Hello, this is John Locke, and today I'm answering a great question that I saw in
an SEO thread. And that question is, "Does the location of your server have an
effect on SEO?" The context of this question is, "If you are targeting
customers in a certain country, should your server be based in that country?
Should your website be hosted on a server from that country?" So the original
person asking this question, they said they had their server hosted
somewhere in Eastern Europe, and they moved the server location over to
the United States, after that they saw an uptick in search traffic. There's a couple factors that
could be explaining why this is happening. I do think that there
is a little bit of a boost from having your server located in the country that
you're targeting. Let me explain each of these things happening. First
off, I'm going to explain some of the things that might come from the server
not necessarily being located in a different country, but other things that
might happen. Now, you could see a traffic boost strictly from having a better server. (that will help SEO). If
you upgrade your hosting from some outsourced host or some localized
IT company, and move it to a good hosting company, if you're moving up from a host like
Hostgator or Bluehost -- sorry they're not really good
with hosting -- if you move your site to somewhere like Kinsta or WP Engine or
Pagely or Flywheel, then you're probably going to
see a boost in the performance of your website. The speed of your site is going to be
better, so that's probably going to give you some performance gains. As far
as SEO goes, if your site loads quicker, then yes, that's going to help you
with SEO. Remember that Google looks at the Time To First Byte, which is how
long it takes the the browser to go to the server, and
start serving up assets to make a webpage. Page speed makes a big
difference. If you have a slow loading page, that's not going to perform as well
as a fast loading page, over a long period of time. So that probably makes a
difference. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that
when you move a server from the non-target country to a target country, that
seems to make a difference. For example, I have someone that I recently
picked up as a client, they compete internationally. Their main
target is basically in Italy, but their customers come from the US and the
UK primarily. What they noticed is people that host just in Italy, the
people who are localized and they host their website in Italy, they seem to do
better in local searches in Italy. But my client does better in searches internationally,
like in the US the UK, places in Western Europe, he does better, because
he is hosted in the US, and not in Italy. The second anecdotal personal experience:
I had a customer, a client, that was being hosted in Canada, and we moved their site
from the Canadian web host to a US web host, and they seem to get a bit of a
boost from that (in US rankings). In their case, search terms that were ranking at number 15 went up to number
10. Keywords that were ranking at number five went up to number two.
Those sorts of gains. I think a lot of that had to do with the speed of the
server, not necessarily the location of the server. But definitely
the speed of the server. Now, this company, their business also targets people in
Canada and the US, so I don't think that that was necessarily a big thing. The
person in the original thread in the SEO forum, they said that they
were being hosted in Eastern Europe. Then they moved to a US server, and they saw boosts in
SEO right away. I think being on a
good hosting platform and a good server, one that's not cheap, like $5.00 a month
shared hosting, but some good hosting that you're going to pay in the neighborhood of
25 to 30 dollars, maybe even $100 a month, to be on a good host -- that's
going to make a big difference, as opposed to a $5 or a $10 a month hosting.
Generally, those types of hosting platforms try and cram as many sites as
they can into one server instance. Meaning that you could be sharing
resources with 10,000 other websites. So when it says "unlimited resources", it
means unlimited resources, except for the other 10,000 sites that are crammed in on that
server. Those sites are usually really slow. Yeah I do think that if you're
targeting a specific country, and you're hosting in that country, I think that
that is a signal to Google that you have a localized business. For example, if
you are hosting in Ireland, you would want to
target people in Ireland. Maybe finding the best hosting company in
Ireland might be a good idea (if your site is aimed toward Irish customers). Another thing that you can do is,
some hosting companies have different data centers. Some hosting companies, like
SiteGround, will let you pick which data center that
you're actually hosted on. They have different ones (data centers). They have one in
Chicago for the US. They have one in Singapore, and one in Eastern
Europe. So if you pick a data center that's closer to your
target audience, that site is going to be a little bit faster for them, because
data still travels through the internet, and a lot of it's through undersea cables.
Many people don't know that, but it goes through undersea cables that's how the
internet is connected. So if a data center is closer to the people searching in North America or South America,
it's going to be just a little bit faster
than the one that is hosted in
Europe or in Asia. So definitely, where you
host your site makes a bit of a difference. If you're
targeting a specific country, you might want to host in that country. (If you do
not care about international traffic.) Now if you do care about international
traffic, I would suggest that you host either in the US, or possibly
the UK. Use a data center or a host that is based there. One way that you can
tell where your current website hosting is based, and you can tell this very easily is
do a WHOIS check. What is a WHOIS? The check looks up the domain name
records for your site. So it will tell you when your domain was first
registered. It will tell you usually what the hosting name service or the
host company is, the underlying host for your company. I usually use
whois.domaintools.com to do a WHOIS look up. There's other services out there.
whois.net and all these different ones. But that's the one that I generally
like the interface of. I'll put that in the show notes: whois.domaintools.com.
That will tell you where you are hosting with (and what country they are based in).
Many of the managed WordPress hosting companies, if you're on WordPress, a lot of them are
reselling Google cloud hosting. If you see that in there (in the WHOIS lookup)
the records where it says "Google", that's why that's happening. So if you're
on managed WordPress hosting, they're reselling somebody else like AWS , Amazon
Web Services, or they are reselling Digital Ocean, or they are reselling Google cloud
hosting. A few years ago, many of them were reselling Linode
hosting. It will say that down in the WHOIS records instead of the actual name
of the host. I hope that all makes sense. Yeah definitely,
where you host matters, and what country you host
in matters. To sum up, if you're targeting a country, host in that country. If you're
targeting internationally, host in the US or the UK. You can look that
up using a WHOIS record. Also, invest in good hosting, because it does make
a difference. Don't just use cheap hosting. This is John Locke for
Lockedown Design and SEO. We're here publishing videos every single day. We'd
love to see you subscribe. Got a question? Leave it in the comments below, we'll
answer it in a future video. That's it for this video. Until next time, peace.