In the realm of SEO marketing and marketing strategies, Google’s constantly evolving algorithms set the bar for what marketers and agencies typically do to stay ahead.
With Google holding a market share of 92.47 percent as of January, the search engine giant can control the market. He is constantly updating the algorithms (PageRank) in the background, making marketers constantly attempt to conform to these untrue rules.
This is why we frequently find SEO “difficult to define” or a “mystery,” and it’s challenging to know the future. There are more than 200 ranking factors that Google uses to determine its SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and many of them are entirely out of our control.
What can marketers do to remain high in their PageRank? Outside of the site itself, there are a variety of components that need to be managed and monitored. Part of it comes down to selecting the appropriate web hosting service for your company.
The most important factors that hosting could affect SEO
Uptime/Downtime
The right hosting is crucial because it dramatically affects the impact of downtime and uptime on your website. The search engine crawlers, also known as “crawlers,” will likely visit your website several times a day and report inaccessibility because of the downtime. Recurring reports of this could be flagged by Google and adversely affect your site’s rankings.
If your website is not up for even a single percent of the time during a month, it’s equivalent to around 7 hours of downtime. This could have severe consequences for businesses, especially in the case of an online-based site that relies on the availability of the site to earn revenues.
But you should remember that interruptions will happen when hosts perform vital maintenance. You can inquire with your hosting provider when this happens and consider that in your decision-making process, as some hosts will be more frequent in their maintenance than others.
If you are using managed hosting, it’s worthwhile asking your service provider whether they can conduct the RTO or RPO (Recovery time/Point objective) test that will provide you with a real-time time to recover if your server goes down.
In addition to expensive programs, there are helpful free tools accessible online, where you can examine your website’s time of operation and downtime. For instance, IsItWP. All you need to do is type in your website’s URL here.
It is always possible to seek assistance to ensure you know your position in managing your website’s downtime and uptime. It is best to select a host that can provide 99.9 percent uptime. This is spread over time and will only amount to 8.8 minutes of downtime!
Other factors that can affect the duration of downtime are the SPOF (Single Points of Failure) and security on your network. Your hosting service provider ought to be able to provide security enhancements that can assist in stopping DDoS as well as malware attacks and more.
Speed
The average load time for websites is approximately 2 seconds. Studies show that 40 percent of visitors are likely to abandon your website when it takes longer than 3 seconds to load, which could significantly affect the overall site’s traffic.
Google incorporates this information into their algorithms that identify slow loading times on websites and immediately impact the quality of your SEO.
It was the year 2010 that Google decided to incorporate loading times into their ranking algorithm. Google noticed that users left their search results because of their slow loading times. This was a financial consequence since they earned less revenue from their advertisements.
Your website’s speed is essential to how people view your company’s online presence and how much trust they place in your company. Unresponsive and slow-loading websites do not inspire confidence in your web-based clients or customers.
Shared hosting users can be affected due to shared resources, which could directly affect their website.
When choosing a web hosting service and plan, you must know your traffic, storage, and resource requirements. Dedicated servers or VPS is the best option for faster performance and incredible speed as you can expand your capacity and RAM. Your hosting provider must be able to provide CDN (Content Delivery Network), which can reduce the time in loading content on websites.
To assess how well your website pages are, you can utilize tools like Pingdom or GT Metrix and Google’s “PSI” (PageSpeed Insights) that provide information regarding the effectiveness of your page on both desktop and mobile devices. The tool also provides suggestions for how the page can be improved.
Server Location
Your website’s location can influence the speed of your site and loading times. If you are using a shared, VPS, or dedicated server hosting plan, your website is hosted in your hosting provider’s physical DC (Data Centre), so the location could directly impact the speed at which your site loads.
The server’s location, far from your site, may appear suspect to search engine algorithms and can also affect SEO. It is recommended to use the data center physically within reach of most site users. For instance, a user searching for a UK-based site or business with a UK IP address will be higher in the search results.
This is where the CDN could be helpful because it is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and data centers and acts as a layer within the Internet ecosystem. Content owners are paying CDN operators to distribute their content, while the CDN will be paid by the IPS (Internet Service Provider) to host its servers within their DCs.
Google search results depend on a server’s IP address, and a server located in the local area can result in more relevant traffic to your website. In the end, choosing the local hosting provider makes it easier to reach a local audience and will ultimately improve your website’s local search engine ranking.
Shared Hosting
There’s been a decent amount of debate regarding the effect shared hosting can have on SEO, specifically regarding sharing an IP address. When researching this blog article, I came across several articles that offer contradictory information regarding the extent to which a shared IP will cause a significant negative impact on the marketing of a company.
While some believe that shared IPs could be affected by other sites within the network, Google employees have denied this claim and stated that it isn’t a definite factor and can be flagged only if there are a lot of sites within the network are infected with spam or considered to be troublesome.
After reading a great deal and researching, it appears that the lines are fuzzy on this subject. So rather than trying to understand something that even experts in the field cannot agree on, let’s look at the aspects where shared hosting has a tangible influence on SEO.
In time, a high bounce rate can harm your page ranking. When you use the shared hosting option, It is essential to keep in mind that you’re sharing resources across various websites. In addition to sharing an IP address, you’re sharing RAM and bandwidth, and if one of those websites experiences a significant increase in traffic, your website could be adversely affected.
Shared hosting is ideal for smaller websites with less than 1,000 visitors daily. If you want to expand the size of your company or have many websites, large numbers of visitors, and increasingly complex demands, then it’s time to switch to shared hosting. It is a necessary upgrade to VPS, dedicated servers, or Cloud hosting to meet the needs of your business.
Other considerations to make when choosing a hosting service
A reputable hosting provider should be able to provide assistance and offer advice on the following aspects:
Support
Do you require managed or unmanaged hosting? What do you have in your IT department at your disposal that will allow the management of your servers and system? A managed support plan with your hosting provider is usually advised, as you’ll benefit from your support program’s knowledge, facilities, and SLAs.
A managed support program can free up your time and allow you to concentrate on more critical projects. They’re generally more affordable for your company.
SSL
Secure Socket Layer certificates are an internet protocol that authenticates and encrypts data over the internet. Based on your industry and traffic, data security, and host requirements, you’ll have to select a paid or a free SSL certificate to guarantee security for your website.
These days, this is expected for all sites other than simple blogs or single-page sites.
Domain names
It’s possible to retain the domain name for as long as 10 years. So when it comes to renewing or switching, it’s crucial to keep control of the old domain. It is possible to use redirects to 301 to ensure your traffic won’t be affected when you buy the new domain.
To verify availability, sign up or transfer the domain here.
Other ideas
Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller says, “Host where it makes sense to you.”
You need your hosting service to become a trusted partner for your company. They will be hosting and maintaining the core infrastructure that impacts the day-to-day management of your operations.
