like they need a web presence that will attract leads, bolster their brand and, most importantly, turn browsers into customers. And many will, sensibly give some thought to hiring a London SEO company to help them with at least the SEO basics that can give will give their website an extra boost in the search engine rankings.
For many companies this will involve focusing their attention on things like quality of content, title tags and keyword usage, possibly turning to special tools to help them make the most of what they have to share with both customers and search engines. But unless you are dealing with an SEO company in London that truly knows their stuff some other important factors are likely to be overlooked.
One of those is how well the hosting solution attached to your website is performing. This hosting environment is, when you think about it for a minute, the foundation for your website. If your hosting service is simply not up to par then other aspects of the site will be affected; this includes the SEO. Here is a look at some of the ways poor hosting can impact your site’s SEO and what you should do about it even before you get started on a serious campaign with any SEO company in London.
Speed Counts
Website speed has been an increasingly important factor in SERP rankings for several years now, and yet still far too few business’ are taking the time to even measure the speeds on the their site, let alone try to improve it.
There are many on page issues, plugins and additional coding issues that can slow an individual website down, and these can be discovered, and addressed, using a tool like Google’s Page Speed Insights.
However, sometimes the slow speed is simply a matter of having chosen the wrong hosting provider. If you have optimized using a tool like Page Insights and still can’t get a good score then it’s time to talk to – and replace if necessary – your hosting company about the issue.
Server Location
Using SEO to rank in a geographical area is a common aim of many businesses, especially those that would describe themselves as local business. What most people don’t know is that search engines may check the IP address of your site to find out where it is located. The location of your site may be used to determine how it ranks in certain areas. Sites that are located in the same country (or part of the country) as the site content suggests tend to perform better in the rankings.
Scalability
What does every business owner really want from SEO? A big increase in the number of visitors heading to – and buying from – their website is certainly at the top of many wish lists. And from an SEO perspective, getting lots of new visitors and a nice spike in traffic is a good thing too.
However, if your hosting package isn’t set up to deal with the increased traffic you could find that many of these visitors will get nothing but a 408 or 503 error, get frustrated and leave. This increases your site’s bounce rate which is considered negative by the major search engines and, even more importantly, it’s stealing potential sales and profits.
The good news is that it’s not too hard to get scalability. To ensure that your site is always ready to handle next level traffic consider using a VPS server. Many cloud hosting packages will automatically upgrade your service level when big traffic surges occur. You’ll immediately get access to more VPS server resources to handle the load and prevent these kinds of potentially very costly errors from ever occurring.