Why Website Hosting in Canada Helps Local SEO
If you want your business to grow, you will want it to be visible when people in your area seek its name or related keywords on their local search engine (Google.ca or otherwise). When your website or business does not appear high in the rankings/search engine results pages (‘SERPS’), the chance to get your business website noticed and generate new business will be less likely.
I’m sure that you’ve come across a bunch of Search Engine Optimization (‘SEO’) articles in order to tweak your website’s SEO so that your business website can get better Google Search rankings. Amongst the many factors, website hosting in Canada can be one of the most crucial factors in determining how your site will be ranked on Google and other search engines.
But why? We have a straightforward answer for you. When your website is hosted on a stable and high quality hosting server that is local to the region your business services (Canada, in this example), your audiences won’t have any problem in accessing it in terms of visibility and load times. A lower quality or non local web host can affect your business website’s SEO.
There are many affordable and quality hosting services out there. But chances are some of them are from the other cities, states, or countries outside of where your primary business is located or servicing. For instance using overseas web hosting services can impact a local businesses website SEO and search rankings. The key factor in this concept is that your website hosting uses a local (Canadian) IP address, and indicates to Google that your business operates within and services Canada (or Canadians).
Downtime with International Web Hosting
It is a common problem that happens to consumers who use international web hosting services that their web hosting has downtime. For instance, your business might be in Canada, but you are using a hosting service provided by another country’s provider. Aside from slower load times, downtime could happen frequently. Downtime has such a bad impact on your site performance and overall SERPs ranking. Google and other search engines do not like downtime to say the least. Eventually, it will bring down your website SEO and SERPs quite drastically. To get 99.9% uptime for your website, we suggest choosing the best web hosting in Canada if you are operating a Canadian business. Avoid downtime at all cost as it will jeopardise your business website SEO rankings.
Website Hosting Impacts Website Load Times
Website loading time can be a primary problem too when you use the wrong web hosting service. If your website is too slow and takes too much time to load, it can also affect the website performance. For Google, it is a big no-no when it comes to recommending slow websites to its users. On the other side, websites with quick load time will have much better bounce rates (keeping users on the site longer) that will improve the search engine rankings as well. Content delivery networks (CDN’s) such as CloudFlare have also become increasingly popular in terms of improving website load times globally.
Importance of Choosing Local Canadian Web Hosting
If you are targeting your local audience, it’s suggested to choose a local web host instead of an international host.
For instance, if you are doing your business in Canada, then it will be beneficial for your business to use a web hosting service in Canada. The server location should be close to your target audience so that they will have a quick access to your website and Google will generally display your website to them. We also suggest that having a local web hosting service can improve the chance for good SEO rankings as compared to website hosting companies outside of Canada.
Simply put, if your target audience is in Canada, don’t hesitate to make your move to subscribe to a website hosting company in Canada. You won’t regret it!