Your website is an essential platform for marketing and customer engagement. Making your site easy to find in search results is crucial, and that means you must focus on search engine optimization (SEO). While keyword research and link building will top your SEO to-do list, don’t overlook the impact that web hosting can have on SEO. You should use a hosting provider that offers SEO web hosting.
An SEO web hosting provider considers every factor that can impact their clients’ SEO and fine-tunes their hosting service to address each factor.
In this article, we’ll start by answering a question many business owners have — does web hosting affect SEO? We’ll then explain what every SEO-focused business owner should look for in a hosting provider. If you make sure you get the best web hosting for SEO, you’ll reap the benefits of increased traffic and sales from the moment your site launches.
Does Web Hosting Affect SEO?
The answer to this question is a resounding “Yes!” Many things that impact your site’s SEO relate to the quality of service you get from your hosting provider.
SEO requires sustained attention to several factors, and the responsibility for some of them falls to the website owner, while others are related to your hosting provider’s capabilities.
The right hosting provider can play a huge role in helping your SEO if they do the following:
- Maintain fast, reliable servers.
- Offer plan features that help clients with SEO.
- Include scalable service offerings to match the changing needs of growing businesses.
- Employ a content delivery network to ensure great site performance worldwide.
- Make it easy to secure SEO-friendly domain names.
- Host your site with SEO-boosting security features.
If you choose a hosting provider that handles some but not all these things, you’ll find it difficult to get the website traffic you’re after. When it comes to maintaining SEO, there are many moving parts, and they’re all important.
For example, you can create engaging content with the perfect keywords for your niche, but all that creative writing and keyword research won’t matter if your site loads slowly. A slow page speed impacts your SEO when search engines crawl your site. If performance issues make it impossible to crawl your whole site, some content won’t get indexed, and if there are errors, the site may be flagged as unreliable.
Likewise, if your hosting provider has lightning-fast servers and a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but they’re of no help when it comes to site optimization and getting an SEO-friendly domain name, you’ll be missing a couple of important pieces of the SEO puzzle. If a provider checks most of the SEO hosting boxes but does not optimize their service for global performance or fails to prioritize security in their plan features, they’re not providing everything needed to address your SEO hosting requirements.
The key to SEO web hosting is that the provider understands the whole SEO picture and includes everything important to SEO as part of their service offering.
How to Choose an SEO Web Hosting Provider
Given the significant impact that web hosting has on SEO, it makes sense to carefully assess a provider’s approach to SEO hosting factors. In the sections below, we’ll examine five things you should look for when selecting a web hosting company.
Make Speed and Reliability Your Top Priority
The amount of time required for a web page to fully load in a user’s browser, known as page speed, is an important factor in SEO. Research studies show that about 40% of consumers will wait no longer than three seconds for a page to load before clicking away. Google has made it clear that page speed is one of the metrics used by their search algorithm — sites with slow-loading pages take a hit in search rankings.
A slow site is also harder for search engines to crawl. When a limit is reached, the search engine moves on, whether it’s indexed all your pages or not. If pages can’t be crawled, some of your keyword-laced content won’t be used in ranking search results.
More about web crawling — if your site has down-time, that’s how search engines find out. Search engine spiders will attempt to access your site several times a day. If Google’s web crawler, for example, tries to crawl your site and page errors occur, your content won’t get indexed. After multiple occurrences, your website will get flagged as unreliable, and your site’s ranking in search results will suffer.
To avoid the negative impact that slow page loading or site downtime can have on your SEO, you should choose a hosting provider that uses state-of-the-art, high-performance servers and equipment. HostPapa offers a range of hosting plans, delivering incredible page speeds and an impressive 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Insist on Superior Optimization Capabilities
Studies indicate that over 71% of searches end with the user clicking a link on the first page of search results, with the second and third pages only getting clicked on about 6% of the time. It’s clear that getting your listing at or near the top of search results is crucial, but it’s not easy to do.
A great SEO web host will help you at every stage, offering right-sized hosting plans and advice when it’s time to upgrade. They’ll make the latest SEO tools and plugins available. Better providers offer low-cost SEO consulting, which can be a big help for business owners who are unfamiliar with keyword research, link building, and other SEO basics.
Getting all your SEO ducks in a row can be challenging, even for expecting website owners. The web hosting provider you choose should supply you with SEO tools and offer hands-on help from seasoned experts. When you sign up with HostPapa, you’ll get access to self‑help tutorials and a comprehensive knowledge base to help you make the most of your web hosting. To get personal assistance with their SEO strategy, customers can book a free, 30-minute, one-on-one training session with one of HostPapa’s experienced specialists.
