By Making a beautiful, well-designed website is just the first step in creating an online sales machine for your clients. If you want to build a steady, reliable stream of conversions, the web hosting solution and SEO strategy need to be optimized. This ensures the site is easily discoverable, well-performing, fast, and secure, maximizing traffic and conversion rates.
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Hosting plays a larger role in search engine performance than many people realize, which is why choosing the best SEO web hosting is essential for creating a website that is sure to be found by target audiences. In this article, we’ll fill you in on everything you need to know about taking your clients’ websites to the top of search results with SEO-friendly web hosting.
Web hosting and SEO: How they work together
SEO is crucial for driving organic traffic and increasing the visibility of your clients’ websites in search engine results, and web hosting directly impacts many of the ranking factors used by Google to determine search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
Whether you’re building a new website or working on an SEO-focused website redesign, there’s no denying that web hosting and SEO performance go hand in hand. That’s why it’s helpful to know exactly which aspects of website hosting influence rankings. Here’s how web hosting affects SEO:
Speed and loading times are direct ranking factors
Google wants to give users the best result for their search requests, which includes prioritizing snappy websites with great user experience (UX). The best web hosting for SEO will offer fast and reliable servers, ensuring that your websites load quickly.
As a general rule, the things that give users a more positive experience of a website will also be favored by Google’s ranking algorithm, and speed is evidently important to users. Just consider the fact that the probability of a visitor bouncing increases by 32% as page load speed goes from 1 second to 3 seconds (Google).
Uptime, downtime, and the impact on traffic
Uptime refers to the amount of time your website is live and available to users, and downtime is when your site is unavailable due to server issues. While some occasional downtime is inevitable, frequent or extended periods can negatively impact your SEO efforts.
Why? Search engines perceive a website with frequent downtime as unreliable and possibly poorly managed. That doesn’t send a good signal to the algorithm, which wants to give users results that are most likely to be live and accessible.
The best web hosting for SEO will come with a high uptime guarantee, giving you and your clients the peace of mind that their websites will always be available to visitors.
Location, location, location
Server location, that is. Each web hosting provider uses an infrastructure of servers, often distributed around the world, to serve websites to browsers. This impacts SEO in two important ways.
Firstly, the server location is taken into account by search engines when generating geotargeted results. If the audience for a website is primarily in a given geographic region, choosing a host with servers in that area can help your client’s site appear in local search results, generating more local SEO traffic.
Secondly, accessing a site from a nearby server can help the site load faster, taking us back to the previous point: page load speed directly impacts SEO performance, so the best web hosting for SEO will include a vast network of globally distributed servers, maximizing page load speeds for users regardless of their location. Providers using reputable infrastructure like Google Cloud web hosting or AWS hosting will excel in this area.
The security factor
Google takes web security very seriously, prioritizing websites that don’t jeopardize the private information of users. For example, websites with secure connections (HTTPS) are generally ranked higher than those with insecure connections (HTTP). Picking a web hosting provider that offers strong security measures, like free SSL secure shopping certificates and regular server updates, will help improve a website's security and, in turn, boost its search engine ranking.
Safe IP addresses
Every website has an IP address, and if that address has a sketchy history, SEO performance can be negatively impacted. For example, if the IP address associated with a low-quality web hosting solution has been previously involved in spammy or black hat tactics, search engines may flag your website as potentially untrustworthy, pushing it down the SERPs.
A reputable SEO web hosting provider that assigns clean IP addresses and actively monitors for any spam or malicious activities can avoid this unwanted outcome.
Key considerations when choosing an SEO-friendly web hosting provider
The success of your website projects depends heavily on your SEO strategy, and choosing the right web hosting provider is an essential component of that. To ensure your websites rank well in the SERPs, you need to select the best website hosting for SEO performance.
If you know what to look for, SEO-friendly web hosting isn’t hard to spot. Here are the most important factors to prioritize when selecting a reseller hosting solution for your agency.
Top-notch server speed and performance
As mentioned earlier, website speed is a crucial ranking factor in SEO. Search engines prioritize fast-loading websites that offer a better user experience. When deciding on a web hosting provider, find out about their server speed and performance.
Opt for a provider with fast, reliable servers that can handle spikes in traffic and load pages quickly, regardless of geographic location. You can check the hosting provider's performance by looking at reviews, benchmarks, or even testing their services with a trial account.
Reliable server uptime
Frequent downtimes can negatively impact a website's search engine rankings and result in lost traffic (and revenue). Look for a hosting provider that guarantees high uptime, preferably 99.9 percent or higher. This ensures that your clients’ sites will remain accessible, supporting a positive SERP ranking.
Read customer reviews and testimonials to get an idea of the provider's general reliability and uptime track record.
Robust security features and protocols
Security is an essential consideration when choosing the best website hosting for SEO: not only does it impact search rankings, but it can also avert costly, reputation-damaging security breaches.
Look for a solution that includes SSL certificates, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, regular automatic backups, and malware scanning. A good hosting provider will also perform regular security updates and patches to protect websites from emerging vulnerabilities.
