SEO Web Hosting Guide: 7 Things To Look Out For

From keywords to building backlinks and analyzing your competitors, there are many things you can work on to increase your website ranking. However, there might be one area you’re overlooking. Any idea what I’m talking about yet?

It’s the influence your web hosting has on SEO.

Whether you realize it or not, the web host you choose can make all the difference between getting your website ranking higher or being pretty much invisible online.

When you think about it, it’s obvious why.

The web host you go with impacts several areas of your website, including uptime and loading speeds.

If you are researching how to host a website, here are 7 things to look out for to help meet your SEO needs.

Why Web Hosting Is So Important For SEO

Your chosen web host plays a significant role in putting your website on the map and keeping it visible, and therefore, you need to pick your web host carefully.

Before I go too much further, let’s just see what Google says about how search works. It considers five factors:

Relevance
Meaning
Quality
Usability
Context

As we’re talking about SEO and web hosting, I’ll focus on usability. For ranking, Google looks at:

Loading times
Mobile friendliness
Country and location (so Google can serve location-based content)

Basically, the more accessible your content is, the more likely it is to rank better.

Google also considers page experience signals, like whether your site uses HTTPS.

Your webhost influences all of the above, which is why you need to choose carefully.

What To Look For When It Comes To Web Hosting And SEO

When it comes to web hosting and SEO, you should expect a few things from your provider as standard, such as uptime reliability and efficient loading times. However, as detailed in the next section, there are other features to look out for:

1. Uptime Reliability

For businesses, a few minutes of downtime can cost thousands of dollars in lost productivity. For your visitors, it’s frustrating if they can’t access your website or if it keeps crashing. However, downtime is equally damaging to your reputation among search engines.

The likes of Google regularly visit websites, and if your website is down a lot, your site gains a reputation for unreliability.

While no web host can guarantee to keep your site online 100 percent of the time, most hosts now provide 99.9 percent uptime. According to Search Engine Journal, 99 percent uptime equals approximately 1.44 minutes of downtime daily, or 8.8 hours a year. Pretty good, huh?