If your business has a website, unless it has traffic visiting, it is of little use. Thankfully, the number of ways that you can generate traffic is significant. Some cost money, and others are free but come with a cost in terms of time and effort. Of the latter, one traffic-generating method which has created fortunes for many businesses that have benefitted from it is SEO.

SEO stands for search engine optimisation, and it is how a website and its pages are optimised so that Google improves its ranking whenever someone searches using terms relating to that business. SEO is an entire industry with experts able to help a website move from obscurity to the top of page one on Google. There are countless ways they do this, but they are not the only ones who can help boost your SEO.

Your hosting service provider can also play their part, albeit not in the same hands-on way an SEO agency would. Instead, based on the quality, reliability, and performance of their hosting and their servers, a hosting company can boost your ranking on Google without so much as creating a single backlink. How do they do this, and why does it work? Here are some of the answers to those questions.

Page Load Speeds

The speed at which your website’s pages load is critical to Google rankings. Slow load times mean visitors click away and that is identified by Google which will downgrade the rankings of websites it sees has lots of ‘bounces’ and where visitors do not stay very long.

Server Locations

Whilst the location of a server might not directly impact your ranking it can influence it indirectly. If a hosting company has multiple server locations meaning your website is hosted on a server in the country you are targeting, your pages should load faster for local visitors than if the servers are on the other side of the world.

Effective Caching

This also influences the speed at which your pages load, and as we have already mentioned, that affects your ranking. Caching means that those parts and pages of your websites that never alter and are thus fixed are saved within browsers so that if someone returns to them, they load faster.

Uptime

If your website is down due to an unreliable hosting service, especially when someone clicks through from a Google search, it is a major problem. Google identifies this as poor user experience and as that is at the top of their list as a factor in ranking websites, you can expect your ranking to diminish if your website’s uptime is poor.

Dedicated Hosting

Many of the issues we have described are all but negated if your website is hosted on a dedicated server, and thus does not have to share resources with other websites. If your hosting company offers dedicated hooting and the quality and reliability of its server hardware are high, it bodes well for the SEO of your website.

Backups

Back to reliability and the fact that if your website is not backed up by your hosting company then it is at risk of being hacked or infected by malware. Both of these will have a devastating impact on your online activities not and can cause rankings to plummet. So, our message to you is to ensure your hosting service provides regular website backups.