SEO isn’t just a standalone technique anymore. Over time, it has developed and mutated into something that’s heavily impacted by a plethora of factors.
Today, speed, uptime, user-interface, URL structure and many other technical factors have gained importance as well on top of content quality and backlinks.
In this article, we will discuss how a simple move of switching to cloud solutions helps maximise your website visibility.
Table of Contents
1. Optimise for speed and uptime
Google has been very clear about its speed requirements. Websites loading faster than 2 seconds have reduced bounce rates, more retention and overall a better SEO score.
Now, multiple metrics have control over your website speed. Your hosting provider is one of the major causes. You can either spend time researching good hosts, or simply go with Cloud solutions.
Cloud hosting speeds up your website because instead of a single server, your website is hosted on multiple servers. This sometimes increases your speed. However, the added benefit is that you get more uptime assurance. It’s only natural that even if one server goes down, the others will continue to function and hence keep your site running.
2. Security
A few years back, Google made SSL certificates (HTTPS) compulsory. Without a valid SSL certificate, your website wouldn’t load on the Google Chrome browser. Rather, your visitors would see a “not secure” warning. This tells us how serious those certificates are.
Now, a not secure warning means you’d lose out on the majority of your traffic. Moreover, even the people who do come will probably not convert as they don’t trust you.
Finally, the lack of SEO definitely makes your website less secure and easy to hack into. That could lead to a whole ocean of different problems.
Now, cloud platforms bring in their own security measures as well. This often includes a direct and dedicated team targeted just for security. They also often keep everything automatically updated and are capable of thwarting DDoS and other attacks.
3. Guaranteed backups
The “cloud” literally means the internet in the technical world. Hence, all your data is stored on the internet rather than on one physical server at all times.
This often means that your cloud provider probably backs up all your data even without your telling it to. It’s because the provider hosts the same content on multiple servers, they must have copies.
Yes, you can enable backups on traditional hosts as well. And yes, not all cloud providers offer automated backups by default either.
4. Cost-effective
A major benefit of cloud hosting solutions is that they’re more cost effective, and yes it does impact your SEO, let me explain.
With traditional hosting, you pay a fixed price for the month or year. This is regardless of how much bandwidth and resources you use.
Cloud hosting often offers a pay-as-you-go model. This means, you only pay for the traffic that you receive. You wouldn’t be overpaying or underpaying. This is a more logical and fair pricing model for both the customer as well as the hosting provider.
The other benefit is that with traditional hosting, your website goes down once you hit your bandwidth limits. That wouldn’t happen here as cloud hosting expands to accommodate your traffic no matter what!
5. Employ CDNs for better ranking
CDNs stand for Content Delivery Network. I’m sure you’ve seen CloudFlare captcha prompts? That’s the most popular CDN in the market currently.
So, a CDN does many things. One of its primary benefits is that it hosts your content across multiple locations. What this means is, your visitors get a superfast website regardless of their location. This of course means more retention, returning visitors and less bounce rates. All of these add up to better rankings, don’t they?
Of course CDNs also help against DDoS and other attacks by forcing captcha if unnatural traffic is detected.
Conclusion
That’s everything I had to say for now. Well, simply shifting to cloud provider probably wouldn’t skyrocket your rankings. You’ll still need to work on the content, speed, security and many other things manually.
However, it definitely gives you a slight boost that helps propel you forward. At the very least, the cloud provider offers better uptime and more geo-accessibility. These two benefits guarantee other improvements which in turn almost guarantees better SEO.
Do note that it’s possible to achieve the same results on traditional hosts as well although that would cost way more financially as well as in terms of time.