Opt for a provider that takes website hosting security seriously, and don’t be afraid to ask about the frequency of security updates. The more frequent they are, the likelier it is that the hosting provider addresses security issues before they can lead to significant problems for users.
Effortless scalability and flexibility
As your clients grow and attract more traffic, their hosting requirements may change. Look for a web hosting provider that makes it easy to scale hosting services without the hassle of migrating to a larger server. Ideally, your provider will be able to handle traffic spikes on-demand, automatically adjusting resources to meet requirements as they evolve.
A flexible hosting provider will make it far easier for you to offer managed website services, since you’ll be able to add features or services for your clients with a few clicks.
Best SEO web hosting tools and features
As your client list grows, the right tools and features will make website management, as well as hosting and maintenance, much easier at scale. These make it easier to improve performance, security, and visibility in search engine results with minimal effort on your part.
- SEO-friendly server configurations: Server configurations can have a substantial impact on SEO performance. That’s why the best SEO hosting will include the latest versions of server software, on-demand scaling of resources, caching, and support for compression (which is a bit like zipping for large files).
- Content delivery networks (CDNs): A CDN is a network of servers that caches and delivers a website's content to a browser from the server closest to its geographic location. Loading from a nearby server can significantly reduce page load times and improve user experience, both of which are essential factors in SEO. Choose an SEO web hosting provider that makes it easy to enable CDNs.
- SSL certificates: SSL certificates are vital for website security, as they encrypt data transmitted between your website and its visitors. They also happen to be strongly favored by Google. The best web hosting for SEO will include free SSL certificates as part of their hosting plans. Make sure the certificates automatically renew after a year.
- Robust website analytics: Website analytics tools like Google Analytics provide actionable insights into a website's traffic, user behavior, and other important metrics. These can help you—and your clients—make informed decisions about your SEO strategy and optimize the website for better SERP performance. Ideally, your SEO web hosting solution will have Google Analytics built right in, so you can see this critical data whenever you log into the dashboard.
- SEO customizations: Being able to customize the hosting solution can give you more control over factors that impact SEO. Some customizations, like updating the robots.txt file, can also help Google’s algorithm bots more effectively crawl websites. This helps them “understand” what the site is all about, increasing the likelihood of it appearing on the right SERPs.
Why Website Pro is the best solution for SEO-friendly web hosting
SEO can feel like a bit of a black box, since we can’t see exactly what Google takes into account when determining rankings. But one thing is for sure: SEO-friendly web hosting is non-negotiable if you want to get your clients to that coveted top spot.
Here’s why Website Pro is the best WordPress hosting for SEO, giving you all the tools you need to resell white-label website, web design, and hosting services that your clients—and search engines—will love.
Lightning-fast hosting you can count on
Website Pro uses the Google Cloud Platform, guaranteeing incredibly fast loading times no matter where your clients, or their website visitors, are located. As the most up-to-date infrastructure in the world, your clients’ sites will benefit from the latest server and virtualization technology, ensuring their sites perform as intended.
Plus, Website Pro’s guaranteed uptime of over 99.9 percent uptime means Google’s algorithm has every reason to place those sites at the top of the SERPs.
Support whenever you need it
When it comes to SEO web hosting, having access to round-the-clock customer support is essential. Website Pro provides 24/7 customer support, ensuring that you can get assistance at any time, day or night, no matter where you are in the world.
One of the most common hosting mistakes to avoid is choosing a provider with limited support: when something goes wrong with a site, addressing it swiftly will help you minimize any negative impact on search rankings. Your clients will also appreciate the high level of customer service.
The power of the Google Cloud Platform
Thanks to the powerful Google Cloud Platform, your sites will be hosted on a robust and scalable infrastructure that provides unparalleled performance and security.
This advanced infrastructure ensures that your websites can handle large amounts of traffic while remaining stable, fast, and secure. Google is a trusted name for a good reason: thanks to world-class security technologies and protocols, the sites you manage will be well-protected from malicious actors.
Effortless management with Admin Dashboard
The Website Admin Dashboard is purpose-built with your needs as an agency in mind. It’s a centralized dashboard that enables you to monitor all of your client’s sites, make important updates, and access analytics, all of which can help you maintain SEO performance across the sites you manage. By streamlining your workflow and providing you with the tools to optimize all of your projects with ease, Website Pro makes SEO-friendly web hosting a breeze.
Frequently asked questions
Can changing web hosting affect my website's SEO?
Yes, changing web hosting can impact your website's SEO. Factors like server speed, downtime, and server location can impact page load times and search engine rankings. Carefully selecting a new provider with SEO-friendly features and properly managing your site migration can help minimize any negative effects.
Can shared web hosting negatively impact my website's SEO?
Shared web hosting can negatively impact your website's SEO if the server is overcrowded, hosts malicious websites, or is impacted by a cyberattack. This may lead to slower page load times, security risks, and a tainted IP address that is disfavored by Google. To avoid these issues, choose a reputable hosting provider that monitors and manages their shared servers effectively.
