Over the last decade, digital marketing has become unavoidable for businesses from all sectors and of all sizes. Hence, they need to establish an online presence starting with a website. When we look at the online space, search engines play an important role in diverting traffic to a website. Site owners work hard to ensure that their site ranks high on the search engine results pages or SERPs for products/services sold by them. Many factors can help optimize a website for search engines. Of these, the hosting service plays an important role since the site resides on the web server. There are different hosting plans like shared hosting, dedicated server hosting, cloud web hosting, VPS hosting, etc. In this article, we will focus on cloud hosting and talk about how it can help boost the SEO of a website. It can help you decide if you want to move to the cloud and choose the best cloud hosting plan.
Cloud Hosting
When you buy cloud hosting, the host stores your website on a shared server. This shared web server is backed by a cloud storage network allowing the host to offer features like high uptimes, resource scalability, reliability, etc. Here is how cloud hosting can boost the SEO of your website.
Site Speed
Search engines prefer websites that load faster. They believe in ranking sites that offer a better user experience higher than their peers that don’t. Site speed is an important aspect of site experience. Hence, if you want to improve the SEO rank of your site, you need to ensure that it loads within a couple of seconds. There are many ways to boost the speed of your site, including the choice of the web hosting service.
With cloud hosting, your site data is mirrored across the cloud network. Hence, every time a user visits your site, the request is processed by a different server on the network resulting in faster load times. Companies offering the best cloud hosting services also incorporate CDNs and caching servers to boost the site speed.
Uptimes
Another aspect that does not bode well with search engines is frequent downtimes. They tend to dock SEO points of sites that face regular downtimes. Most cloud hosting providers offer an uptime assurance of 99.9%+. It is because data mirroring ensures that there is no single point of failure. Therefore, if one server crashes or faces performance issues, others take its place and ensure uninterrupted server availability.
Location of the web server
The location of the web server also plays an important role in determining the SEO rank of a website. There are two aspects concerning the location of the server:
- Let us suppose your business is in India, but the server is located in Australia. In that case, there will be a delay in loading the site since the files will have to be transmitted from the server in Australia to the user’s device in India.
- On many occasions, search engines rank websites of local businesses above others to keep the results relevant to the search.
Hence, it is important to keep this aspect in mind. Traditionally, since websites were hosted on a single physical server, the data centre’s location seemed important. However, with cloud hosting, your site’s data is replicated across the cloud network. When a user visits your site, the server that is geographically nearest to him manages the request. It has a positive impact on your SEO score.
Summing Up
As you can see, it is important to choose a hosting service that is SEO-sensitive and helps you boost the SEO score of your site. Therefore, cloud hosting, with its features listed above, syncs with your other SEO efforts and helps achieve a high page rank on SERPs.