Local SEO and Hosting: How Your Server Location Affects Local Search Rankings

• By Paul Wheeler
• 27-11-2023
• SEO

If you’ve got a local business, then it’s in your business’s best interest to rank well in LOCAL search results. It’s great to rank high in general, but ranking in the area where you do business should be your priority.

A large part of this comes down to the quality and relevance of your content and doing good keyword research. But did you know that server location affects local search rankings? Based on your web hosting provider, your server location could be working against you.

Here’s why it’s vital to choose a web host that helps your local SEO and doesn’t hinder it… As well as all the information you need on global vs local SEO and when to choose which one.

The Effect of Server Location On SEO

Here’s a deeper dive into server location and how it affects your SEO, your audience reach, and overall, your business.

Reaching Your Audience

Getting your content, your website, and your business information out to your audience is essential. Not everyone is going to find your local business through word of mouth or seeing your shopfront.

You need to be visible and easily findable on the internet because that’s the first port of call for almost everyone when looking for a particular business, even locally. Here’s why server location needs to be addressed as well as keyword research.

IP Address Location

Search engines check the IP address of your website’s server to make sure it’s likely to be relevant for the local population.

If the server is located nearby, search engines give it a thumbs-up and can rank you higher. But if your web host’s server is located far away, search engines may assume that your content and offering aren’t relevant for that population and rank you lower.

Many web hosts offer servers worldwide to combat this issue, but NOT all of them do. Take a look at A2 Hosting’s locations as an example. Find a host that offers the same!

Geo-Targeting

Web hosts who don’t have servers across the world often make use of content delivery networks. These are also servers located far and wide, and your web host will send a replica of your site’s content to the CDN for easier access in the local area.

This is a good alternative to a web host with servers in your country, especially if you happen to live in a smaller or third-world country without great local web hosts. Using a CDN can boost your SEO because search engines see your content as being relevant for the area.

Verifying Your Business

If you’re planning on optimizing your site for local SEO, it’s a wise idea to verify your location on Google My Business. Search engines, Google in particular, use the physical location of your site’s server as proof of your location, which means if your web host’s server is located far away, it won’t be able to verify your address.

Using a local server fixes this problem. That way, when locals find you online and want to pay you a visit in the real world, their GPS sends them to the right address. Your web host should have a local server in the area you’re in. In this case, a CDN may not be enough—a physical local server would be a better idea.

Providing a Good Customer Experience

User experience is a valuable and yet often neglected part of SEO. If search engines see your site is difficult to navigate or visitors don’t spend a lot of time on it, they assume that you’re not providing a good experience and rank you lower.

Having a local web host with a local server makes your site much easier and faster for locals to navigate. Web page loading time is speedy thanks to the proximity of the server, so you’ll get bonus SEO points here.

Website Loading Speed

The further your server is away from your local population, the harder it will be to keep your website fast and responsive. In a nutshell, the further data has to travel from the server to the user’s computer or phone, the slower it will load.

Search engines pay a lot more attention to page loading speed than most people realize. They also check out your bounce rate, which is how quickly visitors leave again once they’ve landed on your site.

Considering more than half of visitors leave if the page hasn’t loaded within 3 seconds, it’s in your best interest to do everything you can to improve your page speed! Changing your server location is a big piece of the puzzle here and will make a big difference to both your users’ satisfaction and your local SEO ranking.

Accurate Information

We’ve already mentioned how server location can affect your location on Google My Business. What we haven’t talked about is how inaccurate information can put potential customers off and tarnish your business’s reputation.

While you can manually input your business’s address and contact details on your website, it’s a sign of trust and credibility to have a Google My Business profile, especially as a local business. It also makes it a lot easier for people to get in touch because many of them won’t even get to your website—they’ll get in touch right from your GMB profile on the Google search page.

Difference Between Local and Global SEO

Many website owners aren’t even aware that there’s quite a big difference between local SEO and global SEO. Choosing the wrong one can easily set you on the wrong path with your SEO and reduce your chances of gaining organic traffic and converting visitors to customers.

Geographical Focus

Local SEO primarily focuses on optimizing the website to perform well in local areas, like a particular state, city, region, or even down to a single neighborhood, depending on your audience and offering.

As the geographical focus is very tight, local SEO strategies are a little different from global ones. You’ll have to optimize for location-specific keywords, create a Google My Business listing, and carefully monitor and manage online reviews and engagement to increase visibility in your local area.

