5 web hosting factors that impact your SEO

SEO is an ever-changing marketing technique that helps customers find your website. You put effort into your keywords, your image alt text and find the perfect headings. But an often-overlooked factor that can impact your SEO is your web hosting. Here is how your SEO and web hosting can work together to help improve your rankings.

What is the goal of your SEO work? According to Moz:” SEO stands for search engine optimisation, a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results. Because organic search is the most prominent way for people to discover and access online content.”

To follow these practices, marketers have to understand Google’s ever-changing algorithm. In 2006, Google admitted that they use over 200 ranking factors to help decide where your website should rank on their search engine. Here is five factors that can affect your web hosting and SEO effort.

Uptime/Downtime

No one wants to click on a website to find that it is not working. Google knows this is why they don’t promote sites with a lot of downtime. 

Search engine spiders visit your site several times throughout the day, during any downtime. Repeated reports of downtime negatively impact page rankings.   

 When choosing a hosting provider, pick one that can guarantee 99.9% uptime spread across a year.

But remember, 100% uptime is impossible. Downtime will occur when performing essential maintenance. You can ask your hosting provider how often this is likely to occur and factor that into your decision-making process, as some hosts may perform maintenance more often than others.

Security

Choosing a secure hosting company is the only way to increase the level of protection. A great way to check if your hosting company follows best practices is if they are ISO 27001 accredited. ISO 27001 is the internationally recognised specification for information security and data management. To attain the certification, companies have to demonstrate that they have an Information Security Management System in place and that they can manage data safely. Hosting providers who are willing to become ISO 27001 have already shown you that they are dedicated to keeping you safe and secure.

Domain Names

Domain names are one of the most known factors you need for an SEO-friendly website. For most businesses, keyword-oriented domains used to be the norm. But, Google realised that marketers manipulated this ranking factor, so they changed it.

Now, brandable domain names offer the safest solution. People have become used to seeing domain names as part of your brand identity, like your logo, company name and values. 

Another standard practice is to opt for domains with a ‘.com’ top-level domain. Unless you’re targeting a specific country, you should use .co.uk instead, as Google will boost your website in local results if you only sell in the UK.

If you need some help picking the perfect domain name, you can read our blog post.

Secure Socket Layer Certificates (SSLs)

Secure Socket Layer certificates are a web protocol for servers and web browsers that ensure that data passed between the two are private by using an encrypted link that connects the server and browser.

SSL certificates are small data files that cryptographically confirm this encrypted link between a web server and a browser—ensuring that all data passed between the web server and browser stay private.

Google provides an SEO boost for websites using SSL certificates because they know that these sites are safe. As a search engine, they need to make sure that they guide people to secure sites; otherwise, people will blame them for promoting unsafe websites. 

If you do not have one, you are compromising the SEO score for your website. Read our handy guide if you need help picking which SSL certificate to use.

Speed

Research shows 1 in 4 people would abandon a site if it took over 4 seconds to load – that is 25% of your traffic, and in 2010, Google started factoring load time into their ranking algorithms. 

Overloaded servers and limited infrastructure can lead to slower website loading, harming your website performance in two ways. First, slow sites annoy users, and they often click the “back” button or leave your site directly. Additionally, Google’s crawlers don’t “wait” to see what’s there.

When choosing a hosting provider, you need to consider your traffic, storage and resource requirements. VPS, cloud hosting or dedicated servers are ideal for faster speed and performance as you have scalable RAM and bandwidth. They should also offer CDN (Content Delivery Network) to minimise delays in web page loading. 

Check the performance of your web pages using tools like Pingdom, GT Metrix, and Google’s PageSpeed Insights which provides reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices and advice to improve your pages speed. 

To find out the best hosting plan for your business, get a quote or even ask for some advice, contact our team at CWCS today and take a step towards improving your business’s hosting!