How To Choose The Best Hosting For SEO

If you are about to launch your project online and you are going to base your online marketing strategy on SEO, you are surely wondering what to do with hosting to achieve the best possible result. What is the best hosting for SEO?

Table of Contents

SEO web hosting

Right now there are hundreds of thousands of companies or projects similar to yours. If your business is only one among many… How can you excel? While it’s challenging to get noticed, don’t feel overwhelmed, because there are methods you can work with to help you stand out and succeed. If you are here you probably already know that SEO is your best friend when it comes to achieving online visibility. It is an arduous process, but free, reliable, and will always be by your side to help you.

When we talk about SEO we are not just talking about a strategy or a magic pass that will solve your problems overnight, there are several factors that can affect your Google ranking. Of course, some of the most important are the target keywords, backlinks, content, and structure of your website. However, there is another factor that you should not neglect and that is your hosting provider.

Yes, although everything else may seem sufficient in your SEO strategy, if your hosting website provider falls short, your efforts can receive significant damage.

What is a Hosting service?

To explain it in a simple way, the web hosting service or website hosting is what allows Internet users to see your website. Basically it is a computer that stores the files of your site and shares them through the great network of networks. The companies that offer this type of service have (supposedly) the appropriate technologies to make your information available to everyone and safeguard it.

As you can see, it is not something to take lightly, as it is the heart of all the efforts you make to have an online presence.

How important is SEO Hosting?

In a word – SO MUCH. We always associate SEO with content production, design, web development, and optimization for mobile devices. However, we do not stop to think about the key element so that users can reach our website, the server. On which SEO factors such as loading speed or user experience depend. Let’s see what this is based on.

Uptime / Downtime and SEO

Perhaps you have heard of Uptime or Downtime. If not, don’t worry, I’ll explain below.

Uptime

Also known as uptime or uptime, it is a percentage in a period of time (generally considered monthly) in which your website is working without interruptions.

Downtime

It is the opposite of Uptime and refers to the time that your website is offline, unreachable in a region, or in the entire network.

I bet you prefer your website to be up and running all the time, at least as much as possible, so that customers always find it available. Since when it coincides that your website is down, you lose a potential client.

Frequent inaccessibility will lead Google to mark your website as unreliable. They’re not going to give websites that are offline most of the time a high ranking. They want to show only the best possible results. And availability is a quality factor.

When choosing a hosting service provider, it is important to consider what your average Uptime is. Time is money, and the shorter the uptime of your website, the more money you will lose. If you have problems with your accessibility, it is better that you contact your provider to try to solve it as soon as possible.

If you plan to change hosting, the market is very wide, you have 1000 options. To opt for one or the other you can always look for reviews of hosting providers that have an Uptime / Downtime check like here, to be able to know for sure if what the provider says in its advertising is real.

Website speed as a key factor

As you may already know, in addition to attracting the attention of your customers and being accessible, your website should also have decent loading speed. How fast? Well enough so that your visitor does not lose patience and interest.

The Internet can offer your visitors a wide variety of sources for their questions. If you’re lucky enough to get clicked, don’t let slow loading speed discourage your visitors.

A good hosting provider will load the information quickly and allow your audience to navigate your website with ease. Customers don’t like waiting. In turn, your website will receive a good user response and will improve its ranking in Google if its load is fast.

Make sure to optimize your website correctly to offer the best possible loading speed. But … How do you do it? Here are some of the things you can do:

Look for a hosting provider that offers caching ;
Use plugins or plugins in the case of WordPress that implement caching on your website ;
Compress your images with tools like. You must find a balance between the quality of the image and its size, the less it weighs the better it will be but remember that a poor quality image is not positive for your site either.
Give your images the measures that will be used on the web, to avoid the browser having to resize at runtime.
Use the latest software.

Your server location and domain name

Have you heard of local SEO? Choosing a hosting provider with local servers for a local audience will generate more traffic for your website. Google will evaluate where your website is located and determine the relevance for that place.

Therefore, if you have chosen a provider that has data centers near your target audience, your website will be more likely to show results compared to others in another country.

If your website is local and is aimed at users from a certain country, you must also obtain a domain from that country. So, if your website is in Spain and your target audience is Spanish, then you must obtain a domain.es and web hosting that has data centers in Spain or nearby.

SSL certificates (HTTPS)

Having an SSL (HTTPS) certificate is a ranking factor and this has been confirmed by Google. Most quality web hosting providers offer a free SSL certificate, so be sure to sign up for guaranteed hosting.

In addition to HTTPS being a ranking factor, you will also gain greater user confidence (by seeing the “green lock” next to the URL). Your visitors will feel much more secure if they visit your site without the warning they receive in their browsers when websites don’t have SSL. An SSL today is a must, especially if you work with sensitive data.

Other websites you share an IP with

Although Google has not confirmed it, people often say that it can affect your SEO.

Basically, when you hire a shared hosting, you use the same server and the same IP address with dozens of other websites, sometimes even hundreds. If some or most of these websites spam or get penalized, that IP will be associated with “bad SEO “.

Therefore, if you are hosted on the same server and IP address with other spam websites, your legitimate website will also be affected. To avoid this, you should always go with a better hosting provider, get cloud hosting with a dedicated IP, or just check what kind of websites are hosted on the IP address you are using with your shared hosting account.

The security of your websites and the server

If you do not adequately protect your websites, or if your server is not secure enough, you can easily be hacked or attacked and this will greatly affect your rankings.

If a hacker breaks into your website, they can easily modify your content to the point where you don’t even notice it. Or if the hosting provider has not secured its server enough, it may run a DDoS (denial of service) attack on the server, causing the server to be unresponsive.

Also Read: What Benefits Does Big Data Bring To Marketing Departments?

How to choose hosting providers for SEO?

During my years of experience working with hosting services, I have seen everything. My advice is to look for quality hosting services that can offer you all of the above. Which is better? Which one to trust? Take these factors into account …

Reputation

What is the reputation of the company? What do people and especially experts think about your services? Is it a cheap hosting provider with a very slow landing page and outdated design?

good comments

What do your clients say? What do people have to say about their percentage of uptime, services, and support? Look for reviews on the web, check their forums, and social media pages. Do they interact with their customers and respond to customer comments or questions?

Datacenter

Do they have their own data center or are they only reselling services to another provider? Do they have the latest hardware adhering to best practices or do they have outdated hardware and procedures?

Experience

How many years have they been on the market? While this is not a unique indicator of quality, a company with several years in the industry must be doing something right, otherwise, they would not survive that long.

Customer Support

How many communication channels does this company have? Do you offer 24/7 support? Is your knowledge base broad?