Location! Location! Location!
Look:
Nowadays, almost everything happens in the digital world.
Businesses that wish to engage with their customers, and hopefully drive sales, do so via company websites.
Websites have become the very core of online businesses.
Website and the conversion: The main reason is that marketing campaigns, promotions and personalized offers all serve a purpose of leading target audience and leads back to a website where they’ll be converted into actual customers.
That’s why companies today make an extra effort in optimizing their website and ensuring their visitors have the best experience possible while browsing through its content.
Let us see a good example: A good example is engaging in search engine optimization (SEO) to make certain that a company’s website is well optimized, visible and easily find-able on search engines, such as Google.
Not only that, but SEO helps optimize website content and functionality to provide a seamless experience for customers.
Importance of Website Host:
However, there’s still an issue of choosing a website host.
A hosting server plays a vital role in your website performance and page load speed.
It’s also important to choose the right hosting location – preferably the one that’s closest to your audience.
The question at hand is does a hosting location have an impact on your SEO efforts?
Let’s find out.
Why speed matters?
Website speed is one of the most important factors that determine your ranking factor.
Both customer satisfaction and website speed are considered ranking factors by Google.
What’s more, website speed directly influences customer satisfaction and their experience while browsing through your website.
Therefore, if your website is sluggish and if your pages take too long to load, your website visitors will not just be dissatisfied, but they’ll also abandon your website altogether.
That will result in poor business, loss of reputation, as well as penalties from search engines.
As a matter of fact, 64% of consumers will abandon your website if it takes more than two seconds to load, while 53% of mobile users will do the same if it takes longer than three seconds for your web pages to load properly.
You can do a lot to remedy what’s slowing your pages down and improve your website speed, such as optimize images, minify the code, reduce server response time and so on.
But, there’s still a question of your web hosting location that will influence the speed of your pages.
Importance of server location
As mentioned before, when choosing a hosting service, it’s best if you choose the one closest to your audience.
The main reason is that geographical location influences website speed.
For instance, if your audiences are mostly from China, and you use services from a Hong Kong SEO company, then it’s better to choose a hosting server in Hong Kong so that your audience can have faster access to the content on your website.
The closer your server is to your target audience, the faster your website speed will be.
On the other hand, if your audience is in China but your hosting service is in EU or USA, then the load speed of your website pages will be slower because of the greater geographical distance.
Therefore, the hosting server location technically impacts your SEO because it influences website speed, which is, in fact, an important ranking factor, as well as a crucial factor for customer satisfaction.
In other words, no matter how well your website is optimized to be fast, the further away your hosting server is the more time it will take for your website visitors to view content on your pages.
Using the content delivery network (CDN)
Hosting server distance from your target audience location can be reduced not just by choosing a hosting service closer to your audience, but also by using a content delivery network.
CDN is a network of servers that are placed around the world. Their purpose is to store your website’s content by cashing files, such as CSS, JavaScript files and others. That way, your website content is stored on servers closer to your audience’s location.
Therefore, instead of making a direct request for content to your website hosting server, your visitors are redirected to the CDN closest to them.
This improves your website speed because you have content strategically spread across various locations in the world.
Not only that, but CDN reduces latency and improves your ability to handle more website traffic.
It also minimizes the risk of overloading your hosting server with requests, which can reduce website speed and even lead to a server crash.
Summary:
Both having a well-optimized website and engaging in SEO activities is very important for businesses these days.
The online market is very competitive and you need every advantage you can get. When choosing a web hosting service for your website, keep in mind the importance of its location.
This is especially true if you won’t leverage CDN to distribute your website content accordingly.