Search engine optimization is a must-have for every business. Word-of-mouth referrals and marketing efforts can only take you so far. And when it comes to SEO, every decision plays a role–from the titles of your pages to the type of hosting you use. Careful attention to each of these details is necessary for your long term SEO strategy.
There’s a saying that goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Cloud hosting is a major preventative method for business owners who want to protect their digital assets and reputation for years to come. SEo and cloud solutions go hand in hand, and when you have a better grasp of how they complement one another, you’re on the right track. Here are three major ways that cloud hosting affects SEO:
Faster Loading Times
Speed is an important SEO ranking factor, and cloud-hosted websites tend to run faster than those that aren’t. It’s not uncommon for business and blog owners to turn the other way when it comes to speed: sometimes, a few extra seconds may not seem like it will make the biggest difference. But according to Google, it does.
Google first announced how speed would be an important ranking factor during a Mobile First session at the SMX convention. During this conference, they explained how they would be analyzing mobile sites and their respective ranks differently than desktop sites. Major search engines like Google care about the user experience, because a bad user experience could send the user away from the search portal. Too many bad user experiences, and the user can quickly become frustrating with not just the slow websites, but Google as well.
Faster loading times create a much better experience all around. According to a study conducted by Kissmetrics, 47% of site visitors expect a website to load in less than two seconds, while 40% of visitors will leave if it takes more than three seconds to load. Cloud hosting services are able to speed up the page loading times of a website significantly because they are much more nibble in their ability to effectively distribute resources across a server, providing each website with ample room to load quickly. Outside of cloud hosting, you might be too dependent on a single server to get the job done.
Access to Different Hosting Locations
A user’s host location is another ranking factor for Google. For example, if you conduct a Google search in the United States, your results will be United States-based results. This is why you rarely see a .UK when searching in America, unless it’s a highly relevant result, which will typically only occur in publishing. To circumvent this issue, many website owners will purchase servers in other parts of the globe where they want their website to appear locally, too. Some SEO companies provide this service in their SEO packages because it appeals to business owners who want their content discoverable around the world.
With cloud hosting, this is much easier to eachieve. A cloud hosting service has servers everywhere. This means that the need for purchasing physical servers in multiple locations is eliminated, saving the user time and money. Businesses are able to host their websites while leveraging the local advantage of cloud hosting.
Less Server Downtime
Server downtime can create a domino effect of negative reactions. It hurts your SEO, user experience, and can cost businesses a lot of money. Let’s say you work with a physical host. If the physical host experiences any downtime, so does your site. As a business, you can’t afford this type of ripple effect. For example, in addition to punctured SEO rankings, you also lose money as your employees spend valuable time trying to fix the situation, and lose more money trying to deal with customer dissatisfaction.
A report published by the Ponemon Institute, titled Cost of Data Center Outages, found that unplanned downtime had increased by 38% from 2010 to 2016. And according to DevOps, the total cost of downtime for the Fortune 1000 is between $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion. While you might not be a part of the Fortune 1000, these numbers are indicative of what can happen on the revenue side alone if unplanned downtime occurs.
With cloud hosting, if a server happens to go down, another server simply picks up the slack, and your site doesn’t miss a beat. And when your site is down, search engines aren’t able to crawl it. Search engines rank websites with lower downtime higher in search engine results pages.
