04 Apr How Does Cloud Hosting Impact Your Website Visibility?
How Does Cloud Hosting Impact Your Website Visibility?
To have a successful website, it’s essential to understand and effectively use SEO, or search engine optimization. One often-overlooked SEO success factor is how your website is hosted, which can affect how high your website is ranked on search engine results pages (SERPs). Cloud hosting offers many benefits to businesses, including improving your website’s visibility—in addition to being cost-effective, scalable, flexible and secure.
According to Forbes, 77 percent of businesses keep at least one part of their enterprise computing infrastructure in a cloud hosting system. Enterprises also predicted that they would invest an average of $3.5 million into cloud apps, platforms, and services in 2018. Additionally, 76 percent of businesses in 2018 were looking to cloud-based apps and platforms to expedite and improve IT service delivery.
The Akamai Online Retail Performance Report of 2017 stresses the importance of quick website load speed for improved SEO. A 100 millisecond loading delay for your website can decrease conversion rates by seven percent, a two second delay in website load speed can increase bounce rates up to 103 percent, and up to 53 percent of mobile visitors will leave if a site takes longer than three seconds to load.
With these statistics in mind, let’s look further at the connection between cloud hosting and website visibility. Cloud hosting is one of the quickest ways to improve your website’s search engine ranking, along with page views and web traffic.
Types of Cloud Computing
The types of cloud computing services include:
- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
- Platform as a service (PaaS)
- Software as a service (SaaS)
Additionally, there are three primary different types of cloud systems for a business to choose from, depending on the needs and the ability of the business:
- Public
- Private
- Hybrid
What is Cloud Hosting, and How Does it Work?
Cloud hosting is a method of hosting your website across a series of interconnected servers. The interconnected servers, known as nodes, are geographically far apart. This makes it easier for users to access your website regardless of where they are or what device they are using. There are now many cloud hosting service providers that offer competitive cloud hosting packages to host your website. With cloud hosting, you only pay for what you use, since the resources for maintaining your website are spread over multiple servers. Cloud computing offers significant benefits to help boost your website’s visibility.
How Cloud Hosting Can Impact Your Website Visibility
As stated, cloud hosting offers many benefits to businesses, particularly improving the visibility of your website. Here are some specific ways cloud hosting improves website visibility:
Increase page load speed – Page load speed is crucial to your website’s search engine results page ranking, and cloud hosting has the ability to increase load speed. Faster load speed from cloud hosting will therefore increase your search engine ranking, thereby increasing website visibility. Long load times create a poor user experience, which can decrease web traffic and increase bounce rates. On the flip side, low bounce rates improves your rankings because users are staying on your website.
Local SEO – Cloud hosting helps your website gain advantage in local markets. For local searches, your website needs a country-related domain extension or a domain name that indicates it is for a particular country or region. For example, a website with a domain name synergy.co.nz will rank better in local searches in New Zealand and Australia than a website with a domain name synergy.com. Search engines use details of the local market your website caters to in order to rank it according to location for local searches.
With traditional website hosting, purchasing domain names featuring the country extension so that your website is hosted on local servers is necessary in order to rank well for local searches. With cloud hosting, though, server nodes are spread across the world, so there is no need to host your website on different local servers or tie your website to a particular ccTLD. Cloud hosting allows your website to be present in any country and rank high for local search results.
Improve performance – Cyberattacks, server downtime, and other security complications can seriously impact your SEO performance. Users won’t engage with a website that performs poorly, experiences frequent downtime, or is vulnerable to security breaches. Cloud hosting is extremely reliable because the resources needed to run your website are spread across multiple servers. So, when there is a problem with one server, another server takes over to keep your site running. Since cloud hosting improves the performance of your website, it can increase your search ranking and web traffic.
Enhance mobile compatibility – Because most searches are now made on mobile devices, search engines index mobile responsiveness as part of a website’s ranking. If your website does not load correctly on mobile devices, bounce rates will increase. Cloud hosting provides the resources and tools to make your website mobile compatible. Mobile compatibility will improve your SEO and make your website more visible.
Bot protection – Top cloud hosting service providers ensure that your website is protected from bots, or malicious scripts, which are tasks that can harm your website and its search engine ranking. Bots are applications that command and attack search engines. For example, scraping bots, which duplicate content, can negatively impact your page ranking. Link spamming bots are another challenge that can be taken care of with cloud hosting. With a cloud hosting server, your website is protected against these bots. Therefore, cloud hosting positively impacts your website’s SEO.
If you’re looking to improve your website’s search engine ranking, Virtual Stacks Systems UK can help! Our SEO experts can help your website implement effective SEO practices and target local SEO to bring in the right web traffic. Contact us today to learn more.