Does Hosting Affect Your SEO?

The question is, if you are hosting your website in one country but are striving to gain rankings in another, will this affect the ranking positions in the target country search engine? To clarify, if you host your site in the UK but want to rank in Australia’s google.com.au, will this affect those rankings?

The answer is yes, the problem is that this question is generally only asked when hosting has been set up, rather than right at the onset, when a number of headaches could be avoided.

Search Engine Listings and Traffic Benefits from SEO

Even though the search engines do not provide definitive information as to the impact that hosting will have on rankings. geo-location is becoming increasingly important on the search engines, particularly with the dawn of local search in the last 18 months. 

Relevance Counts

In PPC and search engine optimisation, relevance is a key driver behind cost-per-click & quality score in PPC and certainly relevant content, links and keywords in SEO drive rankings. So, it would only make sense, that the relevant and verifiable information of server location, which tells the search engines the country in which a website is hosted, would have some impact on rankings.

So if you would like your website to rank highly in google.com.au it makes sense to host your website is Australia. If on the other hand, you have a domain with the extension .com.au and your site is hosted in Australia but you would like to rank highly in the UK, you will run into problems.

It is important to bear in mind that the extension of your domain also plays a role in the rankings you achieve on a particular local search engine. You could for example, maintain your Australian hosting and set up a new UK targeted website on a UK extension domain name, to more effectively target this market.

Confused Yet?

It can get rather confusing when thinking about hosting and domain names playing a role in rankings! As if SEO itself was not confusing enough, you now have to think about these other elements that you thought were sorted out for at least a couple of years until the next hosting or domain licence renewal.

The fact is, search engine optimisation does get tricky and there are many elements that interplay and make it even trickier. The important thing is to be aware that hosting and your domain name extension will have an impact on rankings depending on the location of the market that you are targeting. So , now that you are aware of this you can pursue professional advice from experts, like ROI.com.au. We will happily discuss your SEO strategy with you and explain what your options are if you find yourself with hosting outside your target country