There’s a bewildering array of things to consider when trying to optimise your website for search engines like Google. One that gets overlooked — and yet so easy to influence — is the actual location of your web hosting. If your web hosting server is in one particular country, that signals to search engines that your website could be more relevant to users in that nation.
This can be important in determining how your site ranks in country-specific results (like when you click the “pages from the UK” option on Google). If your hosting is in the UK, your website is more likely to appear prominently in “pages from the UK” search results. This can help you target and rank better in country-specific searches.
SEO blog Web Toastie has a good post explaining how this works. In short, Google primarily uses your website’s domain name to determine which country your site is most relevant to:
“…if your ccTLD is relevant to your targeted country, then Google will not take the location of the webserver into consideration”
For instance, if your domain name ends in .co.uk, Google will generally assume your site is most relevant to a UK audience. Your site should therefore rank more highly for UK-specific searches.
However, if your site’s domain name isn’t country-specific (maybe you have a .com domain) the physical location of the servers hosting your site comes into play. In this case, having your site hosted within the UK may give you an advantage over sites hosted in other countries.
Load speed matters too
The location of your hosting matters for another reason too. It can affect your website’s load speed. The further away it is from your target audience, the longer your pages may take to load. So if your visitors are in the UK, it’s good to have your hosting there too.
Again, Web Toastie puts it nicely:
“…if your files are hosted on a slow server in Australia (for example), then Google may also judge your site to be slow and therefore penalise your rankings because of that.”
Having fast-loading pages fast isn’t good just for your website’s search engine ranking. Your visitors benefit too, because they don’t have to wait so long for the pages on your site to appear. In these days of ever-increasing broadband speeds, seconds count – especially when competing websites are only a click away.
Our advice? If your website is aimed at people in the UK, make sure you choose hosting that’s UK-based too – like our own hosting packages, which are all located on servers in a UK data centre. Need more assistance? This guide answers the question “what is a dedicated server?“
