Is the location of a web hosting server important in SEO?
When it comes to choosing a server location, experts always recommend the area where your target audience is located.
In the following article we will try to answer the question:
However, what if you are targeting a global audience?
What if your website supports multiple languages for your diverse users?
When planning your website’s SEO, you would hear a lot about the importance of choosing the right hosting and server location. However, how can you know what is right for your business?
Furthermore, how does this relate to your SEO efforts? Let’s explore and find out!
We are going to have an overview of some specific cases and how to handle them to enjoy the best SEO benefits by choosing a suitable server location to host your website.
Choosing a web hosting server location:
Choosing an appropriate server location is a crucial decision to make when planning website development.
Read more about: Website hosting in Israel or abroad?
Some questions you should ask during this time are:
Why should you host your website where your users are?
How can server location affect your SEO?
How to explain your target demographic to search engines?
What if the website is in different languages and also has subdirectories with target users around the world?
Is it necessary to use a CDN service?
How to link different versions using hreflang attributes?
To get a proper understanding, here we will discuss several cases.
Sites in one language that users in the same country:
Google and other search engines like Bing offer users to set a target country in Webmaster Tools.
You can access directly:
Search traffic> International postal code> The country tab
You can customize the target country from the drop-down list. If your website uses any location-specific domain, for example, ‘.ES’, it may not be possible to select just any country because search engines associate such domains with a specific geographical location (.ES like Spain).
On the other hand, if your website uses a generic domain like .com or .org, then there is no requirement to enter a specific geographic direction in Webmaster Tools. Instead, the segmentation can be based on several other parameters. The experts at All Business Technologies in Boston list some of the following parameters as:
Hosting server IP address
Website location information (contact address or Rich Snippets)
Inbound links to website pages
Other information such as Google My Business
In this case, another important factor to consider for search engine optimization is page loading speed. If the users are located in one country and the hosting is from another country, then this distance can cause a natural delay in response. This will further contribute to the negative border rate, and for this reason, it is recommended to host the site in the same country for local users.
Read more: How to choose a good web hosting company
Websites in one language for users around the world
In such cases, Google says that if your site is not associated with a country or region, you can select the “Not listed” option in the drop-down menu. This option allows Google to unilaterally assign a geographic location to the site.
While setting it up, Google allows you to select countries from a drop-down list, not continents or other geographical specifications. In this case, the server location is usually irrelevant. However, in cases like these where your website is targeting global users, it is important to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) service.
A CDN service offers alternative server nodes from where users can download their resources. These nodes are spread almost across the globe by accessing them from the location closest to the user to ensure faster response time and faster download of the content. There are many CDN services, many of which offer free plans to users. The major players in this sector are Amazon CloudFront, CloudFlare, MaxCDN, and KeyCDN to name a few.
Overall, if your website is targeted at users worldwide, the server location is not that important. What matters most is using a quality server and a suitable CDN to load your website quickly regardless of the physical location of the server and users.
Website in different languages and users around the world
Some sites have a mix of English, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian to target key users around the world. There is also the possibility that sites are in different variations of a particular language targeting different users.
In this case, the most common approach is to host each version of the website on different servers. Such as a US English website on a US server, a UK English website on a UK server, a French server for Spain, a Spanish server for Spain, and so on. For a larger organization with a business presence in many countries, multi-hosting can be an ideal solution.
However, this is only ideal when you don’t have synchronized content. If so, the next option is to host a multilingual website on a single server. This can reduce the cost and ensure easy management. In this case, in addition to choosing a good hosting, it is essential to choose a CDN service.
The article was translated from English to Hebrew from Graham Jones’ website.
Read more about: Web Hosting
