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For most small and medium businesses, SEO is the lifeblood of their marketing strategy. In the age of digital commerce where attention is more valuable than ever, megacorporations have the budget to outspend any small participants when it comes to online advertising. The only viable alternative is organic marketing.
You probably already know that. That’s why you’re investing in a website for your brand. But could your choice of hosting hinder your odds of success at search visibility?
The short answer is, yes. The right hosting can bolster your search strategy. Whereas the wrong host can put a major dent in your pursuit of organic traffic.
Here are the four primary ways in which your hosting provider can affect your SEO.
1. Performance
In today’s fast-paced world, where anything and everything is one click away, consumers want it all here and now. They don’t have the patience for websites that take forever to load. As if that wasn’t enough of an incentive, search engines like Google have explicitly declared page speed as a factor they use for ranking.
If your website takes more than a second or a few to load, you’ll have a much harder time ranking. That’s because in Google’s own words, they “aim for under a half-second”. However, anything up to two seconds is considered acceptable.
2. Reliability
When a searcher finds a page of your website on Google that looks the perfect match for their query, the last thing they want is to be met with a dead site. While you may not realize this, websites can and do go down from time to time, despite many hosts promising 99.99% uptimes.
This is particularly problematic when working with low-quality hosts, as their uptimes are anything but stellar. Your goal should be to choose a host with a true 99.9% uptime or higher.
3. Geolocation
This ties in with our previous points. Choosing a hosting company with servers in the same country as your target audience will help with your website’s performance tremendously. That’s because the lower the distance between your server and your visitors is, the faster your website will load.
4. Security
Hacking incidents can hurt your brand’s perception, credibility, and customer base. You already know that. But what you may not realize is the impact on your reputation in the eyes of search engines. Google, for instance, is known to slam the hammer on websites that are infected with malware.
The good news is that a professional hosting company can mitigate your security risks by a big margin. That’s because the right company will configure all systems properly and install additional layers of security on their end. As such, your website will come with a basic foundation of protection out of the box.
Conclusion
Choosing a hosting service is a decision that could help or hinder your SEO strategy in many ways. If you would like to experience SEO-friendly hosting by a team of industry veterans, be sure to check all our plans at WinkHosting.
