Is Having Your Website Hosted in Australia Better for SEO?

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? Because 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.

Also Read: How to optimise website speed for better 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 you’re going to have to wait till Monday their time. So, in the interim, you have a website that is not only losing 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 lose 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 an Australian internet provider like Web Central or iiNet 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 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 that is hosted overseas WILL have a negative impact on your SEO. Google even tells us in their blog that: Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value on speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.

How long is too long for a website download?

The answer to this is more than two 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. You can check your website speed here by using this effective tool at Pingdom. If it’s more than 2 to 3 seconds then you have to do a full website audit to correct the issues as well as examine your hosting provider.

There are many online discussions about the pros and cons of hosting your website in Australia which you can view here at Quora but in my opinion, if there are any issues with your hosting wouldn’t you prefer to deal with a local Aussie company that can respond to any web hosting issues quickly rather than dealing with an online bot or having to wait 24 hours till someone gets back to you.

There are many Australian hosting companies to choose from and they can all be found online.

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 ( primarily with Sydney based servers ) and be happy to point you in the right direction. If you need further help I am even happy to organise the hosting for you through one of our preferred suppliers.