Search engines can be pretty mysterious entities, but for marketers, search engine optimisation – or SEO – is all about working out how they “think” in order to have the best chance of getting their desired website content in front of as many of the right people as possible. The first step is trying to decipher how search engines such as Google and Bing choose which websites best answer the thousands of questions they are posed each minute to be displayed on results pages. Then, it’s a case of optimising our own websites to ensure that Google and co. “like” what we’re doing.

Unfortunately the search engines are notoriously guarded when it comes to letting us know what they like, but one thing that Google, at least, have confirmed in the past is that site speed (that’s the time it takes for your site to load) is a factor that contributes to your search results page ranking.

In an effort to improve your site speed, you’ve minified your text, made sure that your image files aren’t too large and that you don’t have too many redirects in place, but have your thought about how your website’s hosting can affect site speed?

How does website hosting affect site speed?

Each time a user visits your website, their device makes a request to your website’s server for information and the server very quickly (hopefully!) sends that out to the user in the form of a webpage. When it comes to cheaper web hosting companies, it’s not unusual for many websites to be hosted on one server, which means that one server is dealing with not only requests for your website, but others’ too. If you’re serious about improving your search engine rankings, it can be worth considering a dedicated website server.

Will my ranking be affected by any other hosting issues?

The location of your server may well have an effect. When a user makes a search engine query, that search engine will take into account the user’s location when displaying its results; so someone searching for “hiking boots” in the UK should see results for UK based companies. If your website’s hosted on a server in Russia but your business is based in the UK, this could affect your ability to reach that number one ranking spot.

Consider special events

The quality and capacity of your web hosting doesn’t only help with SEO, but will have an effect on the overall success of your campaigns. If you’re looking to increase traffic to your website, it’s something you’ll want to consider in the planning stages of any campaign or event.

We’ve all tried to take advantage of a sale or buy tickets for an event, only to find that everyone else in the world is doing the same and has caused the website to crash. If you are planning a special sale, offering event tickets online for a limited period of time or running a campaign you’d expect to send a lot of traffic to your website over a short space of time, you should speak to your hosting provider to make sure your website server will be able to handle the increased workload. Frequent crashes will not help your SERP rankings and, worse than that, will put off potential customers who have already reached your website.

When you boil it down to the basics, search engine optimisation is about demonstrating that you provide a good experience for website users. Website hosting plays an important role in this, so it’s definitely something to consider as part of your overall SEO strategy.