Last updated on September 3rd, 2022
Online collaboration has become possible from anywhere around the world with the help of cloud hosting. It may be possible that the server location does not hold any importance to you. However, the server location and web hosting are highly relevant to SEO and the overall user experience. Your web host location has a lot to do with your website’s speed and search engine rankings. The web host location can affect them either negatively or positively. Many users lose their patience even in the lapse of seconds when it comes to the speed of the website they are trying to retrieve data of, and thus, the loading time of your website contributes majorly to the website’s bounce rate. In general, the average users leave the site or switch to another site if they have reached your website, and it is taking more than 3 seconds to load the data. Therefore, you really require to opt for the server location aptly if you desire to boost your website page speed.
Let us give you deep insights in the subsequent sections into how location-based server hosting plays an essential role in SEO. Let us get started.
How The Location Of The Web Server Affects The Speed?
Suppose any user attempts to visit your website. The data of your website will have to get sent from the data center of your hosting provider to the user’s system via interconnected networks that is known as the Internet. to ensure that the data reaches the user’s system in the minimum time, the data center will transfer it through the most effective and fastest route of networks within the Internet. You can discover that most of the networks in today’s date make use of fiber optic cables for the transmission of the data. The fiber optic cables make it possible for the data to travel at the speed of light. If you can observe the estimates, you will know that for every 1000km traveled by data with the fastest speed, the user can experience a delay of 10-millisecond. Thus, for assuring a yet minimalistic data travel time, it is highly suggested that you must pick the location of the data center in the country where your website’s target users can be found.
On the other side, if your website’s target users are from all over the world, then it will be best for you to utilize CDN, an acronym for Content Delivery Network. It serves as an ideal option in such a situation.
Moreover, many servers take time to process the user’s request for data. This time taken by the servers is called server latency. Since servers operate in different locations, the amount of time needed for the processing of data increases further, which can directly affect the user experience.
Now that you have understood how the location of your webserver can have a considerable impact on speed and the users’ experience of your website, let’s check out how the speed and users’ experience counts in determining the ranking of your website on the search engines.
Must Read: Does Server Location Matter for Google & Website SEO?
How Do Search Engines See The Location Servers?
The SEO part of your website involves dealing with a wide range of factors. Google ranks your website on the basis of more than 200 factors. Some are known to you, and others are kept hidden by Google. Out of those known, the one major factor is the speed of your website. Google will give better rank to the websites having a faster page load time to provide users with the excellent experience. If your website has slow speed, it will encounter low ranking and, thus, lower conversion rate.
Since you have analyzed in the previous section how the location of your web server determines the speed of your website, you can infer that the location of the data center is also another determinant of how Google will rank your website.
However, here is another thing that you must know. Google has begun providing a feature that permits you to place a target country in tools. So, picking the same location for servers as the targeting users’ locations for SEO campaigns holds not much importance. Moreover, to set a target country, if your website is .org or .com, you will have to utilize the webmaster’s tool instead. In case you do not get it done from your side manually, the search engines will display the results of the searches according to the IP address of the website. Additionally, along with other relevant SEO information, the location’s detail will be made available in the web content backlinks of the pages.
Impact Of Localized Web Hosting On The Speed
Besides, we cannot deny that the location of the data center does matter the most for the speed of your website. As discussed above, the closer your data center is to your visitors, the faster your website will be able to get loaded for them. Let us observe some facts that show how the delay in loading time can impact other things.
If you have an e-commerce website and it gets delayed to load page data by one second, your website’s conversion rate can fall upto 7%.
If your website gets loaded after three seconds, you will already be losing more than 40% of visitors.
In a research report given by Firefox, it is stated that if your website can improve its loading speed by 2.2 seconds, then it can have an increase in the conversion rates by 15%.
Using The Content Delivery Network For Speed
The network of servers that are located all over the globe is the Content Delivery Network, known by the acronym CDN. It is once such a great solution for intensifying your website’s speed. It lets you distribute your website’s content across various locations. As a result, your applications become capable of handling a higher volume of web traffic. Furthermore, the Content Delivery Network also contributes to improving your website’s ranking over the search engines and enables high website traffic & sales, along with providing users a great experience of your website.
Also Read: How Does Web Hosting Affect SEO? (Updated 2021)
Conclusion
To conclude, we can state that response time is a highly critical factor for search engine optimization. Indeed, the localized hosting of the server directly affects the SEO. Your website will not have any loading issues if it is closer to the server. However, if your target audience is around the world, CDN will do the ideal work. It will enable your website to keep up with the speed and SEO ranking. In addition, CDN also takes away the load on the server. If one location is not available, another location will provide the content while not letting speed get affected in any way. It permits greater scalability and also reduces server latency.