Global SEO has a much wider geographical focus; in some cases, it might be throughout the whole world, or it may be limited to certain countries. It’s a little more complicated than local SEO because you’ll need to optimize for both local and global keywords, ensure that your site is available in multiple languages, and account for cultural differences across your audiences.

Keyword Focus

Keyword focus is important for both local and global SEO. For a local website, you’ll focus more on locally relevant keywords, often including the location name. For example, a doctor’s office in New York might optimize its site for something like “Doctor New York” or “Doctors’ rooms in Manhattan”.

Global SEO needs a very different keyword strategy. Don’t neglect local SEO completely—you can still incorporate keywords that may be of interest to specific markets in local areas. But you’ll need to find a careful balance between using locally appealing keywords and more broadly appealing keywords to use globally.

Those wishing to reach audiences across the world have their work cut out for them when it comes to keyword research! Different keywords rank better or worse in different countries, so plenty of in-depth research is required to get global SEO right and rank well in various countries.

Content and Language

Local SEO requires that the content be written in the local language. If you’re doing business in the area, chances are you know the local language fairly well and can easily create content in that language.

In the same vein, the content needs to be tailored to the local people, customs, interests, and needs. Each area has its own culture, and if you aren’t appealing to that, it’s easy to gain a poor reputation or simply not garner any interest from the locals.

If you’re aiming for a global audience, your content and language need to be more diverse. For example, if the local language isn’t English and you’re focusing on English keywords, you aren’t likely to rank highly in that area.

This adds a layer of complexity to keyword research because it’s not always enough to simply translate content from English to whatever local language they use. Direct translation isn’t always accurate in terms of user-friendly keywords.

So if you’re serious about ranking well in a variety of non-English-speaking countries, you may need to invest in the services of multiple SEO experts who can help you do relevant keyword research in the local languages.

At the same time, it’s essential to create content that’s both relevant and culturally sensitive across a wide range of places.

Backlinks

Local SEO relies very heavily on backlinks from sites within the same geographical area. These kinds of backlinks help to establish a local business’s credibility within the local community.

A large part of local SEO should be working on gaining backlinks from local directories, neighboring businesses, and local news outlets. This helps to build a strong foundation of visibility and credibility, building your business up to become known amongst the locals.

Global SEO needs a different strategy. Your strategy should include acquiring international backlinks from high-authority, relevant websites and building your own high domain rating on a global scale.

Your backlinks should be carefully strategized to not only make you more visible on a global scale but also to add credibility in a range of different locations. Your goal is to build trust, and it’s harder on a global scale.

Should You Use Local and Global SEO Together?

If you’re a local business that serves the community around you, then there’s no need for you to use global SEO strategies. You can focus on local SEO keywords, locally relevant content, and securing local backlinks, and it should be more than enough to get you to rank competitively in the area.

As a local business, it's also worth doing some detailed competitor research, especially if there’s a competitor ranking higher than you. See what they’re doing that you aren’t, or if they’re using different keywords to you.

Global businesses will need to create more detailed SEO and content strategies. If you intend to reach audiences across the world, then global SEO is of utmost importance. But if you’re still targeting buyers in particular areas, you should also be using local SEO to your advantage.

This is often handy for e-commerce companies. For example, if you sell a product that’s popular in certain parts of the world, you might want to focus on global SEO but put more effort into local SEO wherever you see spikes in popularity.

This is a good way of covering most of your bases without needing to spread yourself too thin. Your website should definitely be optimized in multiple languages, but if certain countries, cities, or locations see more action than others, it’s a good idea to tailor your local SEO for those places as well.

Conclusion

There’s much more to web hosting than you might think, especially if you’re “just” a local business. Even if you’re a brick-and-mortar store that only serves the locals, it’s likely that you have a website. If you aren’t optimizing that website for local SEO, you’re missing out on opportunities for more business.

You might not be too concerned with how your server location affects local search rankings. But when you understand that it can undermine every other SEO effort you’re making, it’s easy to see how it’s important and needs to be addressed.

The good news is that it’s not a hard thing to fix. If your web host’s servers aren’t located nearby, do some research. It might be as simple as upgrading your plan to take advantage of content delivery networks, or you might need to take the leap and find a new web host.

Either way, don’t neglect this—it makes a bigger difference than you realize, even if you consider yourself “just a small local business”. If you’ve got a website, tick this box. It’ll be worth it.