As a business website owner, there is hardly anything you wouldn’t do to improve your site’s SEO.
After all, everyone knows that Google’s page 2 is the perfect place to hide a dead body. No one’s ever going to look there.
To be seen by your audience, you need to be on page 1.
Among other things, cloud hosting can definitely help you achieve that goal. Quickly. And easily.
Wondering what is cloud hosting and what’s it got to do with your site’s SEO? Read on to find out.
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What is cloud hosting?
Imagine a physical web hosting server gets split up. Then these multiple servers are located at different places.
This process is called virtualization.
The different locations where the split-up servers are located are called data centers.
And this entire concept results in what is known as cloud hosting.
Simply stated, cloud hosting is a type of web hosting where you have multiple servers located at different places. There is no primary or backup server. The servers at all data centers hold equal precedence, meaning any of these can be used to load your website.
Most business owners feel that the choice of hosting is a purely technical decision that will have no direct impact on search engine optimization. That, however, is not true.
Your hosting greatly affects your website’s speed, performance, security, and accessibility. Thus, ultimately having an impact on search engine rankings too.
Below we have illustrated 5 ways in which cloud hosting positively contributes to your website’s SEO efforts.
5 Ways cloud hosting impacts your SEO efforts
1. Enhanced website speed and performance
Did you know that in a survey 50% of people said they’d give up animations and videos on the website for faster load times?
Well, Google never fails to keep the public mandate in mind while formulating search ranking algorithms. That’s why out of the 200+ parameters used to rank a website, speed is one of the most important points.
And cloud hosting can definitely help you win more points on the Google SEO scorecard. That, ultimately, means better rankings for you.
How does that happen? Most cloud hosting service providers use Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and caching techniques that can significantly ramp up your page load speed.
2. Minimum website downtime
If there is one thing worse than a website that takes awfully long to load, then that is a website that doesn’t open up at all.
Imagine a customer comes to your store. They open the door and walk inside only to see black nothingness. No salespersons. No products. That would be disastrous, right? You could never let that happen.
Now imagine the same thing happening with your digital shopfront – your website. Bad getaways, server downs, and other technical issues with regular web hosting can significantly increase your website downtime. Internet surfers hate it.
And so do search engines like Google. Even if your web host’s server has issues for a few minutes and your website went down for not long, the effect on your rankings can be huge.
A lot of SEO efforts that you’d have taken earlier would go down the drain due to a few minutes of downtime. And if your site remains down for a few days, don’t be shocked when Google de-lists your site from the rankings altogether.
It is in situations like these that cloud hosting servers truly shine. As we had described earlier, cloud hosting means your site is hosted on multiple distinctly located servers. So if one of the servers faces an issue, the other servers can be used to load your site when there are visitors. The downtime is practically negligible and you won’t even notice it.
With this 100% uptime guarantee, cloud hosting becomes a boon for SEO.
3. Enhanced security
A Hubspot research survey found out that 82% of people would leave a website that wasn’t secure. As we already know, Google also keeps security in high regard when it comes to SERP rankings.
In fact, Google goes as long as flagging down the sites that aren’t secure.
And while getting an SSL certificate is a basic security measure to take, you also need to secure your web servers.
Again, security is one of the many strong suits of cloud hosting.
How? Most cloud hosting service providers invest heavily in security and offer in-built security features like application role-based authentication.
Also, with cloud hosting, you get frequent and more expansive backups, which means even in the worst-case scenario when your website gets hacked, you can quickly get it back up with the backup.
A website that Google considers secure will definitely be given precedence over others in rankings.
4. Hosting location doesn’t matter anymore
Before we elaborate on hosting locations and their SEO impact, let’s understand a few basics.
Here’s an example to help you understand what goes on at Google’s end when a search is made.
Google takes the location of the person making the search (Google knows!) and then shows results that are from servers hosted the closest. Why? Simply because it is faster. Thus, for traditional web hosting, the location of your server matters.
That means two things:
- You need to choose the hosting provider based on where their servers are located and often compromise on the quality of service.
- If you are targeting a geographically diverse set of audiences, you will have to either host your website with different servers (more money) or get local domain names (again more money) to ensure equally fast load speed across locations.
That’s costly and cumbersome, right? Cloud hosting solves both these problems for you, in just one shot.
Given that cloud hosting servers are located at various locations (across the world) because of virtualization, their location doesn’t matter anymore.
Here’s an example to help you understand.
Say someone searches for shoes from the US. Now Google will contact your shoe store’s US-based server. This would increase the page load speed and ultimately your ranking.
Later on, someone searches for shoes from India. Now, Google won’t rely on the US-based server. Instead, the Indian server will be contacted. The result? A fast-loading website. And better rankings for you.
5. Saves money
When you get traditional web hosting services, you pay for fixed, physical resources. However, for cloud hosting services, you pay only for the consumed resources.
And even though prices vary from provider to provider, cloud hosting is considered a more cost-effective alternative to traditional hosting.
Now how is that related to SEO?
Well, think of it this way. The amount of money you save on hosting your website can be used elsewhere. You can, for instance, avail trusted SEO services.
So even if your budget and total money spent on the website remain the same, you now have something additional. Combined with cloud hosting, SEO services can give your website a much-needed boost and improve your Search Engine Result Page rankings.
And the websites that rank higher obviously have better conversion rates. So you won’t just be saving money and gaining SEO advantage with cloud hosting, but also making more money.
Don’t wait up anymore. Cloud hosting is the way to go today and in the future. Contact a reliable cloud hosting service provider and check out their plans today. Not sure how to find reliable cloud hosting? Ask your SEO service providers for suggestions and get the hosting plan that is best suited for your budget and offers the maximum SEO benefit.
