How Does Hosting Server Location Impact Your Website’s SEO?

The success of all your SEO activities depends on a lot of factors that include your website speed, your hosting server location, on-page optimization of the website pages etc. Irrespective of whether you have thought about it or not, the loading speed of your website pages and the location from where your website pages are rendered does have an effect on your website’s SEO. It is considered that localized web hosting is suitable to SEO and ensures a better user experience….let’s look into this further…

How does server location affect website speed?

When your website is accessed by the user, it passes through the data center of the host to the user and through a passage of interconnected networks (internet). In order to reach to the user’s computer, data is transmitted through the fastest and the most efficient route of networking within the internet.

While a lot of networks have started using the fiber-optic cables that have the capacity of transmitting the data at a high speed of light (3 x 10^8 m/s). If the data is transmitted with that speed, for every 1000 kilometers, the user will only have a 10 millisecond delay in accessing the website which is not a concern when it comes to delivering a good user experience.

Effect of local web hosting services on website speed

The location of your website’s hosting server has a direct impact on the website speed. The closer the users are to your website’s data center, the faster your website will load for them.

The time required by the server for receiving and processing a user request is known as ‘latency’. When the server is located on a different continent than that of the user, website latency increases and this has a negative impact on the page load time.

Some important facts about website speed:

A 1 second delay in loading the website page results in approximately 7% decrease in the conversion rate of your website.
Most of your users will abandon your website and look for some other alternative if your website takes 3 seconds or more to load.
If you have videos on your website, almost 80% of the internet users will stop watching videos on your website if they take a long time to load and buffer.
A website’s page load time is one of the major factors that is taken into consideration by Google while calculating the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages).
Users spend approximately 70% more time on the websites that load quickly.
As the website’s page load time increases from 1 second – 5 seconds, the bounce rate of the website also increases.
Google has calculated that in case its search results are slowed down by just 4/10^th second, they might lose out on 8 million searches in a day and this also means that they would serve fewer online ads.

Did you know that MilesWeb offers web hosting servers in India, US and UK. Therefore, if your client base is in India, then you can opt for hosting your server in India. If your client base is in India and if your server is also hosted in India, it means that your clients will experience 10x times faster page load speed as compared to if your server was hosted at some other location. The most important benefits of hosting locally is low website latency and faster page load times.

Let’s look at an example, If someone has to reach a certain place in India and if he starts from India itself, reaching to a location in India won’t take much time. However, if someone has to reach somewhere in India but if he starts from US, he will surely take a long time to reach any location in India. Same is the case with serving the web pages. It is important to select the hosting server location according to the location of your audience so that the website requests are processed quickly.

How search engines see server location?

Here is what Google had to say about the server location : “Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better server infrastructure. So, we try not to rely on the server location alone.” Cited from Google Webmaster Forum.

This means that while it is important to choose a hosting server location in the country where your target audience is, more than that it is important to make sure that the pages are rendered faster whether it is through the closest server or through a CDN (content delivery network).

Major search engines like Google and Bing enable the website owners to set a country target through their webmaster tools. If your website’s domain name is registered with a country TLD like (.in for example), then you won’t be able to choose a target country, this is because Google links the TLDs like these with a specific country location like for instance .in is for India. However, if your website has a TLD like .org or .com, then you have to specify a target country in webmaster tools. If this is not done, then Google or the other search engines will perform the selection on the basis of the following factors:

Server IP address.
All the available information about the server location given in the website content like contact information, structured data, content snippets etc.
Backlinks to the web page.
Any other information that is relevant to local SEO.

It is important to note that if your website targets customers all over the world, then it is not very important to choose a specific server location but then it is important to render the website through a CDN for quick page loading.

Is server location important for geo targeting?

If you can use other ways of geo-targeting like ccTLD or Webmaster Tools Geo-targeting tool, you don’t really have to think about the server location. However, it is important to make sure that your website is hosted in a way that provides a faster access to the users that is often accomplished by choosing a data center location that is closest to the users.

MilesWeb provides hosting in various locations like India, UK and US so that the clients can make an appropriate choice. There is absolutely no difference in the configuration of any of these servers; in fact, they are built for ensuring… Share on X

According to Google, the page loading speed of a website has significant importance. As a faster page load time equals to a good user experience, this is an important factor in determining the search engine ranking of a website. This is the reason why the geo-location of the IP and the server are crucial factors for a website for improving the SERPs.

Conclusion:

If you choose a data center location close to your users, the web pages will load quickly and a better user experience will be guaranteed. After all, search engines favor the results that are convenient and useful for the users. As we all know that website ‘response time’ is one of the most important factors for SEO, it is safe to conclude that localized web hosting has a major impact on SEO.