Between building backlinks from authoritative domains and targeting the right keywords, there are plenty of things that companies can do to improve the ranking of their websites on search engine results pages. However, many businesses frequently tend to ignore one of the biggest contributing factors to their ranking, which is their website host, which also has an impact on the ranking of the website. There are a few different reasons why website hosting is so important for search engine optimization efforts, with some of the most important things being the fact that the hosting can affect the loading speed of a website, and its uptime.

Some of the things that search engines list as important ranking factors for websites include the relevance and quality of a website, as well as its usability, meaning, and the context. The web host falls under the usability umbrella, as it can have a direct impact on how mobile-friendly a website can be, the location of the website, and how long it takes for it to load. That’s why it’s important for companies to choose the right website hosting service before they create their website, to ensure that the website host won’t be the one setback that the company has in its search engine optimization efforts. And to do that, companies have to take a few things into consideration including the reliability of the service, as well as the speed.

Reliability
For many companies, having a website down even for a few minutes can end up costing thousands in losses. In terms of the company, it can lose out on productivity, and in terms of the customers, they are going to feel frustrated if the website they are trying to reach keeps crashing, or if they’re not able to access it at all. However, downtime is also a contributing factor to the website’s rank on search engine results pages. Search engine crawlers, like Google, tend to visit the websites they have previously indexed on a regular basis, and if a website is down frequently, it can be marked as unreliable and demoted in the rankings. Although no single website host can guarantee an uptime of 100 percent, most of them provide it 99 percent of the time, which is quite good.

Speed
Another important factor that companies should be taking into consideration when thinking about website hosting services is the loading speed that their website is going to have with different service providers. A slow website can end up making the potential website visitors close the tab and even refuse to do business with such a company. All of that contributes toward a website’s bounce rate, which is another important ranking factor in SEO. There are numerous tools that companies can use to check how long it takes for their website to fully load, and the optimal time should be between 2.6 and 3.2 seconds to make sure that the customers don’t click away and increase the bounce rate.

The author, Mike Paffmann is the CEO of Virgo PR, a leading PR agency.