After a period of business growth, responding to the need to scale your web hosting service will be essential in maintaining your site’s SEO. When you work with a well-managed SEO hosting company, you’ll have access to multiple service tiers, each addressing the needs of different-sized businesses.
Demand Great Website Performance Around the World
Location, location, location. That’s the mantra of real estate brokers, but it also applies to SEO. The user’s experience on your site should be fantastic, no matter where the user is located.
Search engine results are localized. This means that the results someone in England sees, for example, will be different from those shown to a user who enters the same search terms in the USA. So, to the extent that site performance impacts SEO, your site’s ranking in another country will be based on how fast it loads in that country. Your hosting provider can help control that by employing a content delivery network (CDN).
A CDN is a network of servers in different locations around the world that sends content to users located near those servers. A primary host server stores the main copy of your website’s content. The other servers store a cached copy, with the goal being fast content delivery regardless of the user’s location.
Without a CDN in place, your site may load slowly for other countries’ users. In that case, the user experience would suffer, but more importantly, any loading delays or page errors that a user sees will also be encountered by search engine web crawlers. A web crawler’s assessment of your site performance in a given country impacts your search ranking in that country.
CDNs are a component of internet plumbing that most site owners do not need to be aware of, but they’re vital for SEO web hosting. HostPapa ensures optimized site performance around the globe by employing the Cloudflare CDN, a state-of-the-art content delivery network.
Look For Help With SEO-Friendly Domain Registration
Choosing a hosting provider that integrates domain registration into their hosting plans is smart. Your domain name uniquely identifies your website and must be purchased from a seller known as the registrar, typically a web hosting company. When you buy a domain, you’ll pay a fee to the registrar so that the domain name will be registered in your name.
It’s crucial that you choose an SEO-friendly domain name, one that perfectly represents your business and contains your primary keyword.
The process of getting a domain is straight-forward, and SEO hosting companies make it an integral part of their service offerings, providing low cost, and in some cases, free domain registration.
When you’re dealing with a great SEO hosting provider, the support staff will be able to help you choose an SEO-focused domain name. In many cases, at least for eCommerce sites, that means passing up lower-cost extensions like .club or .shop. Sites with extensions like those are associated with spam activity, and they receive substantially less traffic than the more widely used extensions like .com, .net, and .org. It’s a .com extension that users expect to see from a serious business, so it’s worth the $10 to $15 per year you’ll pay for a .com domain name.
When you sign up with a hosting provider that’s focused on SEO, you’ll get access to affordable domain registration and advice about choosing a domain name that will help maximize site traffic. HostPapa’s service plans include free domain registration, and the PapaSquad will be happy to help you select an SEO-friendly domain name that’s perfect for your business.
Boost Your SEO With Top Notch Web Hosting Security
For business website owners, security should be a priority. It’s their responsibility to keep their customers’ data safe. Website security also has a considerable impact on SEO — search engines consistently rank secure sites higher than insecure sites.
For search engines, the main difference between secure and insecure is whether the site has an SSL certificate.
SSL means Secure Sockets Layer, a technology that lets browsers and servers use an encrypted connection called HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure). Compared to HTTP, HTTPS is the SEO winner — 95% of the traffic that Google facilitates is to HTTPS sites.
HTTPS is a positive ranking signal and a key element of an effective SEO strategy. To use SSL encryption, a site owner must purchase an SSL certificate, a server file that digitally identifies your website. An SEO hosting provider will make it easy to buy an SSL certificate, and staff will apply the certificate to your website. HostPapa’s SSL security solutions are provided by GlobalSign, a leading internet trust service provider, and certificates are available at affordable annual rates.
To Maximize Website Traffic and Sales, Select the Best Web Hosting For SEO
As a platform for marketing your business, your website plays a pivotal role, and appearing at the top of search results is crucial to your business’s success. Your hosting company should help you with your SEO strategy by offering services that maximize site traffic.
An SEO hosting provider differentiates their service from competitors’ by addressing every element of web hosting that can affect their clients’ SEO. HostPapa offers a service that guarantees superior website performance and 99.9% uptime. Plans include SEO tools and hands-on help with site optimization. HostPapa helps with domain registration and makes it easy for clients to run safe, secure websites. Flexible plan options let you meet new SEO demands as your business grows.
We hope this look at SEO web hosting has been helpful. With the right hosting provider, you can ensure your business appears at the top of search results and realize the business growth that comes with consistently high website traffic.
Please note that the pricing in this blog post is current as of the date of publication and is subject to change at any time.
