SEO: Web hosting factors that affect business visibility on search engines

Search engine optimisation is a universal term for the steps you can use to improve your business visibility on search engines. Once your site appears on search engines like Google for keywords relating to your brand's product and services, you can dominate your market. Most of your organic traffic that leads to conversion will come from search engines.

Most businesses invest huge amounts of money to optimise for SEO. This includes creating high-quality content, ensuring that their site is responsive to mobile devices, increasing inbound links and optimising broken pages to make it easier for search engines. But did you know your web hosting provider contributes to the success of your website SEO strategy? Here, we explore the four most important web host factors that can make or break organic traffic coming to your business site.

1. Website speed and page load time

To ensure maximum site visibility in the search results, it's essential to have an SEO-friendly website that is secure and accessible at all times. Website speed is an important ranking factor - meaning that it will significantly impact where your website lands on search engines. The optimal page load time is between two and three seconds. In fact, half of your potential customers will leave your site for another if it takes more than three seconds to load. Choosing the right web host provider with high-performance servers, SSD storage, and optimised caching is the first step in ensuring great website performance. A high-quality provider will offer all the necessary tools to ensure your website loads quickly.

2. Web server uptime reliability
Server uptime is a concept used to assess the average duration a website is functional and operational for users. Regular server downtime due to poor and unreliable web hosts can have a negative impact on your ranking. When a search engine crawler reaches your business website when it's not functional, the engine crawler de-indexes the website, and it will no longer appear on the search engine. This gives a bad impression to your users and damages your brand credibility. Opt for a hosting company that guarantees an uptime of 99.9% or better.

3. Type of hosting

Sharing your website servers with spammy email addresses and websites can harm your ranking. When Google penalises spammy sites, it penalises every website that shares the same IP address. Therefore, it is paramount to look for a plan that can help you maintain effectiveness and cater to your business needs; there is a wide range of hosting solutions, each with its limitations and unique features you ought to consider before finalising the hosting plan that accommodates your needs.

4. Servers location

The location of your web servers has an impact on page speed. The closer your target audience is to your servers, the faster your website will load; this improves user experience, reduces bounce rate, and boosts website SEO score. It is advisable to choose a web host with servers near you or leverage a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Conclusion

Managing your SEO is a continuous practice that requires you to be in tune with the current trends. By investing in the best hosting provider, you can mitigate problems and eliminate SEO-related errors that your business website could face.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.