For the majority of businesses, their most important customer base are those in the immediate vicinity of their business location. In order to ensure that your website appears in your customers’ searches for local businesses, it’s necessary to apply certain localised SEO techniques. One such technique is to have your website hosted locally.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is the process of making sure your website appears with good ranking in relevant search results. Local SEO is important for making those search results even more relevant based on the location of the person searching and the websites that appear in the search result. Local SEO techniques include having a local postal address, having listing on local directories and using local hosting.
Local hosting means that the server where your website is hosted is located within your target market. Your website should at least be hosted in the same country as your business, but the closer the better. There are several benefits to using local hosting for your website.
The biggest benefit of localised hosting is that you will increase relevant traffic to your business. Too often, people forget that traffic and relevant traffic are two different things. While more traffic to your website in general can seem like reason to celebrate, if you aren’t getting the right visitors to your site, it’s not going to help your business any. Simply visiting your website isn’t going to mean a sale. If you run a shop in Australia, visits from the US aren’t going to help your business.
When Google looks through your website to determine how relevant it is for a certain search, one of the things it will look at is where your site is hosted. Google uses a reverse IP lookup to do this location search. Knowing where your site is hosted will tell Google how relevant your business is within a certain area. Local search results are particularly relevant when someone is looking for a business near where they live.
In addition to helping you get relevant traffic to your website and helping your search listings, localised hosting has other benefits as well. One benefit is speed. Generally, a locally hosted website will load faster. The loading speed of your website is crucial for customer experience. If your site takes too long to load, chances are your customers will lose interest and move on.
Another benefit of using localised hosting from a business standpoint is the security of having help when you need it. When your website goes down, time is money and you want to be able to get a hold of someone quickly so the problem will be resolved immediately. You also know what the security standards are when your website is hosted in your own country, so you will have the peace of mind that comes with knowing you’re site is safe.
Hosting your website locally is always a good idea. Localised hosting has major benefits for your SEO, ensuring that your website will come up in relevant searches made by relevant customers. Improving your local search listing will help your business by driving the right customers to your business instead of wasting money fishing among the wrong ones.
