Is the Physical Location of your website important to SEO?
If you run a website and your main market is a specific country – such as the UK the physical location of the website can have an impact on your SEO. For example if you run a .com site which is hosted in the US it is much harder to get rankings in the UK version of Google than if it is a .co.uk website hosted in the UK.
Google automatically assigns .co.uk domains to a UK market place which is great for your SEO if you are looking at a UK market focus. However, if you have a .com domain extension this won’t happen. Things are made worse if you are a .com domain hosted in the US , Germany or elsewhere. This is an issue which happens a lot where ISPs offer great prices on their hosting but don’t actually host website’s in the country they sell hosting in.
How to find out where your website is physically located
We offer a free tool for finding out where your website is hosted and you can also get a Firefox plugin called Flag Fox which displays a flag in the address bar showing where a website is located.
How can you get rankings for the search engine for your Target Market?
When undertaking link building on your website ensure that there is a focus on links coming to your site from websites in your target country (.co.uk websites for a UK focussed website).
If you are considering moving your webhosting anyway make sure you ask potential new hosting companies if they offer UK based website hosting.
Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager
