There is a lot of debate surrounding the importance of server location for SEO. Some people believe that it doesn’t matter at all, while others claim that it’s one of the most important factors to consider. So, which is it? Well, the answer isn’t black and white. In fact, it depends on your business and your target audience.
What is Server Location SEO?
If you’ve not seen this debate at all, it entails the location of your physical servers. In other words, where your website is hosted. For example, if your website is hosted in the United States, but you’re trying to rank for a UK audience, does this make a difference? Should you have a server location close to your business or closer to your audience?
Why is Server Location Important?
Google has stated server location is one of the signals they use in their algorithm. However, they’ve also said it’s not nearly as important as other signals like content and backlinks. Some believe that server location shouldn’t matter at all; that as long as your website is accessible from anywhere in the world, it shouldn’t matter where it’s physically hosted.
However, there are some reasons why server location could be important for SEO. Let’s take a look at two of them.
Relevancy
If you’re targeting a local audience, it makes sense to have your website hosted in the same country. For example, if you’re a small business in the United States that only does business in the US, it wouldn’t make much sense to have your website hosted in another country.
Search engines could interpret this as being irrelevant to your target audience, and as a result, you could see a drop in your rankings.
Latency
Another factor to consider is latency; this is the amount of time it takes for your website to load. If your website is hosted in a country that’s far away from your target audience, they could experience higher latency, which means your website would take longer to load.
This is obviously not ideal, as users are likely to give up and go to a competitor’s website. Of course, this also negatively impacts your SEO performance.
How Important is Server Location for SEO?
It’s no secret that SEO is a complex and ever-changing field. There are over 200 ranking factors, and new ones are constantly being added. So, it can be difficult to know which factors are actually important and which ones you can ignore.
Although Google will tell you that server location SEO isn’t important, we’ve seen the impact it can have on latency and relevancy…and it can also affect legal compliance. There are ways to get around server location problems – like with a content delivery network. Essentially, a CDN copies your content and stores it on servers around the world. So, when a user tries to access your site, they’ll be directed to the server that’s closest to them.
This can help improve both speed and SEO. But it’s not a perfect solution, and it can be expensive. If you’re still in the early stages of your business, making a sensible server location decision now could save hassle in the future, even if it’s not one of the most important SEO ranking factors.
If you want to avoid this stress entirely, choose a West Palm Beach SEO agency to take this pressure off your shoulders. Does server location affect SEO? Not as much as many other factors, but it can impact latency and relevancy.
