In short the answer is yes. Having your hosting in Australia is a lot better and will no doubt help with your SEO. Why I hear you ask? Cause of a multitude of factors but let me begin by saying 1 thing. Website speed. Yes that’s correct. Website speeds play a huge role in determining your ranking and will have an effect on your SEO. Sites hosted outside Australia can be notoriously slow and this will hurt your rankings, this is 100% certain.
If you are considering implementing any type of SEO campaign then hosting should be a concern and something that should be brought up with your search engine provider. Following are a few really good reasons why having an Aussie hosting company is going to do wonders for your SEO.
1) If your website goes down for an extended period of time and if this is happening frequently, then this is the fault of your hosting provider. If they are based in the USA or Asia, it can be very difficult for you to get in touch with them to find out the problem and fix any issues. In a lot of cases ( and I can say this from past experience), these guys want you to submit a ticket and then they will look into it. If your site goes down on a Friday or the weekend, you are basically stuffed. These hosting companies are NOT going to do anything over the weekend and your going to have to wait till Monday their time. So, in the interim, you have a website that is not only loosing your business but worst of all, if Google comes around and tries to index the site and sees that it’s down, it cannot crawl it. The end result is that you start to loose your rankings. Try and complain to your hosting company about this and beg them to do something about it – good luck. They don’t really care, cause you are just a number in Australia and you are basically powerless to do anything.
Websites with poor internet connections are going to have a serious impact on your SEO – if you currently have your website hosted overseas and you are forever wondering why it keeps going down, then the time to act is now. Do something about this issue before it has any serious impact on your business.
I’m not kidding here when I say this. You may think that hosting is only a small component of SEO, but every little thing counts when we are dealing with Google.
2) What happens if your competitor and I mean a fierce rival here, is sitting right up there on Google and you just can’t seem to get above him. Well the answer may be as simple as looking at your web hosting. Transferring it over to Aust. might just be the difference between a couple of important spots. Google’s main aim is to provide users not only with the most relevant information, but it also wants to provide users with the best web experience possible. Slow website download speeds are not and I will repeat this ARE NOT what Google wants to reward so if you can get your head around this, then you are well on the way to securing a much better position online. You will know what I mean when you see those sites that take forever to load. These are the types of hosting issues I am talking about.
These really long and boring downloads that take ages to load are that are hosted overseas WILL be have a negative impact on your SEO.
So how long is too long for a website download? The answer to this is more than 2 seconds. That is, if your site pages each take more than a couple of seconds to download then there are issues. There are many on page things you can do to improve speed such as: compress images, reduce animation and file sizes but a huge contributing factor is going to be your hosting.
There are many Australian hosting companies to choose from. In my opinion some are far better than others in terms of response time and customer service BUT if you are stuck and don’t know what to do I really urge you to give us a call here at SEO Sydney Experts. I will gladly explain the benefits of hosting your website locally and be happy to point you I the right direction. If you need further help I am even happy to organise the hosting for you through one of our preferred suppliers.
